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+Project Gutenberg's The Little Lady of the Big House, by Jack London
+#51 in our series by Jack London
+
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+Title: The Little Lady of the Big House
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6455]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 15, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII (with a few ISO-8859-1 characters)
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE LADY OF THE BIG HOUSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, David Maddock, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ]
+
+
+
+THE LITTLE LADY OF THE BIG HOUSE
+
+BY
+
+JACK LONDON
+
+
+
+Author of "The Valley of the Moon,"
+"The Star Rover," "The Sea Wolf,"
+Etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+He awoke in the dark. His awakening was simple, easy, without movement
+save for the eyes that opened and made him aware of darkness. Unlike
+most, who must feel and grope and listen to, and contact with, the
+world about them, he knew himself on the moment of awakening,
+instantly identifying himself in time and place and personality. After
+the lapsed hours of sleep he took up, without effort, the interrupted
+tale of his days. He knew himself to be Dick Forrest, the master of
+broad acres, who had fallen asleep hours before after drowsily putting
+a match between the pages of "Road Town" and pressing off the electric
+reading lamp.
+
+Near at hand there was the ripple and gurgle of some sleepy fountain.
+From far off, so faint and far that only a keen ear could catch, he
+heard a sound that made him smile with pleasure. He knew it for the
+distant, throaty bawl of King Polo--King Polo, his champion Short Horn
+bull, thrice Grand Champion also of all bulls at Sacramento at the
+California State Fairs. The smile was slow in easing from Dick
+Forrest's face, for he dwelt a moment on the new triumphs he had
+destined that year for King Polo on the Eastern livestock circuits. He
+would show them that a bull, California born and finished, could
+compete with the cream of bulls corn-fed in Iowa or imported overseas
+from the immemorial home of Short Horns.
+
+Not until the smile faded, which was a matter of seconds, did he reach
+out in the dark and press the first of a row of buttons. There were
+three rows of such buttons. The concealed lighting that spilled from
+the huge bowl under the ceiling revealed a sleeping-porch, three sides
+of which were fine-meshed copper screen. The fourth side was the house
+wall, solid concrete, through which French windows gave access.
+
+He pressed the second button in the row and the bright light
+concentered at a particular place on the concrete wall, illuminating,
+in a row, a clock, a barometer, and centigrade and Fahrenheit
+thermometers. Almost in a sweep of glance he read the messages of the
+dials: time 4:30; air pressure, 29:80, which was normal at that
+altitude and season; and temperature, Fahrenheit, 36°. With another
+press, the gauges of time and heat and air were sent back into the
+darkness.
+
+A third button turned on his reading lamp, so arranged that the light
+fell from above and behind without shining into his eyes. The first
+button turned off the concealed lighting overhead. He reached a mass
+of proofsheets from the reading stand, and, pencil in hand, lighting a
+cigarette, he began to correct.
+
+The place was clearly the sleeping quarters of a man who worked.
+Efficiency was its key note, though comfort, not altogether Spartan,
+was also manifest. The bed was of gray enameled iron to tone with the
+concrete wall. Across the foot of the bed, an extra coverlet, hung a
+gray robe of wolfskins with every tail a-dangle. On the floor, where
+rested a pair of slippers, was spread a thick-coated skin of mountain
+goat.
+
+Heaped orderly with books, magazines and scribble-pads, there was room
+on the big reading stand for matches, cigarettes, an ash-tray, and a
+thermos bottle. A phonograph, for purposes of dictation, stood on a
+hinged and swinging bracket. On the wall, under the barometer and
+thermometers, from a round wooden frame laughed the face of a girl. On
+the wall, between the rows of buttons and a switchboard, from an open
+holster, loosely projected the butt of a .44 Colt's automatic.
+
+At six o'clock, sharp, after gray light had begun to filter through
+the wire netting, Dick Forrest, without raising his eyes from the
+proofsheets, reached out his right hand and pressed a button in the
+second row. Five minutes later a soft-slippered Chinese emerged on the
+sleeping-porch. In his hands he bore a small tray of burnished copper
+on which rested a cup and saucer, a tiny coffee pot of silver, and a
+correspondingly tiny silver cream pitcher.
+
+"Good morning, Oh My," was Dick Forrest's greeting, and his eyes
+smiled and his lips smiled as he uttered it.
+
+"Good morning, Master," Oh My returned, as he busied himself with
+making room on the reading stand for the tray and with pouring the
+coffee and cream.
+
+This done, without waiting further orders, noting that his master was
+already sipping coffee with one hand while he made a correction on the
+proof with the other, Oh My picked up a rosy, filmy, lacy boudoir cap
+from the floor and departed. His exit was noiseless. He ebbed away
+like a shadow through the open French windows.
+
+At six-thirty, sharp to the minute, he was back with a larger tray.
+Dick Forrest put away the proofs, reached for a book entitled
+"Commercial Breeding of Frogs," and prepared to eat. The breakfast was
+simple yet fairly substantial--more coffee, a half grape-fruit, two
+soft-boiled eggs made ready in a glass with a dab of butter and piping
+hot, and a sliver of bacon, not over-cooked, that he knew was of his
+own raising and curing.
+
+By this time the sunshine was pouring in through the screening and
+across the bed. On the outside of the wire screen clung a number of
+house-flies, early-hatched for the season and numb with the night's
+cold. As Forrest ate he watched the hunting of the meat-eating yellow-
+jackets. Sturdy, more frost-resistant than bees, they were already on
+the wing and preying on the benumbed flies. Despite the rowdy noise of
+their flight, these yellow hunters of the air, with rarely ever a
+miss, pounced on their helpless victims and sailed away with them. The
+last fly was gone ere Forrest had sipped his last sip of coffee,
+marked "Commercial Breeding of Frogs" with a match, and taken up his
+proofsheets.
+
+After a time, the liquid-mellow cry of the meadow-lark, first vocal
+for the day, caused him to desist. He looked at the clock. It marked
+seven. He set aside the proofs and began a series of conversations by
+means of the switchboard, which he manipulated with a practiced hand.
+
+"Hello, Oh Joy," was his first talk. "Is Mr. Thayer up?... Very well.
+Don't disturb him. I don't think he'll breakfast in bed, but find
+out.... That's right, and show him how to work the hot water. Maybe he
+doesn't know... Yes, that's right. Plan for one more boy as soon as
+you can get him. There's always a crowd when the good weather comes
+on.... Sure. Use your judgment. Good-by."
+
+"Mr. Hanley?... Yes," was his second conversation, over another
+switch. "I've been thinking about the dam on the Buckeye. I want the
+figures on the gravel-haul and on the rock-crushing.... Yes, that's
+it. I imagine that the gravel-haul will cost anywhere between six and
+ten cents a yard more than the crushed rock. That last pitch of hill
+is what eats up the gravel-teams. Work out the figures. ... No, we
+won't be able to start for a fortnight. ... Yes, yes; the new
+tractors, if they ever deliver, will release the horses from the
+plowing, but they'll have to go back for the checking.... No, you'll
+have to see Mr. Everan about that. Good-by."
+
+ And his third call:
+
+"Mr. Dawson? Ha! Ha! Thirty-six on my porch right now. It must be
+white with frost down on the levels. But it's most likely the last
+this year.... Yes, they swore the tractors would be delivered two days
+ago.... Call up the station agent. ... By the way, you catch Hanley
+for me. I forgot to tell him to start the 'rat-catchers' out with
+the second instalment of fly-traps.... Yes, pronto. There were a
+couple of dozen roosting on my screen this morning.... Yes.... Good-
+by."
+
+At this stage, Forrest slid out of bed in his pajamas, slipped his
+feet into the slippers, and strode through the French windows to the
+bath, already drawn by Oh My. A dozen minutes afterward, shaved as
+well, he was back in bed, reading his frog book while Oh My, punctual
+to the minute, massaged his legs.
+
+They were the well-formed legs of a well-built, five-foot-ten man who
+weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. Further, they told a tale of the
+man. The left thigh was marred by a scar ten inches in length. Across
+the left ankle, from instep to heel, were scattered half a dozen scars
+the size of half-dollars. When Oh My prodded and pulled the left knee
+a shade too severely, Forrest was guilty of a wince. The right shin
+was colored with several dark scars, while a big scar, just under the
+knee, was a positive dent in the bone. Midway between knee and groin
+was the mark of an ancient three-inch gash, curiously dotted with the
+minute scars of stitches.
+
+A sudden, joyous nicker from without put the match between the pages
+of the frog book, and, while Oh My proceeded partly to dress his
+master in bed, including socks and shoes, the master, twisting partly
+on his side, stared out in the direction of the nicker. Down the road,
+through the swaying purple of the early lilacs, ridden by a
+picturesque cowboy, paced a great horse, glinting ruddy in the morning
+sun-gold, flinging free the snowy foam of his mighty fetlocks, his
+noble crest tossing, his eyes roving afield, the trumpet of his love-
+call echoing through the springing land.
+
+Dick Forrest was smitten at the same instant with joy and anxiety--joy
+in the glorious beast pacing down between the lilac hedges; anxiety in
+that the stallion might have awakened the girl who laughed from the
+round wooden frame on his wall. He glanced quickly across the two-
+hundred-foot court to the long, shadowy jut of her wing of the house.
+The shades of her sleeping-porch were down. They did not stir. Again
+the stallion nickered, and all that moved was a flock of wild
+canaries, upspringing from the flowers and shrubs of the court, rising
+like a green-gold spray of light flung from the sunrise.
+
+He watched the stallion out of sight through the lilacs, seeing
+visions of fair Shire colts mighty of bone and frame and free from
+blemish, then turned, as ever he turned to the immediate thing, and
+spoke to his body servant.
+
+"How's that last boy, Oh My? Showing up?"
+
+"Him pretty good boy, I think," was the answer. "Him young boy.
+Everything new. Pretty slow. All the same bime by him show up good."
+
+"Why? What makes you think so?"
+
+"I call him three, four morning now. Him sleep like baby. Him wake up
+smiling just like you. That very good."
+
+"Do I wake up smiling?" Forrest queried.
+
+Oh My nodded his head violently.
+
+"Many times, many years, I call you. Always your eyes open, your eyes
+smile, your mouth smile, your face smile, you smile all over, just
+like that, right away quick. That very good. A man wake up that way
+got plenty good sense. I know. This new boy like that. Bime by, pretty
+soon, he make fine boy. You see. His name Chow Gam. What name you call
+him this place?"
+
+Dick Forrest meditated.
+
+"What names have we already?" he asked.
+
+"Oh Joy, Ah Well, Ah Me, and me; I am Oh My," the Chinese rattled off.
+"Oh Joy him say call new boy--"
+
+He hesitated and stared at his master with a challenging glint of eye.
+Forrest nodded.
+
+"Oh Joy him say call new boy 'Oh Hell.'"
+
+"Oh ho!" Forrest laughed in appreciation. "Oh Joy is a josher. A good
+name, but it won't do. There is the Missus. We've got to think another
+name."
+
+"Oh Ho, that very good name."
+
+Forrest's exclamation was still ringing in his consciousness so that
+he recognized the source of Oh My's inspiration.
+
+"Very well. The boy's name is Oh Ho."
+
+Oh My lowered his head, ebbed swiftly through the French windows, and
+as swiftly returned with the rest of Forrest's clothes-gear, helping
+him into undershirt and shirt, tossing a tie around his neck for him
+to knot, and, kneeling, putting on his leggings and spurs. A Baden
+Powell hat and a quirt completed his appareling--the quirt, Indian-
+braided of rawhide, with ten ounces of lead braided into the butt that
+hung from his wrist on a loop of leather.
+
+But Forrest was not yet free. Oh My handed him several letters, with
+the explanation that they had come up from the station the previous
+night after Forrest had gone to bed. He tore the right-hand ends
+across and glanced at the contents of all but one with speed. The
+latter he dwelt upon for a moment, with an irritated indrawing of
+brows, then swung out the phonograph from the wall, pressed the button
+that made the cylinder revolve, and swiftly dictated, without ever a
+pause for word or idea:
+
+"In reply to yours of March 14, 1914, I am indeed sorry to learn that
+you were hit with hog cholera. I am equally sorry that you have seen
+fit to charge me with the responsibility. And just as equally am I
+sorry that the boar we sent you is dead.
+
+"I can only assure you that we are quite clear of cholera here, and
+that we have been clear of cholera for eight years, with the exception
+of two Eastern importations, the last two years ago, both of which,
+according to our custom, were segregated on arrival and were destroyed
+before the contagion could be communicated to our herds.
+
+"I feel that I must inform you that in neither case did I charge the
+sellers with having sent me diseased stock. On the contrary, as you
+should know, the incubation of hog cholera being nine days, I
+consulted the shipping dates of the animals and knew that they had
+been healthy when shipped.
+
+"Has it ever entered your mind that the railroads are largely
+responsible for the spread of cholera? Did you ever hear of a railroad
+fumigating or disinfecting a car which had carried cholera? Consult
+the dates: First, of shipment by me; second, of receipt of the boar by
+you; and, third, of appearance of symptoms in the boar. As you say,
+because of washouts, the boar was five days on the way. Not until the
+seventh day after you receipted for same did the first symptoms
+appear. That makes twelve days after it left my hands.
+
+"No; I must disagree with you. I am not responsible for the disaster
+that overtook your herd. Furthermore, doubly to assure you, write to
+the State Veterinary as to whether or not my place is free of cholera.
+
+"Very truly yours..."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+When Forrest went through the French windows from his sleeping-porch,
+he crossed, first, a comfortable dressing room, window-divaned, many-
+lockered, with a generous fireplace, out of which opened a bathroom;
+and, second, a long office room, wherein was all the paraphernalia of
+business--desks, dictaphones, filing cabinets, book cases, magazine
+files, and drawer-pigeonholes that tiered to the low, beamed ceiling.
+
+Midway in the office room, he pressed a button and a series of book-
+freightened shelves swung on a pivot, revealing a tiny spiral stairway
+of steel, which he descended with care that his spurs might not catch,
+the bookshelves swinging into place behind him.
+
+At the foot of the stairway, a press on another button pivoted more
+shelves of books and gave him entrance into a long low room shelved
+with books from floor to ceiling. He went directly to a case, directly
+to a shelf, and unerringly laid his hand on the book he sought. A
+minute he ran the pages, found the passage he was after, nodded his
+head to himself in vindication, and replaced the book.
+
+A door gave way to a pergola of square concrete columns spanned with
+redwood logs and interlaced with smaller trunks of redwood, all rough
+and crinkled velvet with the ruddy purple of the bark.
+
+It was evident, since he had to skirt several hundred feet of concrete
+walls of wandering house, that he had not taken the short way out.
+Under wide-spreading ancient oaks, where the long hitching-rails,
+bark-chewed, and the hoof-beaten gravel showed the stamping place of
+many horses, he found a pale-golden, almost tan-golden, sorrel mare.
+Her well-groomed spring coat was alive and flaming in the morning sun
+that slanted straight under the edge of the roof of trees. She was
+herself alive and flaming. She was built like a stallion, and down her
+backbone ran a narrow dark strip of hair that advertised an ancestry
+of many range mustangs.
+
+"How's the Man-Eater this morning?" he queried, as he unsnapped the
+tie-rope from her throat.
+
+She laid back the tiniest ears that ever a horse possessed--ears that
+told of some thoroughbred's wild loves with wild mares among the
+hills--and snapped at Forrest with wicked teeth and wicked-gleaming
+eyes.
+
+She sidled and attempted to rear as he swung into the saddle, and,
+sidling and attempting to rear, she went off down the graveled road.
+And rear she would have, had it not been for the martingale that held
+her head down and that, as well, saved the rider's nose from her
+angry-tossing head.
+
+So used was he to the mare, that he was scarcely aware of her antics.
+Automatically, with slightest touch of rein against arched neck, or
+with tickle of spur or press of knee, he kept the mare to the way he
+willed. Once, as she whirled and danced, he caught a glimpse of the
+Big House. Big it was in all seeming, and yet, such was the vagrant
+nature of it, it was not so big as it seemed. Eight hundred feet
+across the front face, it stretched. But much of this eight hundred
+feet was composed of mere corridors, concrete-walled, tile-roofed,
+that connected and assembled the various parts of the building. There
+were patios and pergolas in proportion, and all the walls, with their
+many right-angled juts and recessions, arose out of a bed of greenery
+and bloom.
+
+Spanish in character, the architecture of the Big House was not of the
+California-Spanish type which had been introduced by way of Mexico a
+hundred years before, and which had been modified by modern architects
+to the California-Spanish architecture of the day. Hispano-Moresque
+more technically classified the Big House in all its hybridness,
+although there were experts who heatedly quarreled with the term.
+
+Spaciousness without austerity and beauty without ostentation were the
+fundamental impressions the Big House gave. Its lines, long and
+horizontal, broken only by lines that were vertical and by the lines
+of juts and recesses that were always right-angled, were as chaste as
+those of a monastery. The irregular roof-line, however, relieved the
+hint of monotony.
+
+Low and rambling, without being squat, the square upthrusts of towers
+and of towers over-topping towers gave just proportion of height
+without being sky-aspiring. The sense of the Big House was solidarity.
+It defied earthquakes. It was planted for a thousand years. The honest
+concrete was overlaid by a cream-stucco of honest cement. Again, this
+very sameness of color might have proved monotonous to the eye had it
+not been saved by the many flat roofs of warm-red Spanish tile.
+
+In that one sweeping glance while the mare whirled unduly, Dick
+Forrest's eyes, embracing all of the Big House, centered for a quick
+solicitous instant on the great wing across the two-hundred-foot
+court, where, under climbing groups of towers, red-snooded in the
+morning sun, the drawn shades of the sleeping-porch tokened that his
+lady still slept.
+
+About him, for three quadrants of the circle of the world, arose low-
+rolling hills, smooth, fenced, cropped, and pastured, that melted into
+higher hills and steeper wooded slopes that merged upward, steeper,
+into mighty mountains. The fourth quadrant was unbounded by mountain
+walls and hills. It faded away, descending easily to vast far flatlands,
+which, despite the clear brittle air of frost, were too vast and far
+to scan across.
+
+The mare under him snorted. His knees tightened as he straightened her
+into the road and forced her to one side. Down upon him, with a
+pattering of feet on the gravel, flowed a river of white shimmering
+silk. He knew it at sight for his prize herd of Angora goats, each
+with a pedigree, each with a history. There had to be a near two
+hundred of them, and he knew, according to the rigorous selection he
+commanded, not having been clipped in the fall, that the shining
+mohair draping the sides of the least of them, as fine as any human
+new-born baby's hair and finer, as white as any human albino's thatch
+and whiter, was longer than the twelve-inch staple, and that the
+mohair of the best of them would dye any color into twenty-inch
+switches for women's heads and sell at prices unreasonable and
+profound.
+
+The beauty of the sight held him as well. The roadway had become a
+flowing ribbon of silk, gemmed with yellow cat-like eyes that floated
+past wary and curious in their regard for him and his nervous horse.
+Two Basque herders brought up the rear. They were short, broad,
+swarthy men, black-eyed, vivid-faced, contemplative and philosophic of
+expression. They pulled off their hats and ducked their heads to him.
+Forrest lifted his right hand, the quirt dangling from wrist, the
+straight forefinger touching the rim of his Baden Powell in semi-
+military salute.
+
+The mare, prancing and whirling again, he held her with a touch of
+rein and threat of spur, and gazed after the four-footed silk that
+filled the road with shimmering white. He knew the significance of
+their presence. The time for kidding was approaching and they were
+being brought down from their brush-pastures to the brood-pens and
+shelters for jealous care and generous feed through the period of
+increase. And as he gazed, in his mind, comparing, was a vision of all
+the best of Turkish and South African mohair he had ever seen, and his
+flock bore the comparison well. It looked good. It looked very good.
+
+He rode on. From all about arose the clacking whir of manure-
+spreaders. In the distance, on the low, easy-sloping hills, he saw
+team after team, and many teams, three to a team abreast, what he knew
+were his Shire mares, drawing the plows back and forth across,
+contour-plowing, turning the green sod of the hillsides to the rich
+dark brown of humus-filled earth so organic and friable that it would
+almost melt by gravity into fine-particled seed-bed. That was for the
+corn--and sorghum-planting for his silos. Other hill-slopes, in the
+due course of his rotation, were knee-high in barley; and still other
+slopes were showing the good green of burr clover and Canada pea.
+
+Everywhere about him, large fields and small were arranged in a system
+of accessibility and workability that would have warmed the heart of
+the most meticulous efficiency-expert. Every fence was hog-tight and
+bull-proof, and no weeds grew in the shelters of the fences. Many of
+the level fields were in alfalfa. Others, following the rotations,
+bore crops planted the previous fall, or were in preparation for the
+spring-planting. Still others, close to the brood barns and pens, were
+being grazed by rotund Shropshire and French-Merino ewes, or were
+being hogged off by white Gargantuan brood-sows that brought a flash
+of pleasure in his eyes as he rode past and gazed.
+
+He rode through what was almost a village, save that there were
+neither shops nor hotels. The houses were bungalows, substantial,
+pleasing to the eye, each set in the midst of gardens where stouter
+blooms, including roses, were out and smiling at the threat of late
+frost. Children were already astir, laughing and playing among the
+flowers or being called in to breakfast by their mothers.
+
+Beyond, beginning at a half-mile distant to circle the Big House, he
+passed a row of shops. He paused at the first and glanced in. One
+smith was working at a forge. A second smith, a shoe fresh-nailed on
+the fore-foot of an elderly Shire mare that would disturb the scales
+at eighteen hundred weight, was rasping down the outer wall of the
+hoof to smooth with the toe of the shoe. Forrest saw, saluted, rode
+on, and, a hundred feet away, paused and scribbled a memorandum in the
+notebook he drew from his hip-pocket.
+
+He passed other shops--a paint-shop, a wagon-shop, a plumbing shop, a
+carpenter-shop. While he glanced at the last, a hybrid machine, half-
+auto, half-truck, passed him at speed and took the main road for the
+railroad station eight miles away. He knew it for the morning butter-
+truck freighting from the separator house the daily output of the
+dairy.
+
+The Big House was the hub of the ranch organization. Half a mile from
+it, it was encircled by the various ranch centers. Dick Forrest,
+saluting continually his people, passed at a gallop the dairy center,
+which was almost a sea of buildings with batteries of silos and with
+litter carriers emerging on overhead tracks and automatically dumping
+into waiting manure-spreaders. Several times, business-looking men,
+college-marked, astride horses or driving carts, stopped him and
+conferred with him. They were foremen, heads of departments, and they
+were as brief and to the point as was he. The last of them, astride a
+Palomina three-year-old that was as graceful and wild as a half-broken
+Arab, was for riding by with a bare salute, but was stopped by his
+employer.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Hennessy, and how soon will she be ready for Mrs.
+Forrest?" Dick Forrest asked.
+
+"I'd like another week," was Hennessy's answer. "She's well broke now,
+just the way Mrs. Forrest wanted, but she's over-strung and sensitive
+and I'd like the week more to set her in her ways."
+
+Forrest nodded concurrence, and Hennessy, who was the veterinary, went
+on:
+
+"There are two drivers in the alfalfa gang I'd like to send down the
+hill."
+
+"What's the matter with them?"
+
+"One, a new man, Hopkins, is an ex-soldier. He may know government
+mules, but he doesn't know Shires."
+
+Forrest nodded.
+
+"The other has worked for us two years, but he's drinking now, and he
+takes his hang-overs out on his horses--"
+
+"That's Smith, old-type American, smooth-shaven, with a cast in his
+left eye?" Forrest interrupted.
+
+The veterinary nodded.
+
+"I've been watching him," Forrest concluded. "He was a good man at
+first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill.
+And send that other fellow--Hopkins, you said?--along with him. By the
+way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore
+off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his hand. "You've a
+new horse-shoer in the shop. How does he strike you?"
+
+"He's too new to make up my mind yet."
+
+"Well, send him down the hill along with the other two. He can't take
+your orders. I observed him just now fitting a shoe to old Alden
+Bessie by rasping off half an inch of the toe of her hoof."
+
+"He knew better."
+
+"Send him down the hill," Forrest repeated, as he tickled his champing
+mount with the slightest of spur-tickles and shot her out along the
+road, sidling, head-tossing, and attempting to rear.
+
+Much he saw that pleased him. Once, he murmured aloud, "A fat land, a
+fat land." Divers things he saw that did not please him and that won a
+note in his scribble pad. Completing the circle about the Big House
+and riding beyond the circle half a mile to an isolated group of sheds
+and corrals, he reached the objective of the ride: the hospital. Here
+he found but two young heifers being tested for tuberculosis, and a
+magnificent Duroc Jersey boar in magnificent condition. Weighing fully
+six hundred pounds, its bright eyes, brisk movements, and sheen of
+hair shouted out that there was nothing the matter with it.
+Nevertheless, according to the ranch practice, being a fresh
+importation from Iowa, it was undergoing the regular period of
+quarantine. Burgess Premier was its name in the herd books of the
+association, age two years, and it had cost Forrest five hundred
+dollars laid down on the ranch.
+
+Proceeding at a hand gallop along a road that was one of the spokes
+radiating from the Big House hub, Forrest overtook Crellin, his hog
+manager, and, in a five-minute conference, outlined the next few
+months of destiny of Burgess Premier, and learned that the brood sow,
+Lady Isleton, the matron of all matrons of the O. I. C.'s and blue-
+ribboner in all shows from Seattle to San Diego, was safely farrowed
+of eleven. Crellin explained that he had sat up half the night with
+her and was then bound home for bath and breakfast.
+
+"I hear your oldest daughter has finished high school and wants to
+enter Stanford," Forrest said, curbing the mare just as he had half-
+signaled departure at a gallop.
+
+Crellin, a young man of thirty-five, with the maturity of a long-time
+father stamped upon him along with the marks of college and the
+youthfulness of a man used to the open air and straight-living, showed
+his appreciation of his employer's interest as he half-flushed under
+his tan and nodded.
+
+"Think it over," Forrest advised. "Make a statistic of all the college
+girls--yes, and State Normal girls--you know. How many of them follow
+career, and how many of them marry within two years after their
+degrees and take to baby farming."
+
+"Helen is very seriously bent on the matter," Crellin urged.
+
+"Do you remember when I had my appendix out?" Forrest queried. "Well,
+I had as fine a nurse as I ever saw and as nice a girl as ever walked
+on two nice legs. She was just six months a full-fledged nurse, then.
+And four months after that I had to send her a wedding present. She
+married an automobile agent. She's lived in hotels ever since. She's
+never had a chance to nurse--never a child of her own to bring through
+a bout with colic. But... she has hopes... and, whether or not her
+hopes materialize, she's confoundedly happy. But... what good was her
+nursing apprenticeship?"
+
+Just then an empty manure-spreader passed, forcing Crellin, on foot,
+and Forrest, on his mare, to edge over to the side of the road.
+Forrest glanced with kindling eye at the off mare of the machine, a
+huge, symmetrical Shire whose own blue ribbons, and the blue ribbons
+of her progeny, would have required an expert accountant to enumerate
+and classify.
+
+"Look at the Fotherington Princess," Forrest said, nodding at the mare
+that warmed his eye. "She is a normal female. Only incidentally,
+through thousands of years of domestic selection, has man evolved her
+into a draught beast breeding true to kind. But being a draught-beast
+is secondary. Primarily she is a female. Take them by and large, our
+own human females, above all else, love us men and are intrinsically
+maternal. There is no biological sanction for all the hurly burly of
+woman to-day for suffrage and career."
+
+"But there is an economic sanction," Crellin objected.
+
+"True," his employer agreed, then proceeded to discount. "Our present
+industrial system prevents marriage and compels woman to career. But,
+remember, industrial systems come, and industrial systems go, while
+biology runs on forever."
+
+"It's rather hard to satisfy young women with marriage these days,"
+the hog-manager demurred.
+
+Dick Forrest laughed incredulously.
+
+"I don't know about that," he said. "There's your wife for an
+instance. She with her sheepskin--classical scholar at that--well,
+what has she done with it?... Two boys and three girls, I believe? As
+I remember your telling me, she was engaged to you the whole last half
+of her senior year."
+
+"True, but--" Crellin insisted, with an eye-twinkle of appreciation of
+the point, "that was fifteen years ago, as well as a love-match. We
+just couldn't help it. That far, I agree. She had planned unheard-of
+achievements, while I saw nothing else than the deanship of the
+College of Agriculture. We just couldn't help it. But that was fifteen
+years ago, and fifteen years have made all the difference in the world
+in the ambitions and ideals of our young women."
+
+"Don't you believe it for a moment. I tell you, Mr. Crellin, it's a
+statistic. All contrary things are transient. Ever woman remains
+Avoman, everlasting, eternal. Not until our girl-children cease from
+playing with dolls and from looking at their own enticingness in
+mirrors, will woman ever be otherwise than what she has always been:
+first, the mother, second, the mate of man. It is a statistic. I've
+been looking up the girls who graduate from the State Normal. You will
+notice that those who marry by the way before graduation are excluded.
+Nevertheless, the average length of time the graduates actually teach
+school is little more than two years. And when you consider that a lot
+of them, through ill looks and ill luck, are foredoomed old maids and
+are foredoomed to teach all their lives, you can see how they cut down
+the period of teaching of the marriageable ones."
+
+"A woman, even a girl-woman, will have her way where mere men are
+concerned," Crellin muttered, unable to dispute his employer's figures
+but resolved to look them up.
+
+"And your girl-woman will go to Stanford," Forrest laughed, as he
+prepared to lift his mare into a gallop, "and you and I and all men,
+to the end of time, will see to it that they do have their way."
+
+Crellin smiled to himself as his employer diminished down the road;
+for Crellin knew his Kipling, and the thought that caused the smile
+was: "But where's the kid of your own, Mr. Forrest?" He decided to
+repeat it to Mrs. Crellin over the breakfast coffee.
+
+Once again Dick Forrest delayed ere he gained the Big House. The man
+he stopped he addressed as Mendenhall, who was his horse-manager as
+well as pasture expert, and who was reputed to know, not only every
+blade of grass on the ranch, but the length of every blade of grass
+and its age from seed-germination as well.
+
+At signal from Forrest, Mendenhall drew up the two colts he was
+driving in a double breaking-cart. What had caused Forrest to signal
+was a glance he had caught, across the northern edge of the valley, of
+great, smooth-hill ranges miles beyond, touched by the sun and deeply
+green where they projected into the vast flat of the Sacramento
+Valley.
+
+The talk that followed was quick and abbreviated to terms of
+understanding between two men who knew. Grass was the subject. Mention
+was made of the winter rainfall and of the chance for late spring
+rains to come. Names occurred, such as the Little Coyote and Los
+Cuatos creeks, the Yolo and the Miramar hills, the Big Basin, Round
+Valley, and the San Anselmo and Los Banos ranges. Movements of herds
+and droves, past, present, and to come, were discussed, as well as the
+outlook for cultivated hay in far upland pastures and the estimates of
+such hay that still remained over the winter in remote barns in the
+sheltered mountain valleys where herds had wintered and been fed.
+
+Under the oaks, at the stamping posts, Forrest was saved the trouble
+of tying the Man-Eater. A stableman came on the run to take the mare,
+and Forrest, scarce pausing for a word about a horse by the name of
+Duddy, was clanking his spurs into the Big House.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+Forrest entered a section of the Big House by way of a massive, hewn-
+timber, iron-studded door that let in at the foot of what seemed a
+donjon keep. The floor was cement, and doors let off in various
+directions. One, opening to a Chinese in the white apron and starched
+cap of a chef, emitted at the same time the low hum of a dynamo. It
+was this that deflected Forrest from his straight path. He paused,
+holding the door ajar, and peered into a cool, electric-lighted cement
+room where stood a long, glass-fronted, glass-shelved refrigerator
+flanked by an ice-machine and a dynamo. On the floor, in greasy
+overalls, squatted a greasy little man to whom his employer nodded.
+
+"Anything wrong, Thompson?" he asked.
+
+"There _was,"_ was the answer, positive and complete.
+
+Forrest closed the door and went on along a passage that was like a
+tunnel. Narrow, iron-barred openings, like the slits for archers in
+medieval castles, dimly lighted the way. Another door gave access to a
+long, low room, beam-ceilinged, with a fireplace in which an ox could
+have been roasted. A huge stump, resting on a bed of coals, blazed
+brightly. Two billiard tables, several card tables, lounging corners,
+and a miniature bar constituted the major furnishing. Two young men
+chalked their cues and returned Forrest's greeting.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Naismith," he bantered. "--More material for the
+_Breeders' Gazette?"_
+
+Naismith, a youngish man of thirty, with glasses, smiled sheepishly
+and cocked his head at his companion.
+
+"Wainwright challenged me," he explained.
+
+"Which means that Lute and Ernestine must still be beauty-sleeping,"
+Forrest laughed.
+
+Young Wainwright bristled to acceptance of the challenge, but before
+he could utter the retort on his lips his host was moving on and
+addressing Naismith over his shoulder.
+
+"Do you want to come along at eleven:thirty? Thayer and I are running
+out in the machine to look over the Shropshires. He wants about ten
+carloads of rams. You ought to find good stuff in this matter of Idaho
+shipments. Bring your camera along.--Seen Thayer this morning?"
+
+"Just came in to breakfast as we were leaving," Bert Wainwright
+volunteered.
+
+"Tell him to be ready at eleven-thirty if you see him. You're not
+invited, Bert... out of kindness. The girls are sure to be up then."
+
+"Take Rita along with you anyway," Bert pleaded.
+
+"No fear," was Forrest's reply from the door. "We're on business.
+Besides, you can't pry Rita from Ernestine with block-and-tackle."
+
+"That's why I wanted to see if you could," Bert grinned.
+
+"Funny how fellows never appreciate their own sisters." Forrest paused
+for a perceptible moment. "I always thought Rita was a real nice
+sister. What's the matter with her?"
+
+Before a reply could reach him, he had closed the door and was
+jingling his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad
+concrete steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time
+piano measure and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning
+room, flooded with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and
+boudoir cap, was at the instrument, while two others, similarly
+accoutered, in each other's arms, were parodying a dance never learned
+at dancing school nor intended by the participants for male eyes to
+see.
+
+The girl at the piano discovered him, winked, and played on. Not for
+another minute did the dancers spy him. They gave startled cries,
+collapsed, laughing, in each other's arms, and the music stopped. They
+were gorgeous, healthy young creatures, the three of them, and
+Forrest's eye kindled as he looked at them in quite the same way that
+it had kindled when he regarded the Fotherington Princess.
+
+Persiflage, of the sort that obtains among young things of the human
+kind, flew back and forth.
+
+"I've been here five minutes," Dick Forrest asserted.
+
+The two dancers, to cover their confusion, doubted his veracity and
+instanced his many well-known and notorious guilts of mendacity. The
+girl at the piano, Ernestine, his sister-in-law, insisted that pearls
+of truth fell from his lips, that she had seen him from the moment he
+began to look, and that as she estimated the passage of time he had
+been looking much longer than five minutes.
+
+"Well, anyway," Forrest broke in on their babel, "Bert, the sweet
+innocent, doesn't think you are up yet."
+
+"We're not... to him," one of the dancers, a vivacious young Venus,
+retorted. "Nor are we to you either. So run along, little boy. Run
+along."
+
+"Look here, Lute," Forrest began sternly. "Just because I am a
+decrepit old man, and just because you are eighteen, just eighteen,
+and happen to be my wife's sister, you needn't presume to put the high
+and mighty over on me. Don't forget--and I state the fact,
+disagreeable as it may be, for Rita's sake--don't forget that in the
+past ten years I've paddled you more disgraceful times than you care
+to dare me to enumerate.
+
+"It is true, I am not so young as I used to was, but--" He felt the
+biceps of his right arm and made as if to roll up the sleeve. "--But,
+I'm not all in yet, and for two cents..."
+
+"What?" the young woman challenged belligerently.
+
+"For two cents," he muttered darkly. "For two cents... Besides, and it
+grieves me to inform you, your cap is not on straight. Also, it is not
+a very tasteful creation at best. I could make a far more becoming cap
+with my toes, asleep, and... yes, seasick as well."
+
+Lute tossed her blond head defiantly, glanced at her comrades in
+solicitation of support, and said:
+
+"Oh, I don't know. It seems humanly reasonable that the three of us
+can woman-handle a mere man of your elderly and insulting avoirdupois.
+What do you say, girls? Let's rush him. He's not a minute under forty,
+and he has an aneurism. Yes, and though loath to divulge family
+secrets, he's got Meniere's Disease."
+
+Ernestine, a small but robust blonde of eighteen, sprang from the
+piano and joined her two comrades in a raid on the cushions of the
+deep window seats. Side by side, a cushion in each hand, and with
+proper distance between them cannily established for the swinging of
+the cushions, they advanced upon the foe.
+
+Forrest prepared for battle, then held up his hand for parley.
+
+"'Fraid cat!" they taunted, in several at first, and then in chorus.
+
+He shook his head emphatically.
+
+"Just for that, and for all the rest of your insolences, the three of
+you are going to get yours. All the wrongs of a lifetime are rising
+now in my brain in a dazzling brightness. I shall go Berserk in a
+moment. But first, and I speak as an agriculturist, and I address
+myself to you, Lute, in all humility, in heaven's name what is
+Meniere's Disease? Do sheep catch it?"
+
+"Meniere's Disease is," Lute began,... "is what you've got. Sheep are
+the only known living creatures that get it."
+
+Ensued red war and chaos. Forrest made a football rush of the sort
+that obtained in California before the adoption of Rugby; and the
+girls broke the line to let him through, turned upon him, flanked him
+on either side, and pounded him with cushions.
+
+He turned, with widespread arms, extended fingers, each finger a hook,
+and grappled the three. The battle became a whirlwind, a be-spurred
+man the center, from which radiated flying draperies of flimsy silk,
+disconnected slippers, boudoir caps, and hairpins. There were thuds
+from the cushions, grunts from the man, squeals, yelps and giggles
+from the girls, and from the totality of the combat inextinguishable
+laughter and a ripping and tearing of fragile textures.
+
+Dick Forrest found himself sprawled on the floor, the wind half
+knocked out of him by shrewdly delivered cushions, his head buzzing
+from the buffeting, and, in one hand, a trailing, torn, and generally
+disrupted girdle of pale blue silk and pink roses.
+
+In one doorway, cheeks flaming from the struggle, stood Rita, alert as
+a fawn and ready to flee. In the other doorway, likewise flame-
+checked, stood Ernestine in the commanding attitude of the Mother of
+the Gracchi, the wreckage of her kimono wrapped severely about her and
+held severely about her by her own waist-pressing arm. Lute, cornered
+behind the piano, attempted to run but was driven back by the menace
+of Forrest, who, on hands and knees, stamped loudly with the palms of
+his hands on the hardwood floor, rolled his head savagely, and emitted
+bull-like roars.
+
+"And they still believe that old prehistoric myth," Ernestine
+proclaimed from safety, "that once he, that wretched semblance of a
+man-thing prone in the dirt, captained Berkeley to victory over
+Stanford."
+
+Her breasts heaved from the exertion, and he marked the pulsating of
+the shimmering cherry-colored silk with delight as he flung his glance
+around to the other two girls similarly breathing.
+
+The piano was a miniature grand--a dainty thing of rich white and gold
+to match the morning room. It stood out from the wall, so that there
+was possibility for Lute to escape around either way of it. Forrest
+gained his feet and faced her across the broad, flat top of the
+instrument. As he threatened to vault it, Lute cried out in horror:
+
+"But your spurs, Dick! Your spurs!"
+
+"Give me time to take them off," he offered.
+
+As he stooped to unbuckle them, Lute darted to escape, but was herded
+back to the shelter of the piano.
+
+"All right," he growled. "On your head be it. If the piano's scratched
+I'll tell Paula."
+
+"I've got witnesses," she panted, indicating with her blue joyous eyes
+the young things in the doorways.
+
+"Very well, my dear." Forrest drew back his body and spread his
+resting palms. "I'm coming over to you."
+
+Action and speech were simultaneous. His body, posited sidewise from
+his hands, was vaulted across, the perilous spurs a full foot above
+the glossy white surface. And simultaneously Lute ducked and went
+under the piano on hands and knees. Her mischance lay in that she
+bumped her head, and, before she could recover way, Forrest had
+circled the piano and cornered her under it.
+
+"Come out!" he commanded. "Come out and take your medicine!"
+
+"A truce," she pleaded. "A truce, Sir Knight, for dear love's sake and
+all damsels in distress."
+
+"I ain't no knight," Forrest announced in his deepest bass. "I'm an
+ogre, a filthy, debased and altogether unregenerate ogre. I was born
+in the tule-swamps. My father was an ogre and my mother was more so. I
+was lulled to slumber on the squalls of infants dead, foreordained,
+and predamned. I was nourished solely on the blood of maidens educated
+in Mills Seminary. My favorite chophouse has ever been a hardwood
+floor, a loaf of Mills Seminary maiden, and a roof of flat piano. My
+father, as well as an ogre, was a California horse-thief. I am more
+reprehensible than my father. I have more teeth. My mother, as well as
+an ogress, was a Nevada book-canvasser. Let all her shame be told. She
+even solicited subscriptions for ladies' magazines. I am more terrible
+than my mother. I have peddled safety razors."
+
+"Can naught soothe and charm your savage breast?" Lute pleaded in
+soulful tones while she studied her chances for escape.
+
+"One thing only, miserable female. One thing only, on the earth, over
+the earth, and under its ruining waters--"
+
+A squawk of recognized plagiarism interrupted him from Ernestine.
+
+"See Ernest Dowson, page seventy-nine, a thin book of thin verse
+ladled out with porridge to young women detentioned at Mills
+Seminary," Forrest went on. "As I had already enunciated before I was
+so rudely interrupted, the one thing only that can balm and embalm
+this savage breast is the 'Maiden's Prayer.' Listen, with all your
+ears ere I chew them off in multitude and gross! Listen, silly,
+unbeautiful, squat, short-legged and ugly female under the piano! Can
+you recite the 'Maiden's Prayer'?"
+
+Screams of delight from the young things in the doorways prevented the
+proper answer and Lute, from under the piano, cried out to young
+Wainwright, who had appeared:
+
+"A rescue, Sir Knight! A rescue!"
+
+"Unhand the maiden!" was Bert's challenge.
+
+"Who art thou?" Forrest demanded.
+
+"King George, sirrah!--I mean, er, Saint George."
+
+"Then am I thy dragon," Forrest announced with due humility. "Spare
+this ancient, honorable, and only neck I have."
+
+"Off with his head!" the young things encouraged.
+
+"Stay thee, maidens, I pray thee," Bert begged. "I am only a Small
+Potato. Yet am I unafraid. I shall beard the dragon. I shall beard him
+in his gullet, and, while he lingeringly chokes to death over my
+unpalatableness and general spinefulness, do you, fair damsels, flee
+to the mountains lest the valleys fall upon you. Yolo, Petaluma, and
+West Sacramento are about to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave and many
+big fishes."
+
+"Off with his head!" the young things chanted. "Slay him in his blood
+and barbecue him!"
+
+"Thumbs down," Forrest groaned. "I am undone. Trust to the unstrained
+quality of mercy possessed by Christian young women in the year 1914
+who will vote some day if ever they grow up and do not marry
+foreigners. Consider my head off, Saint George. I am expired. Further
+deponent sayeth not."
+
+And Forrest, with sobs and slubberings, with realistic shudders and
+kicks and a great jingling of spurs, lay down on the floor and
+expired.
+
+Lute crawled out from under the piano, and was joined by Rita and
+Ernestine in an extemporized dance of the harpies about the slain.
+
+In the midst of it, Forrest sat up, protesting. Also, he was guilty of
+a significant and privy wink to Lute.
+
+"The hero!" he cried. "Forget him not. Crown him with flowers."
+
+And Bert was crowned with flowers from the vases, unchanged from the
+day before. When a bunch of water-logged stems of early tulips,
+propelled by Lute's vigorous arm, impacted soggily on his neck under
+the ear, he fled. The riot of pursuit echoed along the hall and died
+out down the stairway toward the stag room. Forrest gathered himself
+together, and, grinning, went jingling on through the Big House.
+
+He crossed two patios on brick walks roofed with Spanish tile and
+swamped with early foliage and blooms, and gained his wing of the
+house, still breathing from the fun, to find, in the office, his
+secretary awaiting him.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Blake," he greeted. "Sorry I was delayed." He
+glanced at his wrist-watch. "Only four minutes, however. I just
+couldn't get away sooner."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+From nine till ten Forrest gave himself up to his secretary, achieving
+a correspondence that included learned societies and every sort of
+breeding and agricultural organization and that would have compelled
+the average petty business man, unaided, to sit up till midnight to
+accomplish.
+
+For Dick Forrest was the center of a system which he himself had built
+and of which he was secretly very proud. Important letters and
+documents he signed with his ragged fist. All other letters were
+rubber-stamped by Mr. Blake, who, also, in shorthand, in the course of
+the hour, put down the indicated answers to many letters and received
+the formula designations of reply to many other letters. Mr. Blake's
+private opinion was that he worked longer hours than his employer,
+although it was equally his private opinion that his employer was a
+wonder for discovering work for others to perform.
+
+At ten, to the stroke of the clock, as Pittman, Forrest's show-
+manager, entered the office, Blake, burdened with trays of
+correspondence, sheafs of documents, and phonograph cylinders, faded
+away to his own office.
+
+From ten to eleven a stream of managers and foremen flowed in and out.
+All were well disciplined in terseness and time-saving. As Dick
+Forrest had taught them, the minutes spent with him were not minutes
+of cogitation. They must be prepared before they reported or
+suggested. Bonbright, the assistant secretary, always arrived at ten
+to replace Blake; and Bonbright, close to shoulder, with flying
+pencil, took down the rapid-fire interchange of question and answer,
+statement and proposal and plan. These shorthand notes, transcribed
+and typed in duplicate, were the nightmare and, on occasion, the
+Nemesis, of the managers and foremen. For, first, Forrest had a
+remarkable memory; and, second, he was prone to prove its worth by
+reference to those same notes of Bonbright.
+
+A manager, at the end of a five or ten minute session, often emerged
+sweating, limp and frazzled. Yet for a swift hour, at high tension,
+Forrest met all comers, with a master's grip handling them and all the
+multifarious details of their various departments. He told Thompson,
+the machinist, in four flashing minutes, where the fault lay in the
+dynamo to the Big House refrigerator, laid the fault home to Thompson,
+dictated a note to Bonbright, with citation by page and chapter to a
+volume from the library to be drawn by Thompson, told Thompson that
+Parkman, the dairy manager, was not satisfied with the latest wiring
+up of milking machines, and that the refrigerating plant at the
+slaughter house was balking at its accustomed load.
+
+Each man was a specialist, yet Forrest was the proved master of their
+specialties. As Paulson, the head plowman, complained privily to
+Dawson, the crop manager: "I've worked here twelve years and never
+have I seen him put his hands to a plow, and yet, damn him, he somehow
+seems to know. He's a genius, that's what he is. Why, d'ye know, I've
+seen him tear by a piece of work, his hands full with that Man-Eater
+of his a-threatenin' sudden funeral, an', next morning, had 'm mention
+casually to a half-inch how deep it was plowed an' what plows'd done
+the plowin'!--Take that plowin' of the Poppy Meadow, up above Little
+Meadow, on Los Cuatos. I just couldn't see my way to it, an' had to
+cut out the cross-sub-soiling, an' thought I could slip it over on
+him. After it was all finished he kind of happened up that way--I was
+lookin' an' he didn't seem to look--an', well, next A.M. I got mine in
+the office. No; I didn't slip it over. I ain't tried to slip nothing
+over since."
+
+At eleven sharp, Wardman, his sheep manager, departed with an
+engagement scheduled at eleven: thirty to ride in the machine along
+with Thayer, the Idaho buyer, to look over the Shropshire rams. At
+eleven, Bonbright having departed with Wardman to work up his notes,
+Forrest was left alone in the office. From a wire tray of unfinished
+business--one of many wire trays superimposed in groups of five--he
+drew a pamphlet issued by the State of Iowa on hog cholera and
+proceeded to scan it.
+
+Five feet, ten inches in height, weighing a clean-muscled one hundred
+and eighty pounds, Dick Forrest was anything but insignificant for a
+forty years' old man. The eyes were gray, large, over-arched by bone
+of brow, and lashes and brows were dark. The hair, above an ordinary
+forehead, was light brown to chestnut. Under the forehead, the cheeks
+showed high-boned, with underneath the slight hollows that necessarily
+accompany such formation. The jaws were strong without massiveness,
+the nose, large-nostriled, was straight enough and prominent enough
+without being too straight or prominent, the chin square without
+harshness and uncleft, and the mouth girlish and sweet to a degree
+that did not hide the firmness to which the lips could set on due
+provocation. The skin was smooth and well-tanned, although, midway
+between eyebrows and hair, the tan of forehead faded in advertisement
+of the rim of the Baden Powell interposed between him and the sun.
+
+Laughter lurked in the mouth corners and eye-corners, and there were
+cheek lines about the mouth that would seem to have been formed by
+laughter. Equally strong, however, every line of the face that meant
+blended things carried a notice of surety. Dick Forrest was sure--
+sure, when his hand reached out for any object on his desk, that the
+hand would straightly attain the object without a fumble or a miss of
+a fraction of an inch; sure, when his brain leaped the high places of
+the hog cholera text, that it was not missing a point; sure, from his
+balanced body in the revolving desk-chair to the balanced back-head of
+him; sure, in heart and brain, of life and work, of all he possessed,
+and of himself.
+
+He had reason to be sure. Body, brain, and career were long-proven
+sure. A rich man's son, he had not played ducks and drakes with his
+father's money. City born and reared, he had gone back to the land and
+made such a success as to put his name on the lips of breeders
+wherever breeders met and talked. He was the owner, without
+encumbrance, of two hundred and fifty thousand acres of land--land
+that varied in value from a thousand dollars an acre to a hundred
+dollars, that varied from a hundred dollars to ten cents an acre, and
+that, in stretches, was not worth a penny an acre. The improvements on
+that quarter of a million acres, from drain-tiled meadows to dredge-
+drained tule swamps, from good roads to developed water-rights, from
+farm buildings to the Big House itself, constituted a sum gaspingly
+ungraspable to the country-side.
+
+Everything was large-scale but modern to the last tick of the clock.
+His managers lived, rent-free, with salaries commensurate to ability,
+in five--and ten-thousand-dollar houses--but they were the cream of
+specialists skimmed from the continent from the Atlantic to the
+Pacific. When he ordered gasoline-tractors for the cultivation of the
+flat lands, he ordered a round score. When he dammed water in his
+mountains he dammed it by the hundreds of millions of gallons. When he
+ditched his tule-swamps, instead of contracting the excavation, he
+bought the huge dredgers outright, and, when there was slack work on
+his own marshes, he contracted for the draining of the marshes of
+neighboring big farmers, land companies, and corporations for a
+hundred miles up and down the Sacramento River.
+
+He had brain sufficient to know the need of buying brains and to pay a
+tidy bit over the current market price for the most capable brains.
+And he had brain sufficient to direct the brains he bought to a
+profitable conclusion.
+
+And yet, he was just turned forty was clear-eyed, calm-hearted,
+hearty-pulsed, man-strong; and yet, his history, until he was thirty,
+had been harum-scarum and erratic to the superlative. He had run away
+from a millionaire home when he was thirteen. He had won enviable
+college honors ere he was twenty-one and after that he had known all
+the purple ports of the purple seas, and, with cool head, hot heart,
+and laughter, played every risk that promised and provided in the wild
+world of adventure that he had lived to see pass under the sobriety of
+law.
+
+In the old days of San Francisco Forrest had been a name to conjure
+with. The Forrest Mansion had been one of the pioneer palaces on Nob
+Hill where dwelt the Floods, the Mackays, the Crockers, and the
+O'Briens. "Lucky" Richard Forrest, the father, had arrived, via the
+Isthmus, straight from old New England, keenly commercial, interested
+before his departure in clipper ships and the building of clipper
+ships, and interested immediately after his arrival in water-front
+real estate, river steamboats, mines, of course, and, later, in the
+draining of the Nevada Comstock and the construction of the Southern
+Pacific.
+
+He played big, he won big, he lost big; but he won always more than he
+lost, and what he paid out at one game with one hand, he drew back
+with his other hand at another game. His winnings from the Comstock he
+sank into the various holes of the bottomless Daffodil Group in
+Eldorado County. The wreckage from the Benicia Line he turned into the
+Napa Consolidated, which was a quicksilver venture, and it earned him
+five thousand per cent. What he lost in the collapse of the Stockton
+boom was more than balanced by the realty appreciation of his key-
+holdings at Sacramento and Oakland.
+
+And, to cap it all, when "Lucky" Richard Forrest had lost everything
+in a series of calamities, so that San Francisco debated what price
+his Nob Hill palace would fetch at auction, he grubstaked one, Del
+Nelson, to a prospecting in Mexico. As soberly set down in history,
+the result of the said Del Nelson's search for quartz was the Harvest
+Group, including the fabulous and inexhaustible Tattlesnake, Voice,
+City, Desdemona, Bullfrog, and Yellow Boy claims. Del Nelson,
+astounded by his achievement, within the year drowned himself in an
+enormous quantity of cheap whisky, and, the will being incontestible
+through lack of kith and kin, left his half to Lucky Richard Forrest.
+
+Dick Forrest was the son of his father. Lucky Richard, a man of
+boundless energy and enterprise, though twice married and twice
+widowed, had not been blessed with children. His third marriage
+occurred in 1872, when he was fifty-eight, and in 1874, although he
+lost the mother, a twelve-pound boy, stout-barreled and husky-lunged,
+remained to be brought up by a regiment of nurses in the palace on Nob
+Hill.
+
+Young Dick was precocious. Lucky Richard was a democrat. Result: Young
+Dick learned in a year from a private teacher what would have required
+three years in the grammar school, and used all of the saved years in
+playing in the open air. Also, result of precocity of son and
+democracy of father, Young Dick was sent to grammar school for the
+last year in order to learn shoulder-rubbing democracy with the sons
+and daughters of workmen, tradesmen, saloon-keepers and politicians.
+
+In class recitation or spelling match his father's millions did not
+aid him in competing with Patsy Halloran, the mathematical prodigy
+whose father was a hod-carrier, nor with Mona Sanguinetti who was a
+wizard at spelling and whose widowed mother ran a vegetable store. Nor
+were his father's millions and the Nob Hill palace of the slightest
+assistance to Young Dick when he peeled his jacket and, bareknuckled,
+without rounds, licking or being licked, milled it to a finish with
+Jimmy Botts, Jean Choyinsky, and the rest of the lads that went out
+over the world to glory and cash a few years later, a generation of
+prizefighters that only San Francisco, raw and virile and yeasty and
+young, could have produced.
+
+The wisest thing Lucky Richard did for his boy was to give him this
+democratic tutelage. In his secret heart, Young Dick never forgot that
+he lived in a palace of many servants and that his father was a man of
+power and honor. On the other hand, Young Dick learned two-legged,
+two-fisted democracy. He learned it when Mona Sanguinetti spelled him
+down in class. He learned it when Berney Miller out-dodged and out-ran
+him when running across in Black Man.
+
+And when Tim Hagan, with straight left for the hundredth time to
+bleeding nose and mangled mouth, and with ever reiterant right hook to
+stomach, had him dazed and reeling, the breath whistling and sobbing
+through his lacerated lips--was no time for succor from palaces and
+bank accounts. On his two legs, with his two fists, it was either he
+or Tim. And it was right there, in sweat and blood and iron of soul,
+that Young Dick learned how not to lose a losing fight. It had been
+uphill from the first blow, but he stuck it out until in the end it
+was agreed that neither could best the other, although this agreement
+was not reached until they had first lain on the ground in nausea and
+exhaustion and with streaming eyes wept their rage and defiance at
+each other. After that, they became chums and between them ruled the
+schoolyard.
+
+Lucky Richard died the same month Young Dick emerged from grammar
+school. Young Dick was thirteen years old, with twenty million
+dollars, and without a relative in the world to trouble him. He was
+the master of a palace of servants, a steam yacht, stables, and, as
+well, of a summer palace down the Peninsula in the nabob colony at
+Menlo. One thing, only, was he burdened with: guardians.
+
+On a summer afternoon, in the big library, he attended the first
+session of his board of guardians. There were three of them, all
+elderly, and successful, all legal, all business comrades of his
+father. Dick's impression, as they explained things to him, was that,
+although they meant well, he had no contacts with them. In his
+judgment, their boyhood was too far behind them. Besides that, it was
+patent that him, the particular boy they were so much concerned with,
+they did not understand at all. Furthermore, in his own sure way he
+decided that he was the one person in the world fitted to know what
+was best for himself.
+
+Mr. Crockett made a long speech, to which Dick listened with alert and
+becoming attention, nodding his head whenever he was directly
+addressed or appealed to. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum also had their
+say and were treated with equal consideration. Among other things,
+Dick learned what a sterling, upright man his father had been, and the
+program already decided upon by the three gentlemen which would make
+him into a sterling and upright man.
+
+When they were quite done, Dick took it upon himself to say a few
+things.
+
+"I have thought it over," he announced, "and first of all I shall go
+traveling."
+
+"That will come afterward, my boy," Mr. Slocum explained soothingly.
+"When--say--when you are ready to enter the university. At that time a
+year abroad would be a very good thing... a very good thing indeed."
+
+"Of course," Mr. Davidson volunteered quickly, having noted the
+annoyed light in the lad's eyes and the unconscious firm-drawing and
+setting of the lips, "of course, in the meantime you could do some
+traveling, a limited amount of traveling, during your school
+vacations. I am sure my fellow guardians will agree--under the proper
+management and safeguarding, of course--that such bits of travel
+sandwiched between your school-terms, would be advisable and
+beneficial."
+
+"How much did you say I am worth?" Dick asked with apparent
+irrelevance.
+
+"Twenty millions--at a most conservative estimate--that is about the
+sum," Mr. Crockett answered promptly.
+
+"Suppose I said right now that I wanted a hundred dollars!" Dick went
+on.
+
+"Why--er--ahem." Mr. Slocum looked about him for guidance.
+
+"We would be compelled to ask what you wanted it for," answered Mr.
+Crockett.
+
+"And suppose," Dick said very slowly, looking Mr. Crockett squarely in
+the eyes, "suppose I said that I was very sorry, but that I did not
+care to say what I wanted it for?"
+
+"Then you wouldn't get it," Mr. Crockett said so immediately that
+there was a hint of testiness and snap in his manner.
+
+Dick nodded slowly, as if letting the information sink in.
+
+"But, of course, my boy," Mr. Slocum took up hastily, "you understand
+you are too young to handle money yet. We must decide that for you."
+
+"You mean I can't touch a penny without your permission?"
+
+"Not a penny," Mr. Crockett snapped.
+
+Dick nodded his head thoughtfully and murmured, "Oh, I see."
+
+"Of course, and quite naturally, it would only be fair, you know, you
+will have a small allowance for your personal spending," Mr. Davidson
+said. "Say, a dollar, or, perhaps, two dollars, a week. As you grow
+older this allowance will be increased. And by the time you are
+twenty-one, doubtlessly you will be fully qualified--with advice, of
+course--to handle your own affairs."
+
+"And until I am twenty-one my twenty million wouldn't buy me a hundred
+dollars to do as I please with?" Dick queried very subduedly.
+
+Mr. Davidson started to corroborate in soothing phrases, but was waved
+to silence by Dick, who continued:
+
+"As I understand it, whatever money I handle will be by agreement
+between the four of us?"
+
+The Board of Guardians nodded.
+
+"That is, whatever we agree, goes?"
+
+Again the Board of Guardians nodded.
+
+"Well, I'd like to have a hundred right now," Dick announced.
+
+"What for?" Mr. Crockett demanded.
+
+"I don't mind telling you," was the lad's steady answer. "To go
+traveling."
+
+"You'll go to bed at eight:thirty this evening," Mr. Crockett
+retorted. "And you don't get any hundred. The lady we spoke to you
+about will be here before six. She is to have, as we explained, daily
+and hourly charge of you. At six-thirty, as usual, you will dine, and
+she will dine with you and see you to bed. As we told you, she will
+have to serve the place of a mother to you--see that your ears are
+clean, your neck washed--"
+
+"And that I get my Saturday night bath," Dick amplified meekly for
+him.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"How much are you--am I--paying the lady for her services?" Dick
+questioned in the disconcerting, tangential way that was already
+habitual to him, as his school companions and teachers had learned to
+their cost.
+
+Mr. Crockett for the first time cleared his throat for pause.
+
+"I'm paying her, ain't I?" Dick prodded. "Out of the twenty million,
+you know."
+
+"The spit of his father," said Mr. Slocum in an aside.
+
+"Mrs. Summerstone, the lady as you elect to call her, receives one
+hundred and fifty a month, eighteen hundred a year in round sum," said
+Mr. Crockett.
+
+"It's a waste of perfectly good money," Dick sighed. "And board and
+lodging thrown in!"
+
+He stood up--not the born aristocrat of the generations, but the
+reared aristocrat of thirteen years in the Nob Hill palace. He stood
+up with such a manner that his Board of Guardians left their leather
+chairs to stand up with him. But he stood up as no Lord Fauntleroy
+ever stood up; for he was a mixer. He had knowledge that human life
+was many-faced and many-placed. Not for nothing had he been spelled
+down by Mona Sanguinetti. Not for nothing had he fought Tim Hagan to a
+standstill and, co-equal, ruled the schoolyard roost with him.
+
+He was birthed of the wild gold-adventure of Forty-nine. He was a
+reared aristocrat and a grammar-school-trained democrat. He knew, in
+his precocious immature way, the differentiations between caste and
+mass; and, behind it all, he was possessed of a will of his own and of
+a quiet surety of self that was incomprehensible to the three elderly
+gentlemen who had been given charge of his and his destiny and who had
+pledged themselves to increase his twenty millions and make a man of
+him in their own composite image.
+
+"Thank you for your kindness," Young Dick said generally to the three.
+"I guess we'll get along all right. Of course, that twenty millions is
+mine, and of course you've got to take care of it for me, seeing I
+know nothing of business--"
+
+"And we'll increase it for you, my boy, we'll increase it for you in
+safe, conservative ways," Mr. Slocum assured him.
+
+"No speculation," Young Dick warned. "Dad's just been lucky--I've
+heard him say that times have changed and a fellow can't take the
+chances everybody used to take."
+
+From which, and from much which has already passed, it might
+erroneously be inferred that Young Dick was a mean and money-grubbing
+soul. On the contrary, he was at that instant entertaining secret
+thoughts and plans so utterly regardless and disdainful of his twenty
+millions as to place him on a par with a drunken sailor sowing the
+beach with a three years' pay-day.
+
+"I am only a boy," Young Dick went on. "But you don't know me very
+well yet. We'll get better acquainted by and by, and, again thanking
+you...."
+
+He paused, bowed briefly and grandly as lords in Nob Hill palaces
+early learn to bow, and, by the quality of the pause, signified that
+the audience was over. Nor did the impact of dismissal miss his
+guardians. They, who had been co-lords with his father, withdrew
+confused and perplexed. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum were on the point
+of resolving their perplexity into wrath, as they went down the great
+stone stairway to the waiting carriage, but Mr. Crockett, the testy
+and snappish, muttered ecstatically: "The son of a gun! The little son
+of a gun!"
+
+The carriage carried them down to the old Pacific Union Club, where,
+for another hour, they gravely discussed the future of Young Dick
+Forrest and pledged themselves anew to the faith reposed in them by
+Lucky Richard Forrest. And down the hill, on foot, where grass grew on
+the paved streets too steep for horse-traffic, Young Dick hurried. As
+the height of land was left behind, almost immediately the palaces and
+spacious grounds of the nabobs gave way to the mean streets and wooden
+warrens of the working people. The San Francisco of 1887 as
+incontinently intermingled its slums and mansions as did the old
+cities of Europe. Nob Hill arose, like any medieval castle, from the
+mess and ruck of common life that denned and laired at its base.
+
+Young Dick came to pause alongside a corner grocery, the second story
+of which was rented to Timothy Hagan Senior, who, by virtue of being a
+policeman with a wage of a hundred dollars a month, rented this high
+place to dwell above his fellows who supported families on no more
+than forty and fifty dollars a month.
+
+In vain Young Dick whistled up through the unscreened, open windows.
+Tim Hagan Junior was not at home. But Young Dick wasted little wind in
+the whistling. He was debating on possible adjacent places where Tim
+Hagan might be, when Tim himself appeared around the corner, bearing a
+lidless lard-can that foamed with steam beer. He grunted greeting, and
+Young Dick grunted with equal roughness, just as if, a brief space
+before, he had not, in most lordly fashion, terminated an audience
+with three of the richest merchant-kings of an imperial city. Nor did
+his possession of twenty increasing millions hint the slightest
+betrayal in his voice or mitigate in the slightest the gruffness of
+his grunt.
+
+"Ain't seen yeh since yer old man died," Tim Hagan commented.
+
+"Well, you're seein' me now, ain't you?" was Young Dick's retort.
+"Say, Tim, I come to see you on business."
+
+"Wait till I rush the beer to the old man," said Tim, inspecting the
+state of the foam in the lard-can with an experienced eye. "He'll roar
+his head off if it comes in flat."
+
+"Oh, you can shake it up," Young Dick assured him. "Only want to see
+you a minute. I'm hitting the road to-night. Want to come along?"
+
+Tim's small, blue Irish eyes flashed with interest.
+
+"Where to?" he queried.
+
+"Don't know. Want to come? If you do, we can talk it over after we
+start? You know the ropes. What d'ye say?"
+
+"The old man'll beat the stuffin' outa me," Tim demurred.
+
+"He's done that before, an' you don't seem to be much missing," Young
+Dick callously rejoined. "Say the word, an' we'll meet at the Ferry
+Building at nine to-night. What d'ye say? I'll be there."
+
+"Supposin' I don't show up?" Tim asked.
+
+"I'll be on my way just the same." Young Dick turned as if to depart,
+paused casually, and said over his shoulder, "Better come along."
+
+Tim shook up the beer as he answered with equal casualness, "Aw right.
+I'll be there."
+
+After parting from Tim Hagan Young Dick spent a busy hour or so
+looking up one, Marcovich, a Slavonian schoolmate whose father ran a
+chop-house in which was reputed to be served the finest twenty-cent
+meal in the city. Young Marcovich owed Young Dick two dollars, and
+Young Dick accepted the payment of a dollar and forty cents as full
+quittance of the debt.
+
+Also, with shyness and perturbation, Young Dick wandered down
+Montgomery Street and vacillated among the many pawnshops that graced
+that thoroughfare. At last, diving desperately into one, he managed to
+exchange for eight dollars and a ticket his gold watch that he knew
+was worth fifty at the very least.
+
+Dinner in the Nob Hill palace was served at six-thirty. He arrived at
+six-forty-five and encountered Mrs. Summerstone. She was a stout,
+elderly, decayed gentlewoman, a daughter of the great Porter-
+Rickington family that had shaken the entire Pacific Coast with its
+financial crash in the middle seventies. Despite her stoutness, she
+suffered from what she called shattered nerves.
+
+"This will never, never do, Richard," she censured. "Here is dinner
+waiting fifteen minutes already, and you have not yet washed your face
+and hands."
+
+"I am sorry, Mrs. Summerstone," Young Dick apologized. "I won't keep
+you waiting ever again. And I won't bother you much ever."
+
+At dinner, in state, the two of them alone in the great dining room,
+Young Dick strove to make things easy for the lady, whom, despite his
+knowledge that she was on his pay-roll, he felt toward as a host must
+feel toward a guest.
+
+"You'll be very comfortable here," he promised, "once you are settled
+down. It's a good old house, and most of the servants have been here
+for years."
+
+"But, Richard," she smiled seriously to him; "it is not the servants
+who will determine my happiness here. It is you."
+
+"I'll do my best," he said graciously. "Better than that. I'm sorry I
+came in late for dinner. In years and years you'll never see me late
+again. I won't bother you at all. You'll see. It will be just as
+though I wasn't in the house."
+
+When he bade her good night, on his way to bed, he added, as a last
+thought:
+
+"I'll warn you of one thing: Ah Sing. He's the cook. He's been in our
+house for years and years--oh, I don't know, maybe twenty-five or
+thirty years he's cooked for father, from long before this house was
+built or I was born. He's privileged. He's so used to having his own
+way that you'll have to handle him with gloves. But once he likes you
+he'll work his fool head off to please you. He likes me that way. You
+get him to like you, and you'll have the time of your life here. And,
+honest, I won't give you any trouble at all. It'll be a regular snap,
+just as if I wasn't here at all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ AT nine in the evening, sharp to the second, clad in his oldest
+clothes, Young Dick met Tim Hagan at the Ferry Building.
+
+"No use headin' north," said Tim. "Winter'll come on up that way and
+make the sleepin' crimpy. D'ye want to go East--that means Nevada and
+the deserts."
+
+"Any other way?" queried Young Dick. "What's the matter with south? We
+can head for Los Angeles, an' Arizona, an' New Mexico--oh, an' Texas."
+
+"How much money you got?" Tim demanded.
+
+"What for?" Young Dick countered.
+
+"We gotta get out quick, an' payin' our way at the start is quickest.
+Me--I'm all hunkydory; but you ain't. The folks that's lookin' after
+you'll raise a roar. They'll have more detectives out than you can
+shake at stick at. We gotta dodge 'em, that's what."
+
+"Then we will dodge," said Young Dick. "We'll make short jumps this
+way and that for a couple of days, layin' low most of the time, paying
+our way, until we can get to Tracy. Then we'll quit payin' an' beat
+her south."
+
+All of which program was carefully carried out. They eventually went
+through Tracy as pay passengers, six hours after the local deputy
+sheriff had given up his task of searching the trains. With an excess
+of precaution Young Dick paid beyond Tracy and as far as Modesto.
+After that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying,
+riding blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought
+the newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid
+accounts of the kidnapping of the young heir to the Forrest millions.
+
+Back in San Francisco the Board of Guardians offered rewards that
+totaled thirty thousand dollars for the recovery of their ward. And
+Tim Hagan, reading the same while they lay in the grass by some water-
+tank, branded forever the mind of Young Dick with the fact that honor
+beyond price was a matter of neither place nor caste and might outcrop
+in the palace on the height of land or in the dwelling over a grocery
+down on the flat.
+
+"Gee!" Tim said to the general landscape. "The old man wouldn't raise
+a roar if I snitched on you for that thirty thousand. It makes me
+scared to think of it."
+
+And from the fact that Tim thus openly mentioned the matter, Young
+Dick concluded that there was no possibility of the policeman's son
+betraying him.
+
+Not until six weeks afterward, in Arizona, did Young Dick bring up the
+subject.
+
+"You see, Tim," he said, "I've got slathers of money. It's growing all
+the time, and I ain't spending a cent of it, not so as you can
+notice... though that Mrs. Summerstone is getting a cold eighteen
+hundred a year out of me, with board and carriages thrown in, while
+you an' I are glad to get the leavings of firemen's pails in the
+round-houses. Just the same, my money's growing. What's ten per cent,
+on twenty dollars?"
+
+Tim Hagan stared at the shimmering heat-waves of the desert and tried
+to solve the problem.
+
+"What's one-tenth of twenty million?" Young Dick demanded irritably.
+
+"Huh!--two million, of course."
+
+"Well, five per cent's half of ten per cent. What does twenty million
+earn at five per cent, for one year?"
+
+Tim hesitated.
+
+"Half of it, half of two million!" Young Dick cried. "At that rate I'm
+a million richer every year. Get that, and hang on to it, and listen
+to me. When I'm good and willing to go back--but not for years an'
+years--we'll fix it up, you and I. When I say the word, you'll write
+to your father. He'll jump out to where we are waiting, pick me up,
+and cart me back. Then he'll collect the thirty thousand reward from
+my guardians, quit the police force, and most likely start a saloon."
+
+"Thirty thousand's a hell of a lot of money," was Tim's nonchalant way
+of expressing his gratitude.
+
+"Not to me," Young Dick minimized his generosity. "Thirty thousand
+goes into a million thirty-three times, and a million's only a year's
+turnover of my money."
+
+But Tim Hagan never lived to see his father a saloon keeper. Two days
+later, on a trestle, the lads were fired out of an empty box-car by a
+brake-man who should have known better. The trestle spanned a dry
+ravine. Young Dick looked down at the rocks seventy feet below and
+demurred.
+
+"There's room on the trestle," he said; "but what if the train starts
+up?"
+
+"It ain't goin' to start--beat it while you got time," the brakeman
+insisted. "The engine's takin' water at the other side. She always
+takes it here."
+
+But for once the engine did not take water. The evidence at the
+inquest developed that the engineer had found no water in the tank and
+started on. Scarcely had the two boys dropped from the side-door of
+the box-car, and before they had made a score of steps along the
+narrow way between the train and the abyss, than the train began to
+move. Young Dick, quick and sure in all his perceptions and
+adjustments, dropped on the instant to hands and knees on the trestle.
+This gave him better holding and more space, because he crouched
+beneath the overhang of the box-cars. Tim, not so quick in perceiving
+and adjusting, also overcome with Celtic rage at the brakeman, instead
+of dropping to hands and knees, remained upright to flare his opinion
+of the brakeman, to the brakeman, in lurid and ancestral terms.
+
+"Get down!--drop!" Young Dick shouted.
+
+But the opportunity had passed. On a down grade, the engine picked up
+the train rapidly. Facing the moving cars, with empty air at his back
+and the depth beneath, Tim tried to drop on hands and knees. But the
+first twist of his shoulders brought him in contact with the car and
+nearly out-balanced him. By a miracle he recovered equilibrium. But he
+stood upright. The train was moving faster and faster. It was
+impossible to get down.
+
+Young Dick, kneeling and holding, watched. The train gathered way. The
+cars moved more swiftly. Tim, with a cool head, his back to the fall,
+his face to the passing cars, his arms by his sides, with nowhere save
+under his feet a holding point, balanced and swayed. The faster the
+train moved, the wider he swayed, until, exerting his will, he
+controlled himself and ceased from swaying.
+
+And all would have been well with him, had it not been for one car.
+Young Dick knew it, and saw it coming. It was a "palace horse-car,"
+projecting six inches wider than any car on the train. He saw Tim see
+it coming. He saw Tim steel himself to meet the abrupt subtraction of
+half a foot from the narrow space wherein he balanced. He saw Tim
+slowly and deliberately sway out, sway out to the extremest limit, and
+yet not sway out far enough. The thing was physically inevitable. An
+inch more, and Tim would have escaped the car. An inch more and he
+would have fallen without impact from the car. It caught him, in that
+margin of an inch, and hurled him backward and side-twisting. Twice he
+whirled sidewise, and two and a half times he turned over, ere he
+struck on his head and neck on the rocks.
+
+He never moved after he struck. The seventy-foot fall broke his neck
+and crushed his skull. And right there Young Dick learned death--not
+the ordered, decent death of civilization, wherein doctors and nurses
+and hypodermics ease the stricken one into the darkness, and ceremony
+and function and flowers and undertaking institutions conspire to give
+a happy leave-taking and send-off to the departing shade, but sudden
+death, primitive death, ugly and ungarnished, like the death of a
+steer in the shambles or a fat swine stuck in the jugular.
+
+And right there Young Dick learned more--the mischance of life and
+fate; the universe hostile to man; the need to perceive and to act, to
+see and know, to be sure and quick, to adjust instantly to all instant
+shiftage of the balance of forces that bear upon the living. And right
+there, beside the strangely crumpled and shrunken remnant of what had
+been his comrade the moment before, Young Dick learned that illusion
+must be discounted, and that reality never lied.
+
+In New Mexico, Young Dick drifted into the Jingle-bob Ranch, north of
+Roswell, in the Pecos Valley. He was not yet fourteen, and he was
+accepted as the mascot of the ranch and made into a "sure-enough"
+cowboy by cowboys who, on legal papers, legally signed names such as
+Wild Horse, Willie Buck, Boomer Deacon, and High Pockets.
+
+Here, during a stay of six months, Young Dick, soft of frame and
+unbreakable, achieved a knowledge of horses and horsemanship, and of
+men in the rough and raw, that became a life asset. More he learned.
+There was John Chisum, owner of the Jingle-bob, the Bosque Grande, and
+of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond.
+John Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the
+farmer and adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in
+order to do so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got
+for nothing the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that
+was worthless without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the
+camp-fire and chuck wagon, among forty-dollar-a-month cowboys who had
+not foreseen what John Chisum foresaw, Young Dick learned precisely
+why and how John Chisum had become a cattle king while a thousand of
+his contemporaries worked for him on wages.
+
+But Young Dick was no cool-head. His blood was hot. He had passion,
+and fire, and male pride. Ready to cry from twenty hours in the
+saddle, he learned to ignore the thousand aching creaks in his body
+and with the stoic brag of silence to withstain from his blankets
+until the hard-bitten punchers led the way. By the same token he
+straddled the horse that was apportioned him, insisted on riding
+night-herd, and knew no hint of uncertainty when it came to him to
+turn the flank of a stampede with a flying slicker. He could take a
+chance. It was his joy to take a chance. But at such times he never
+failed of due respect for reality. He was well aware that men were
+soft-shelled and cracked easily on hard rocks or under pounding hoofs.
+And when he rejected a mount that tangled its legs in quick action and
+stumbled, it was not because he feared to be cracked, but because,
+when he took a chance on being cracked, he wanted, as he told John
+Chisum himself, "an even break for his money."
+
+It was while at the Jingle-bob, but mailed by a cattleman from
+Chicago, that Young Dick wrote a letter to his guardians. Even then,
+so careful was he, that the envelope was addressed to Ah Sing. Though
+unburdened by his twenty millions, Young Dick never forgot them, and,
+fearing his estate might be distributed among remote relatives who
+might possibly inhabit New England, he warned his guardians that he
+was still alive and that he would return home in several years. Also,
+he ordered them to keep Mrs. Summerstone on at her regular salary.
+
+But Young Dick's feet itched. Half a year, he felt, was really more
+than he should have spent at the Jingle-bob. As a boy hobo, or road-
+kid, he drifted on across the United States, getting acquainted with
+its peace officers, police judges, vagrancy laws, and jails. And he
+learned vagrants themselves at first hand, and floating laborers and
+petty criminals. Among other things, he got acquainted with farms and
+farmers, and, in New York State, once picked berries for a week with a
+Dutch farmer who was experimenting with one of the first silos erected
+in the United States. Nothing of what he learned came to him in the
+spirit of research. He had merely the human boy's curiosity about all
+things, and he gained merely a huge mass of data concerning human
+nature and social conditions that was to stand him in good stead in
+later years, when, with the aid of the books, he digested and
+classified it.
+
+His adventures did not harm him. Even when he consorted with jail-
+birds in jungle camps, and listened to their codes of conduct and
+measurements of life, he was not affected. He was a traveler, and they
+were alien breeds. Secure in the knowledge of his twenty millions,
+there was neither need nor temptation for him to steal or rob. All
+things and all places interested him, but he never found a place nor a
+situation that could hold him. He wanted to see, to see more and more,
+and to go on seeing.
+
+At the end of three years, nearly sixteen, hard of body, weighing a
+hundred and thirty pounds, he judged it time to go home and open the
+books. So he took his first long voyage, signing on as boy on a
+windjammer bound around the Horn from the Delaware Breakwater to San
+Francisco. It was a hard voyage, of one hundred and eighty days, but
+at the end he weighed ten pounds the more for having made it.
+
+Mrs. Summerstone screamed when he walked in on her, and Ah Sing had to
+be called from the kitchen to identify him. Mrs. Summerstone screamed
+a second time. It was when she shook hands with him and lacerated her
+tender skin in the fisty grip of his rope-calloused palms.
+
+He was shy, almost embarrassed, as he greeted his guardians at the
+hastily summoned meeting. But this did not prevent him from talking
+straight to the point.
+
+"It's this way," he said. "I am not a fool. I know what I want, and I
+want what I want. I am alone in the world, outside of good friends
+like you, of course, and I have my own ideas of the world and what I
+want to do in it. I didn't come home because of a sense of duty to
+anybody here. I came home because it was time, because of my sense of
+duty to myself. I'm all the better from my three years of wandering
+about, and now it's up to me to go on with my education--my book
+education, I mean."
+
+"The Belmont Academy," Mr. Slocum suggested. "That will fit you for
+the university--"
+
+Dick shook his head decidedly.
+
+"And take three years to do it. So would a high school. I intend to be
+in the University of California inside one year. That means work. But
+my mind's like acid. It'll bite into the books. I shall hire a coach,
+or half a dozen of them, and go to it. And I'll hire my coaches
+myself--hire and fire them. And that means money to handle."
+
+"A hundred a month," Mr. Crockett suggested.
+
+Dick shook his head.
+
+"I've taken care of myself for three years without any of my money. I
+guess. I can take care of myself along with some of my money here in
+San Francisco. I don't care to handle my business affairs yet, but I
+do want a bank account, a respectable-sized one. I want to spend it as
+I see fit, for what I see fit."
+
+The guardians looked their dismay at one another.
+
+"It's ridiculous, impossible," Mr. Crockett began. "You are as
+unreasonable as you were before you went away."
+
+"It's my way, I guess," Dick sighed. "The other disagreement was over
+my money. It was a hundred dollars I wanted then."
+
+"Think of our position, Dick," Mr. Davidson urged. "As your guardians,
+how would it be looked upon if we gave you, a lad of sixteen, a free
+hand with money."
+
+"What's the _Freda_ worth, right now?" Dick demanded irrelevantly.
+
+"Can sell for twenty thousand any time," Mr. Crockett answered.
+
+"Then sell her. She's too large for me, and she's worth less every
+year. I want a thirty-footer that I can handle myself for knocking
+around the Bay, and that won't cost a thousand. Sell the _Freda_
+and put the money to my account. Now what you three are afraid of is
+that I'll misspend my money--taking to drinking, horse-racing, and
+running around with chorus girls. Here's my proposition to make you
+easy on that: let it be a drawing account for the four of us. The
+moment any of you decide I am misspending, that moment you can draw
+out the total balance. I may as well tell you, that just as a side
+line I'm going to get a business college expert to come here and cram
+me with the mechanical side of the business game."
+
+Dick did not wait for their acquiescence, but went on as from a matter
+definitely settled.
+
+"How about the horses down at Menlo?--never mind, I'll look them over
+and decide what to keep. Mrs. Summerstone will stay on here in charge
+of the house, because I've got too much work mapped out for myself
+already. I promise you you won't regret giving me a free hand with my
+directly personal affairs. And now, if you want to hear about the last
+three years, I'll spin the yarn for you."
+
+ Dick Forrest had been right when he told his guardians that his mind
+was acid and would bite into the books. Never was there such an
+education, and he directed it himself--but not without advice. He had
+learned the trick of hiring brains from his father and from John
+Chisum of the Jingle-bob. He had learned to sit silent and to think
+while cow men talked long about the campfire and the chuck wagon. And,
+by virtue of name and place, he sought and obtained interviews with
+professors and college presidents and practical men of affairs; and he
+listened to their talk through many hours, scarcely speaking, rarely
+asking a question, merely listening to the best they had to offer,
+content to receive from several such hours one idea, one fact, that
+would help him to decide what sort of an education he would go in for
+and how.
+
+Then came the engaging of coaches. Never was there such an engaging
+and discharging, such a hiring and firing. He was not frugal in the
+matter. For one that he retained a month, or three months, he
+discharged a dozen on the first day, or the first week. And invariably
+he paid such dischargees a full month although their attempts to teach
+him might not have consumed an hour. He did such things fairly and
+grandly, because he could afford to be fair and grand.
+
+He, who had eaten the leavings from firemen's pails in round-houses
+and "scoffed" mulligan-stews at water-tanks, had learned thoroughly
+the worth of money. He bought the best with the sure knowledge that it
+was the cheapest. A year of high school physics and a year of high
+school chemistry were necessary to enter the university. When he had
+crammed his algebra and geometry, he sought out the heads of the
+physics and chemistry departments in the University of California.
+Professor Carey laughed at him... at the first.
+
+"My dear boy," Professor Carey began.
+
+Dick waited patiently till he was through. Then Dick began, and
+concluded.
+
+"I'm not a fool, Professor Carey. High school and academy students are
+children. They don't know the world. They don't know what they want,
+or why they want what is ladled out to them. I know the world. I know
+what I want and why I want it. They do physics for an hour, twice a
+week, for two terms, which, with two vacations, occupy one year. You
+are the top teacher on the Pacific Coast in physics. The college year
+is just ending. In the first week of your vacation, giving every
+minute of your time to me, I can get the year's physics. What is that
+week worth to you?"
+
+"You couldn't buy it for a thousand dollars," Professor Carey
+rejoined, thinking he had settled the matter.
+
+"I know what your salary is--" Dick began.
+
+"What is it?" Professor Carey demanded sharply.
+
+"It's not a thousand a week," Dick retorted as sharply. "It's not five
+hundred a week, nor two-fifty a week--" He held up his hand to stall
+off interruption. "You've just told me I couldn't buy a week of your
+time for a thousand dollars. I'm not going to. But I am going to buy
+that week for two thousand. Heavens!--I've only got so many years to
+live--"
+
+"And you can buy years?" Professor Carey queried slyly.
+
+"Sure. That's why I'm here. I buy three years in one, and the week
+from you is part of the deal."
+
+"But I have not accepted," Professor Carey laughed.
+
+"If the sum is not sufficient," Dick said stiffly, "why name the sum
+you consider fair."
+
+And Professor Carey surrendered. So did Professor Barsdale, head of
+the department of chemistry.
+
+Already had Dick taken his coaches in mathematics duck hunting for
+weeks in the sloughs of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. After his
+bout with physics and chemistry he took his two coaches in literature
+and history into the Curry County hunting region of southwestern
+Oregon. He had learned the trick from his father, and he worked, and
+played, lived in the open air, and did three conventional years of
+adolescent education in one year without straining himself. He fished,
+hunted, swam, exercised, and equipped himself for the university at
+the same time. And he made no mistake. He knew that he did it because
+his father's twenty millions had invested him with mastery. Money was
+a tool. He did not over-rate it, nor under-rate it. He used it to buy
+what he wanted.
+
+"The weirdest form of dissipation I ever heard," said Mr. Crockett,
+holding up Dick's account for the year. "Sixteen thousand for
+education, all itemized, including railroad fares, porters' tips, and
+shot-gun cartridges for his teachers."
+
+"He passed the examinations just the same," quoth Mr. Slocum.
+
+"And in a year," growled Mr. Davidson. "My daughter's boy entered
+Belmont at the same time, and, if he's lucky, it will be two years yet
+before he enters the university."
+
+"Well, all I've got to say," proclaimed Mr. Crockett, "is that from
+now on what that boy says in the matter of spending his money goes."
+
+"And now I'll have a snap," Dick told his guardians. "Here I am, neck
+and neck again, and years ahead of them in knowledge of the world.
+Why, I know things, good and bad, big and little, about men and women
+and life that sometimes I almost doubt myself that they're true. But I
+know them.
+
+"From now on, I'm not going to rush. I've caught up, and I'm going
+through regular. All I have to do is to keep the speed of the classes,
+and I'll be graduated when I'm twenty-one. From now on I'll need less
+money for education--no more coaches, you know--and more money for a
+good time."
+
+Mr. Davidson was suspicious.
+
+"What do you mean by a good time?"
+
+"Oh, I'm going in for the frats, for football, hold my own, you know--
+and I'm interested in gasoline engines. I'm going to build the first
+ocean-going gasoline yacht in the world--"
+
+"You'll blow yourself up," Mr. Crockett demurred. "It's a fool notion
+all these cranks are rushing into over gasoline."
+
+"I'll make myself safe," Dick answered, "and that means experimenting,
+and it means money, so keep me a good drawing account--same old way--
+all four of us can draw."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+Dick Forrest proved himself no prodigy at the university, save that he
+cut more lectures the first year than any other student. The reason
+for this was that he did not need the lectures he cut, and he knew it.
+His coaches, while preparing him for the entrance examinations, had
+carried him nearly through the first college year. Incidentally, he
+made the Freshman team, a very scrub team, that was beaten by every
+high school and academy it played against.
+
+But Dick did put in work that nobody saw. His collateral reading was
+wide and deep, and when he went on his first summer cruise in the
+ocean-going gasoline yacht he had built no gay young crowd accompanied
+him. Instead, his guests, with their families, were professors of
+literature, history, jurisprudence, and philosophy. It was long
+remembered in the university as the "high-brow" cruise. The
+professors, on their return, reported a most enjoyable time. Dick
+returned with a greater comprehension of the general fields of the
+particular professors than he could have gained in years at their
+class-lectures. And time thus gained, enabled him to continue to cut
+lectures and to devote more time to laboratory work.
+
+Nor did he miss having his good college time. College widows made love
+to him, and college girls loved him, and he was indefatigable in his
+dancing. He never cut a smoker, a beer bust, or a rush, and he toured
+the Pacific Coast with the Banjo and Mandolin Club.
+
+And yet he was no prodigy. He was brilliant at nothing. Half a dozen
+of his fellows could out-banjo and out-mandolin him. A dozen fellows
+were adjudged better dancers than he. In football, and he gained the
+Varsity in his Sophomore year, he was considered a solid and
+dependable player, and that was all. It seemed never his luck to take
+the ball and go down the length of the field while the Blue and Gold
+host tore itself and the grandstand to pieces. But it was at the end
+of heart-breaking, grueling slog in mud and rain, the score tied, the
+second half imminent to its close, Stanford on the five-yard line,
+Berkeley's ball, with two downs and three yards to gain--it was then
+that the Blue and Gold arose and chanted its demand for Forrest to hit
+the center and hit it hard.
+
+He never achieved super-excellence at anything. Big Charley Everson
+drank him down at the beer busts. Harrison Jackson, at hammer-
+throwing, always exceeded his best by twenty feet. Carruthers out-
+pointed him at boxing. Anson Burge could always put his shoulders to
+the mat, two out of three, but always only by the hardest work. In
+English composition a fifth of his class excelled him. Edlin, the
+Russian Jew, out-debated him on the contention that property was
+robbery. Schultz and Debret left him with the class behind in higher
+mathematics; and Otsuki, the Japanese, was beyond all comparison with
+him in chemistry.
+
+But if Dick Forrest did not excel at anything, he failed in nothing.
+He displayed no superlative strength, he betrayed no weakness nor
+deficiency. As he told his guardians, who, by his unrelenting good
+conduct had been led into dreaming some great career for him; as he
+told them, when they asked what he wanted to become:
+
+"Nothing. Just all around. You see, I don't have to be a specialist.
+My father arranged that for me when he left me his money. Besides, I
+couldn't be a specialist if I wanted to. It isn't me."
+
+And thus so well-keyed was he, that he expressed clearly his key. He
+had no flare for anything. He was that rare individual, normal,
+average, balanced, all-around.
+
+When Mr. Davidson, in the presence of his fellow guardians, stated his
+pleasure in that Dick had shown no wildness since he had settled down,
+Dick replied:
+
+"Oh, I can hold myself when I want to."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Slocum gravely. "It's the finest thing in the world
+that you sowed your wild oats early and learned control."
+
+Dick looked at him curiously.
+
+"Why, that boyish adventure doesn't count," he said. "That wasn't
+wildness. I haven't gone wild yet. But watch me when I start. Do you
+know Kipling's 'Song of Diego Valdez'? Let me quote you a bit of it.
+You see, Diego Valdez, like me, had good fortune. He rose so fast to
+be High Admiral of Spain that he found no time to take the pleasure he
+had merely tasted. He was lusty and husky, but he had no time, being
+too busy rising. But always, he thought, he fooled himself with the
+thought, that his lustiness and huskiness would last, and, after he
+became High Admiral he could then have his pleasure. Always he
+remembered:
+
+  "'--comrades--
+       Old playmates on new seas--
+     When as we traded orpiment
+       Among the savages--
+     A thousand leagues to south'ard
+       And thirty years removed--
+     They knew not noble Valdez,
+       But me they knew and loved.
+
+  "'Then they that found good liquor
+       They drank it not alone,
+    And they that found fair plunder,
+       They told us every one,
+    Behind our chosen islands
+       Or secret shoals between,
+     When, walty from far voyage,
+       We gathered to careen.
+
+  "'There burned our breaming-fagots,
+       All pale along the shore:
+    There rose our worn pavilions--
+       A sail above an oar:
+    As flashed each yearning anchor
+       Through mellow seas afire,
+     So swift our careless captains
+       Rowed each to his desire.
+
+  "'Where lay our loosened harness?
+       Where turned our naked feet?
+    Whose tavern mid the palm-trees?
+       What quenchings of what heat?
+    Oh fountain in the desert!
+       Oh cistern in the waste!
+     Oh bread we ate in secret!
+       Oh cup we spilled in haste!
+
+  "'The youth new-taught of longing,
+       The widow curbed and wan--
+    The good wife proud at season,
+       And the maid aware of man;
+     All souls, unslaked, consuming,
+       Defrauded in delays,
+     Desire not more than quittance
+       Than I those forfeit days!'
+
+"Oh, get him, get him, you three oldsters, as I've got him! Get what
+he saws next:
+
+  "'I dreamed to wait my pleasure,
+       Unchanged my spring would bide:
+     Wherefore, to wait my pleasure,
+       I put my spring aside,
+    Till, first in face of Fortune,
+       And last in mazed disdain,
+     I made Diego Valdez
+       High Admiral of Spain!'
+
+"Listen to me, guardians!" Dick cried on, his face a flame of passion.
+"Don't forget for one moment that I am anything but unslaked,
+consuming. I am. I burn. But I hold myself. Don't think I am a dead
+one because I am a darn nice, meritorious boy at college. I am young.
+I am alive. I am all lusty and husky. But I make no mistake. I hold
+myself. I don't start out now to blow up on the first lap. I am just
+getting ready. I am going to have my time. I am not going to spill my
+cup in haste. And in the end I am not going to lament as Diego Valdez
+did:
+
+  "'There walks no wind 'neath heaven
+       Nor wave that shall restore
+     The old careening riot
+       And the clamorous, crowded shore--
+     The fountain in the desert,
+       The cistern in the waste,
+     The bread we ate in secret,
+       The cup we spilled in haste.'
+
+"Listen, guardians! Do you know what it is to hit your man, to hit him
+in hot blood--square to the jaw--and drop him cold? I want that. And I
+want to love, and kiss, and risk, and play the lusty, husky fool. I
+want to take my chance. I want my careening riot, and I want it while
+I am young, but not while I am too young. And I'm going to have it.
+And in the meantime I play the game at college, I hold myself, I equip
+myself, so that when I turn loose I am going to have the best chance
+of my best. Oh, believe me, I do not always sleep well of nights."
+
+"You mean?" queried Mr. Crockett.
+
+"Sure. That's just what I mean. I haven't gone wild yet, but just
+watch me when I start."
+
+"And you will start when you graduate?"
+
+The remarkable youngster shook his head.
+
+"After I graduate I'm going to take at least a year of post-graduate
+courses in the College of Agriculture. You see, I'm developing a
+hobby--farming. I want to do something ... something constructive. My
+father wasn't constructive to amount to anything. Neither were you
+fellows. You struck a new land in pioneer days, and you picked up
+money like a lot of sailors shaking out nuggets from the grass roots
+in a virgin placer--"
+
+"My lad, I've some little experience in Californian farming," Mr.
+Crockett interrupted in a hurt way.
+
+"Sure you have, but you weren't constructive. You were--well, facts
+are facts--you were destructive. You were a bonanza farmer. What did
+you do? You took forty thousand acres of the finest Sacramento Valley
+soil and you grew wheat on it year after year. You never dreamed of
+rotation. You burned your straw. You exhausted your humus. You plowed
+four inches and put a plow-sole like a cement sidewalk just four
+inches under the surface. You exhausted that film of four inches and
+now you can't get your seed back.
+
+"You've destroyed. That's what my father did. They all did it. Well,
+I'm going to take my father's money and construct. I'm going to take
+worked-out wheat-land that I can buy as at a fire-sale, rip out the
+plow-sole, and make it produce more in the end than it did when you
+fellows first farmed it."
+
+It was at the end of his Junior year that Mr. Crockett again mentioned
+Dick's threatened period of wildness.
+
+"Soon as I'm done with cow college," was his answer. "Then I'm going
+to buy, and stock, and start a ranch that'll be a ranch. And then I'll
+set out after my careening riot."
+
+"About how large a ranch will you start with?" Mr. Davidson asked.
+
+"Maybe fifty thousand acres, maybe five hundred thousand. It all
+depends. I'm going to play unearned increment to the limit. People
+haven't begun to come to California yet. Without a tap of my hand or a
+turn over, fifteen years from now land that I can buy for ten dollars
+an acre will be worth fifty, and what I can buy for fifty will be
+worth five hundred."
+
+"A half million acres at ten dollars an acre means five million
+dollars," Mr. Crockett warned gravely.
+
+"And at fifty it means twenty-five million," Dick laughed.
+
+But his guardians never believed in the wild oats pilgrimage he
+threatened. He might waste his fortune on new-fangled farming, but to
+go literally wild after such years of self-restraint was an
+unthinkable thing.
+
+Dick took his sheepskin with small honor. He was twenty-eighth in his
+class, and he had not set the college world afire. His most notable
+achievement had been his resistance and bafflement of many nice girls
+and of the mothers of many nice girls. Next, after that, he had
+signalized his Senior year by captaining the Varsity to its first
+victory over Stanford in five years. It was in the day prior to large-
+salaried football coaches, when individual play meant much; but he
+hammered team-work and the sacrifice of the individual into his team,
+so that on Thanksgiving Day, over a vastly more brilliant eleven, the
+Blue and Gold was able to serpentine its triumph down Market Street in
+San Francisco.
+
+In his post-graduate year in cow college, Dick devoted himself to
+laboratory work and cut all lectures. In fact, he hired his own
+lecturers, and spent a sizable fortune on them in mere traveling
+expenses over California. Jacques Ribot, esteemed one of the greatest
+world authorities on agricultural chemistry, who had been seduced from
+his two thousand a year in France by the six thousand offered by the
+University of California, who had been seduced to Hawaii by the ten
+thousand of the sugar planters, Dick Forrest seduced with fifteen
+thousand and the more delectable temperate climate of California on a
+five years' contract.
+
+Messrs. Crockett, Slocum, and Davidson threw up their hands in horror
+and knew that this was the wild career Dick Forrest had forecast.
+
+But this was only one of Dick Forrest's similar dissipations. He stole
+from the Federal Government, at a prodigal increase of salary, its
+star specialist in livestock breeding, and by similar misconduct he
+robbed the University of Nebraska of its greatest milch cow professor,
+and broke the heart of the Dean of the College of Agriculture of the
+University of California by appropriating Professor Nirdenhammer, the
+wizard of farm management.
+
+"Cheap at the price, cheap at the price," Dick explained to his
+guardians. "Wouldn't you rather see me spend my money in buying
+professors than in buying race horses and actresses? Besides, the
+trouble with you fellows is that you don't know the game of buying
+brains. I do. That's my specialty. I'm going to make money out of
+them, and, better than that, I'm going to make a dozen blades of grass
+grow where you fellows didn't leave room for half a blade in the soil
+you gutted."
+
+So it can be understood how his guardians could not believe in his
+promise of wild career, of kissing and risking, and hitting men hot on
+the jaw. "One year more," he warned, while he delved in agricultural
+chemistry, soil analysis, farm management, and traveled California
+with his corps of high-salaried experts. And his guardians could only
+apprehend a swift and wide dispersal of the Forrest millions when Dick
+attained his majority, took charge of the totality of his fortune, and
+actually embarked on his agricultural folly.
+
+The day he was twenty-one the purchase of his principality, that
+extended west from the Sacramento River to the mountain tops, was
+consummated.
+
+"An incredible price," said Mr. Crockett.
+
+"Incredibly cheap," said Dick. "You ought to see my soil reports. You
+ought to see my water-reports. And you ought to hear me sing. Listen,
+guardians, to a song that is a true song. I am the singer and the
+song."
+
+Whereupon, in the queer quavering falsetto that is the sense of song
+to the North American Indian, the Eskimo, and the Mongol, Dick sang:
+
+  "Hu'-tim yo'-kim koi-o-di'!
+    Wi'-hi yan'-ning koi-o-di'!
+    Lo'-whi yan'-ning koi-o-di'!
+    Yo-ho' Nai-ni', hal-u'-dom yo nai, yo-ho' nai-nim'!"
+
+"The music is my own," he murmured apologetically, "the way I think it
+ought to have sounded. You see, no man lives who ever heard it sung.
+The Nishinam got it from the Maidu, who got it from the Konkau, who
+made it. But the Nishinam and the Maidu and the Konkau are gone. Their
+last rancheria is not. You plowed it under, Mr. Crockett, with you
+bonanza gang-plowing, plow-soling farming. And I got the song from a
+certain ethnological report, volume three, of the United States
+Pacific Coast Geographical and Geological Survey. Red Cloud, who was
+formed out of the sky, first sang this song to the stars and the
+mountain flowers in the morning of the world. I shall now sing it for
+you in English."
+
+And again, in Indian falsetto, ringing with triumph, vernal and
+bursting, slapping his thighs and stamping his feet to the accent,
+Dick sang:
+
+  "The acorns come down from heaven!
+    I plant the short acorns in the valley!
+    I plant the long acorns in the valley!
+    I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!"
+
+Dick Forrest's name began to appear in the newspapers with appalling
+frequency. He leaped to instant fame by being the first man in
+California who paid ten thousand dollars for a single bull. His
+livestock specialist, whom he had filched from the Federal Government,
+in England outbid the Rothschilds' Shire farm for Hillcrest Chieftain,
+quickly to be known as Forrest's Folly, paying for that kingly animal
+no less than five thousand guineas.
+
+"Let them laugh," Dick told his ex-guardians. "I am importing forty
+Shire mares. I'll write off half his price the first twelvemonth. He
+will be the sire and grandsire of many sons and grandsons for which
+the Californians will fall over themselves to buy of me at from three
+to five thousand dollars a clatter."
+
+Dick Forrest was guilty of many similar follies in those first months
+of his majority. But the most unthinkable folly of all was, after he
+had sunk millions into his original folly, that he turned it over to
+his experts personally to develop along the general broad lines laid
+down by him, placed checks upon them that they might not go
+catastrophically wrong, bought a ticket in a passenger brig to Tahiti,
+and went away to run wild.
+
+Occasionally his guardians heard from him. At one time he was owner
+and master of a four-masted steel sailing ship that carried the
+English flag and coals from Newcastle. They knew that much, because
+they had been called upon for the purchase price, because they read
+Dick's name in the papers as master when his ship rescued the
+passengers of the ill-fated _Orion_, and because they collected
+the insurance when Dick's ship was lost with most of all hands in the
+great Fiji hurricane. In 1896, he was in the Klondike; in 1897, he was
+in Kamchatka and scurvy-stricken; and, next, he erupted with the
+American flag into the Philippines. Once, although they could never
+learn how nor why, he was owner and master of a crazy tramp steamer,
+long since rejected by Lloyd's, which sailed under the aegis of Siam.
+
+From time to time business correspondence compelled them to hear from
+him from various purple ports of the purple seas. Once, they had to
+bring the entire political pressure of the Pacific Coast to bear upon
+Washington in order to get him out of a scrape in Russia, of which
+affair not one line appeared in the daily press, but which affair was
+secretly provocative of ticklish joy and delight in all the
+chancellories of Europe.
+
+Incidentally, they knew that he lay wounded in Mafeking; that he
+pulled through a bout with yellow fever in Guayaquil; and that he
+stood trial for brutality on the high seas in New York City. Thrice
+they read in the press dispatches that he was dead: once, in battle,
+in Mexico; and twice, executed, in Venezuela. After such false
+flutterings, his guardians refused longer to be thrilled when he
+crossed the Yellow Sea in a sampan, was "rumored" to have died of
+beri-beri, was captured from the Russians by the Japanese at Mukden,
+and endured military imprisonment in Japan.
+
+The one thrill of which they were still capable, was when, true to
+promise, thirty years of age, his wild oats sown, he returned to
+California with a wife to whom, as he announced, he had been married
+several years, and whom all his three guardians found they knew. Mr.
+Slocum had dropped eight hundred thousand along with the totality of
+her father's fortune in the final catastrophe at the Los Cocos mine in
+Chihuahua when the United States demonetized silver. Mr. Davidson had
+pulled a million out of the Last Stake along with her father when he
+pulled eight millions from that sunken, man-resurrected, river bed in
+Amador County. Mr. Crockett, a youth at the time, had "spooned" the
+Merced bottom with her father in the late 'fifties, had stood up best
+man with him at Stockton when he married her mother, and, at Grant's
+Pass, had played poker with him and with the then Lieutenant U.S.
+Grant when all the little the western world knew of that young
+lieutenant was that he was a good Indian fighter but a poor poker
+player.
+
+And Dick Forrest had married the daughter of Philip Desten! It was not
+a case of wishing Dick luck. It was a case of garrulous insistence on
+the fact that he did not know how lucky he was. His guardians forgave
+him all his wildness. He had made good. At last he had performed a
+purely rational act. Better; it was a stroke of genius. Paula Desten!
+Philip Desten's daughter! The Desten blood! The Destens and the
+Forrests! It was enough. The three aged comrades of Forrest and Desten
+of the old Gold Days, of the two who had played and passed on, were
+even severe with Dick. They warned him of the extreme value of his
+treasure, of the sacred duty such wedlock imposed on him, of all the
+traditions and virtues of the Desten and Forrest blood, until Dick
+laughed and broke in with the disconcerting statement that they were
+talking like a bunch of fanciers or eugenics cranks--which was
+precisely what they were talking like, although they did not care to
+be told so crassly.
+
+At any rate, the simple fact that he had married a Desten made them
+nod unqualified approbation when he showed them the plans and building
+estimates of the Big House. Thanks to Paula Desten, for once they were
+agreed that he was spending wisely and well. As for his farming, it
+was incontestible that the Harvest Group was unfalteringly producing,
+and he might be allowed his hobbies. Nevertheless, as Mr. Slocum put
+it: "Twenty-five thousand dollars for a mere work-horse stallion is a
+madness. Work-horses are work-horses; now had it been running
+stock...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+
+While Dick Forrest scanned the pamphlet on hog cholera issued by the
+State of Iowa, through his open windows, across the wide court, began
+to come sounds of the awakening of the girl who laughed from the
+wooden frame by his bed and who had left on the floor of his sleeping
+porch, not so many hours before, the rosy, filmy, lacy, boudoir cap so
+circumspectly rescued by Oh My.
+
+Dick heard her voice, for she awoke, like a bird, with song. He heard
+her trilling, in and out through open windows, all down the long wing
+that was hers. And he heard her singing in the patio garden, where,
+also, she desisted long enough to quarrel with her Airedale and scold
+the collie pup unholily attracted by the red-orange, divers-finned,
+and many-tailed Japanese goldfish in the fountain basin.
+
+He was aware of pleasure that she was awake. It was a pleasure that
+never staled. Always, up himself for hours, he had a sense that the
+Big House was not really awake until he heard Paula's morning song
+across the patio.
+
+But having tasted the pleasure of knowing her to be awake, Dick, as
+usual, forgot her in his own affairs. She went out of his
+consciousness as he became absorbed again in the Iowa statistics on
+hog cholera.
+
+"Good morning, Merry Gentleman," was the next he heard, always
+adorable music in his ears; and Paula flowed in upon him, all softness
+of morning kimono and stayless body, as her arm passed around his neck
+and she perched, half in his arms, on one accommodating knee of his.
+And he pressed her, and advertised his awareness of her existence and
+nearness, although his eyes lingered a full half minute longer on the
+totals of results of Professor Kenealy's hog inoculations on Simon
+Jones' farm at Washington, Iowa.
+
+"My!" she protested. "You are too fortunate. You are sated with
+riches. Here is your Lady Boy, your 'little haughty moon,' and you
+haven't even said, 'Good morning, Little Lady Boy, was your sleep
+sweet and gentle?'"
+
+And Dick Forrest forsook the statistical columns of Professor
+Kenealy's inoculations, pressed his wife closer, kissed her, but with
+insistent right fore-finger maintained his place in the pages of the
+pamphlet.
+
+Nevertheless, the very terms of her "reproof prevented him from asking
+what he should have asked--the prosperity of her night since the
+boudoir cap had been left upon his sleeping porch. He shut the
+pamphlet on his right fore-finger, at the place he intended to resume,
+and added his right arm to his left about her.
+
+"Oh!" she cried. "Oh! Oh! Listen!"
+
+From without came the flute-calls of quail. She quivered against him
+with the joy she took in the mellow-sweet notes.
+
+"The coveys are breaking up," he said.
+
+"It means spring," Paula cried.
+
+"And the sign that good weather has come."
+
+"And love!"
+
+"And nest-building and egg-laying," Dick laughed. "Never has the world
+seemed more fecund than this morning. Lady Isleton is farrowed of
+eleven. The angoras were brought down this morning for the kidding.
+You should have seen them. And the wild canaries have been discussing
+matrimony in the patio for hours. I think some free lover is trying to
+break up their monogamic heaven with modern love-theories. It's a
+wonder you slept through the discussion. Listen! There they go now. Is
+that applause? Or is it a riot?"
+
+Arose a thin twittering, like elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and
+excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears,
+till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the
+microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away,
+obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound--no less wild, no less
+musical, no less passionate with love, but immense, dominant,
+compelling by very vastitude of volume.
+
+The eager eyes of the man and woman sought instantly the channel past
+open French windows and the screen of the sleeping porch to the road
+through the lilacs, while they waited breathlessly for the great
+stallion to appear who trumpeted his love-call before him. Again,
+unseen, he trumpeted, and Dick said:
+
+"I will sing you a song, my haughty moon. It is not my song. It is the
+Mountain Lad's. It is what he nickers. Listen! He sings it again. This
+is what he says: 'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill
+the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures;
+for they know me. The grass grows rich and richer, the land is filled
+with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The
+spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares
+remember my voice. They know me aforetime through their mothers before
+them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys
+are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.'"
+
+And Paula pressed closer to her husband, and was pressed, as her lips
+touched his forehead, and as the pair of them, gazing at the empty
+road among the lilacs, saw it filled with the eruptive vision of
+Mountain Lad, majestic and mighty, the gnat-creature of a man upon his
+back absurdly small; his eyes wild and desirous, with the blue sheen
+that surfaces the eyes of stallions; his mouth, flecked with the froth
+and fret of high spirit, now brushed to burnished knees of impatience,
+now tossed skyward to utterance of that vast, compelling call that
+shook the air.
+
+Almost as an echo, from afar off, came a thin-sweet answering whinney.
+
+"It is the Fotherington Princess," Paula breathed softly.
+
+Again Mountain Lad trumpeted his call, and Dick chanted:
+
+"Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!"
+
+And almost, for a flash of an instant, circled soft and close in his
+arms, Paula knew resentment of her husband's admiration for the
+splendid beast. And the next instant resentment vanished, and, in
+acknowledgment of due debt, she cried gaily:
+
+"And now, Red Cloud! the Song of the Acorn!" Dick glanced half
+absently to her from the pamphlet folded on his finger, and then, with
+equal pitch of gaiety, sang:
+
+   "The acorns come down from heaven!
+    I plant the short acorns in the valley!
+    I plant the long acorns in the valley!
+    I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!"
+
+She had impressed herself very close against him during his moment of
+chanting, but, in the first moments that succeeded she felt the
+restless movement of the hand that held the finger-marked hog-pamphlet
+and caught the swift though involuntary flash of his eye to the clock
+on his desk that marked 11:25. Again she tried to hold him, although,
+with equal involuntariness, her attempt was made in mild terms of
+resentment.
+
+"You are a strange and wonderful Red Cloud," she said slowly.
+"Sometimes almost am I convinced that you are utterly Red Cloud,
+planting your acorns and singing your savage joy of the planting. And,
+sometimes, almost you are to me the ultramodern man, the last word of
+the two-legged, male human that finds Trojan adventures in sieges of
+statistics, and, armed with test tubes and hypodermics, engages in
+gladiatorial contests with weird microorganisms. Almost, at times, it
+seems you should wear glasses and be bald-headed; almost, it
+seems...."
+
+"That I have no right of vigor to possess an armful of girl," he
+completed for her, drawing her still closer. "That I am a silly
+scientific brute who doesn't merit his 'vain little breath of sweet
+rose-colored dust.' Well, listen, I have a plan. In a few days...."
+
+But his plan died in birth, for, at their backs, came a discreet cough
+of warning, and, both heads turning as one they saw Bonbright, the
+assistant secretary, with a sheaf of notes on yellow sheets in his
+hand.
+
+"Four telegrams," he murmured apologetically. "Mr. Blake is confident
+that two of them are very important. One of them concerns that Chile
+shipment of bulls...."
+
+And Paula, slowly drawing away from her husband and rising to her
+feet, could feel him slipping from her toward his tables of
+statistics, bills of lading, and secretaries, foremen, and managers.
+
+"Oh, Paula," Dick called, as she was fading through the doorway; "I've
+christened the last boy--he's to be known as 'Oh Ho.' How do you like
+it?"
+
+Her reply began with a hint of forlornness that vanished with her
+smile, as she warned:
+
+"You _will_ play ducks and drakes with the house-boys' names."
+
+"I never do it with pedigreed stock," he assured her with a solemnity
+belied by the challenging twinkle in his eyes.
+
+"I didn't mean that," was her retort. "I meant that you were
+exhausting the possibilities of the language. Before long you'll have
+to be calling them Oh Bel, Oh Hell, and Oh Go to Hell. Your 'Oh' was a
+mistake. You should have started with 'Red.' Then you could have had
+Red Bull, Red Horse, Red Dog, Red Frog, Red Fern--and, and all the
+rest of the reds."
+
+She mingled her laughter with his, as she vanished, and, the next
+moment, the telegram before him, he was immersed in the details of the
+shipment, at two hundred and fifty dollars each, F. O. B., of three
+hundred registered yearling bulls to the beef ranges of Chile. Even
+so, vaguely, with vague pleasure, he heard Paula sing her way back
+across the patio to her long wing of house; though he was unaware that
+her voice was a trifle, just the merest trifle, subdued.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+
+Five minutes after Paula had left him, punctual to the second, the
+four telegrams disposed of, Dick was getting into a ranch motor car,
+along with Thayer, the Idaho buyer, and Naismith, the special
+correspondent for the _Breeders' Gazette_. Wardman, the sheep
+manager, joined them at the corrals where several thousand young
+Shropshire rams had been assembled for inspection.
+
+There was little need for conversation. Thayer was distinctly
+disappointed in this, for he felt that the purchase of ten carloads of
+such expensive creatures was momentous enough to merit much
+conversation.
+
+"They speak for themselves," Dick had assured him, and turned aside to
+give data to Naismith for his impending article on Shropshires in
+California and the Northwest.
+
+"I wouldn't advise you to bother to select them," Dick told Thayer ten
+minutes later. "The average is all top. You could spend a week picking
+your ten carloads and have no higher grade than if you had taken the
+first to hand."
+
+This cool assumption that the sale was already consummated so
+perturbed Thayer, that, along with the sure knowledge that he had
+never seen so high a quality of rams, he was nettled into changing his
+order to twenty carloads.
+
+As he told Naismith, after they had regained the Big House and as they
+chalked their cues to finish the interrupted game:
+
+"It's my first visit to Forrest's. He's a wizard. I've been buying in
+the East and importing. But those Shropshires won my judgment. You
+noticed I doubled my order. Those Idaho buyers will be wild for them.
+I only had buying orders straight for six carloads, and contingent on
+my judgment for two carloads more; but if every buyer doesn't double
+his order, straight and contingent, when he sees them rams, and if
+there isn't a stampede for what's left, I don't know sheep. They're
+the goods. If they don't jump up the sheep game of Idaho ... well,
+then Forrest's no breeder and I'm no buyer, that's all."
+
+As the warning gong for lunch rang out--a huge bronze gong from Korea
+that was never struck until it was first indubitably ascertained that
+Paula was awake--Dick joined the young people at the goldfish fountain
+in the big patio. Bert Wainwright, variously advised and commanded by
+his sister, Rita, and by Paula and her sisters, Lute and Ernestine,
+was striving with a dip-net to catch a particularly gorgeous flower of
+a fish whose size and color and multiplicity of fins and tails had led
+Paula to decide to segregate him for the special breeding tank in the
+fountain of her own secret patio. Amid high excitement, and much
+squealing and laughter, the deed was accomplished, the big fish
+deposited in a can and carried away by the waiting Italian gardener.
+
+"And what have you to say for yourself?" Ernestine challenged, as Dick
+joined them.
+
+"Nothing," he answered sadly. "The ranch is depleted. Three hundred
+beautiful young bulls depart to-morrow for South America, and Thayer--
+you met him last night--is taking twenty carloads of rams. All I can
+say is that my congratulations are extended to Idaho and Chile."
+
+"Plant more acorns," Paula laughed, her arms about her sisters, the
+three of them smilingly expectant of an inevitable antic.
+
+"Oh, Dick, sing your acorn song," Lute begged.
+
+He shook his head solemnly.
+
+"I've got a better one. It's purest orthodoxy. It's got Red Cloud and
+his acorn song skinned to death. Listen! This is the song of the
+little East-sider, on her first trip to the country under the auspices
+of her Sunday School. She's quite young. Pay particular attention to
+her lisp."
+
+And then Dick chanted, lisping:
+
+  "The goldfish thwimmeth in the bowl,
+    The robin thiths upon the tree;
+    What maketh them thit so eathily?
+    Who stuckth the fur upon their breasths?
+      God! God! He done it!"
+
+"Cribbed," was Ernestine's judgment, as the laughter died away.
+
+"Sure," Dick agreed. "I got it from the _Rancher and Stockman_,
+that got it from the _Swine Breeders' Journal_, that got it from
+the _Western Advocate_, that got it from _Public Opinion_,
+that got it, undoubtedly, from the little girl herself, or, rather
+from her Sunday School teacher. For that matter I am convinced it was
+first printed in _Our Dumb Animals_."
+
+The bronze gong rang out its second call, and Paula, one arm around
+Dick, the other around Rita, led the way into the house, while,
+bringing up the rear, Bert Wainwright showed Lute Ernestine a new
+tango step.
+
+"One thing, Thayer," Dick said in an aside, after releasing himself
+from the girls, as they jostled in confusion where they met Thayer and
+Naismith at the head of the stairway leading down to the dining room.
+"Before you leave us, cast your eyes over those Merinos. I really have
+to brag about them, and American sheepmen will have to come to them.
+Of course, started with imported stock, but I've made a California
+strain that will make the French breeders sit up. See Wardman and take
+your pick. Get Naismith to look them over with you. Stick half a dozen
+of them in your train-load, with my compliments, and let your Idaho
+sheepmen get a line on them."
+
+They seated at a table, capable of indefinite extension, in a long,
+low dining room that was a replica of the hacienda dining rooms of the
+Mexican land-kings of old California. The floor was of large brown
+tiles, the beamed ceiling and the walls were whitewashed, and the
+huge, undecorated, cement fireplace was an achievement in massiveness
+and simplicity. Greenery and blooms nodded from without the deep-
+embrasured windows, and the room expressed the sense of cleanness,
+chastity, and coolness.
+
+On the walls, but not crowded, were a number of canvases--most
+ambitious of all, in the setting of honor, all in sad grays, a
+twilight Mexican scene by Xavier Martinez, of a peon, with a crooked-
+stick plow and two bullocks, turning a melancholy furrow across the
+foreground of a sad, illimitable, Mexican plain. There were brighter
+pictures, of early Mexican-Californian life, a pastel of twilight
+eucalyptus with a sunset-tipped mountain beyond, by Reimers, a
+moonlight by Peters, and a Griffin stubble-field across which gleamed
+and smoldered California summer hills of tawny brown and purple-
+misted, wooded canyons.
+
+"Say," Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick
+and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter,
+"here's some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the
+Big House. I've seen the servants' dining room. Forty head sit down to
+it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It's
+a boarding house in itself. Some head, some system, take it from me.
+That Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz. He's housekeeper, or manager, of
+the whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job--and, say, it
+runs that smooth you can't hear it."
+
+"Forrest's the real wooz," Naismith nodded. "He's the brains that
+picks brains. He could run an army, a campaign, a government, or even
+a three-ring circus."
+
+"Which last is some compliment," Thayer concurred heartily.
+
+"Oh, Paula," Dick said across to his wife. "I just got word that
+Graham arrives to-morrow morning. Better tell Oh Joy to put him in the
+watch-tower. It's man-size quarters, and it's possible he may carry
+out his threat and work on his book."
+
+"Graham?--Graham?" Paula queried aloud of her memory. "Do I know him?"
+
+"You met him once two years ago, in Santiago, at the Café Venus. He
+had dinner with us."
+
+"Oh, one of those naval officers?"
+
+Dick shook his head.
+
+"The civilian. Don't you remember that big blond fellow--you talked
+music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads
+off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out
+with the mailed fist."
+
+"Oh, to be sure," Paula vaguely recollected. "He'd met you somewhere
+before... South Africa, wasn't it? Or the Philippines?"
+
+"That's the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met
+was on the _Times_ dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we
+crossed trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that
+night in the Café Venus.
+
+"Heavens--he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped
+anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters
+for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed
+each other by three days at Levuka--I was sailing the _Wild Duck_
+then. He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard
+Im Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more
+letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the
+New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and
+out of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons.
+The cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa,
+steamed out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did
+deliver those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him
+was at the Café Venus two years ago."
+
+"But who about him, and what about him?" Paula queried. "And what's
+the book?"
+
+"Well, first of all, beginning at the end, he's broke--that is, for
+him, he's broke. He's got an income of several thousand a year left,
+but all that his father left him is gone. No; he didn't blow it. He
+got in deep, and the 'silent panic' several years ago just about
+cleaned him. But he doesn't whimper.
+
+"He's good stuff, old American stock, a Yale man. The book--he expects
+to make a bit on it--covers last year's trip across South America,
+west coast to east coast. It was largely new ground. The Brazilian
+government voluntarily voted him a honorarium of ten thousand dollars
+for the information he brought out concerning unexplored portions of
+Brazil. Oh, he's a man, all man. He delivers the goods. You know the
+type--clean, big, strong, simple; been everywhere, seen everything,
+knows most of a lot of things, straight, square, looks you in the
+eyes--well, in short, a man's man."
+
+Ernestine clapped her hands, flung a tantalizing, man-challenging,
+man-conquering glance at Bert Wainwright, and exclaimed: "And he comes
+tomorrow!"
+
+Dick shook his head reprovingly.
+
+"Oh, nothing in that direction, Ernestine. Just as nice girls as you
+have tried to hook Evan Graham before now. And, between ourselves, I
+couldn't blame them. But he's had good wind and fast legs, and they've
+always failed to run him down or get him into a corner, where, dazed
+and breathless, he's mechanically muttered 'Yes' to certain
+interrogatories and come out of the trance to find himself, roped,
+thrown, branded, and married. Forget him, Ernestine. Stick by golden
+youth and let it drop its golden apples. Pick them up, and golden
+youth with them, making a noise like stupid failure all the time you
+are snaring swift-legged youth. But Graham's out of the running. He's
+old like me--just about the same age--and, like me, he's run a lot of
+those queer races. He knows how to make a get-away. He's been cut by
+barbed wire, nose-twitched, neck-burnt, cinched to a fare-you-well,
+and he remains subdued but uncatchable. He doesn't care for young
+things. In fact, you may charge him with being wobbly, but I plead
+guilty, by proxy, that he is merely old, hard bitten, and very wise."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+
+"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" Dick shouted, stamping with jingling
+spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.
+
+He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door
+without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But Dick
+shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the
+spring, and the door swung wide.
+
+"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he called and stamped down the length of
+her quarters.
+
+A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending
+marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula's
+wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway
+that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet
+Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty,
+lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own
+sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a
+drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a
+laugh of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of
+an awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of
+madly whinneying for its mother.
+
+"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted before him, out to the
+sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman
+of thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment into his eyes.
+
+This was Paula's maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before,
+because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that
+made her appear as if ever on the verge of saying, "Oh dear!" In fact,
+Dick had taken her, as a child almost, for Paula's service, from a
+fishing village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as
+much as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the
+fishermen. Oh Dear's first service for Paula had been aboard the
+three-topmast schooner, _All Away_, at the same time that Oh Joy,
+cabin-boy, had begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him,
+through the years, to rise to the majordomoship of the Big House.
+
+"Where is your mistress, Oh Dear?" Dick asked.
+
+Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.
+
+Dick waited.
+
+"She maybe with 'm young ladies--I don't know," Oh Dear stammered; and
+Dick, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.
+
+"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted, as he stamped out under the
+porte cochère just as a ranch limousine swung around the curve among
+the lilacs.
+
+"I'll be hanged if I know," a tall, blond man in a light summer suit
+responded from the car; and the next moment Dick Forrest and Evan
+Graham were shaking hands.
+
+Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and Dick accompanied his
+guest to the watch tower quarters.
+
+"You'll have to get used to us, old man," Dick was explaining. "We run
+the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow
+ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If you'd arrived two minutes later
+there'd have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was
+just going for a ride, and Paula--Mrs. Forrest--has disappeared."
+
+The two men were almost of a size, Graham topping his host by perhaps
+an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders
+and depth of chest. Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than
+Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the
+whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely similarly bronzed by sun
+and weather-beat. Graham's features were in a slightly larger mold;
+his eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a
+heavier droop of lids. His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter
+as well as larger than Dick's, and his lips were a shade thicker, a
+shade redder, a shade more bowed with fulsome-ness.
+
+Forrest's hair was light brown to chestnut, while Graham's carried a
+whispering advertisement that it would have been almost golden in its
+silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun. The cheeks
+of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrest's cheek-
+bones were more pronounced. Both noses were large-nostriled and
+sensitive. And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the
+impression of girlish sweetness and chastity along with the muscles
+that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not
+give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.
+
+But the inch more in height and the inch less in chest-girth gave Evan
+Graham a grace of body and carriage that Dick Forrest did not possess.
+In this particular of build, each served well as a foil to the other.
+Graham was all light and delight, with a hint--but the slightest of
+hints--of Prince Charming. Forrest's seemed a more efficient and
+formidable organism, more dangerous to other life, stouter-gripped on
+its own life.
+
+Forrest threw a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that
+glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of
+correlation, he read the dial.
+
+"Eleven-thirty," he said. "Come along at once, Graham. We don't eat
+till twelve-thirty. I am sending out a shipment of bulls, three
+hundred of them, and I'm downright proud of them. You simply must see
+them. Never mind your riding togs. Oh Ho--fetch a pair of my leggings.
+You, Oh Joy, order Altadena saddled.--What saddle do you prefer,
+Graham?"
+
+"Oh, anything, old man."
+
+"English?--Australian?--McClellan?--Mexican?" Dick insisted.
+
+"McClellan, if it's no trouble," Graham surrendered.
+
+ They sat their horses by the side of the road and watched the last of
+the herd beginning its long journey to Chili disappear around the
+bend.
+
+"I see what you're doing--it's great," Graham said with sparkling
+eyes. "I've fooled some myself with the critters, when I was a
+youngster, down in the Argentine. If I'd had beef-blood like that to
+build on, I mightn't have taken the cropper I did."
+
+"But that was before alfalfa and artesian wells," Dick smoothed for
+him. "The time wasn't ripe for the Shorthorn. Only scrubs could
+survive the droughts. They were strong in staying powers but light on
+the scales. And refrigerator steamships hadn't been invented. That's
+what revolutionized the game down there."
+
+"Besides, I was a mere youngster," Graham added. "Though that meant
+nothing much. There was a young German tackled it at the same time I
+did, with a tenth of my capital. He hung it out, lean years, dry
+years, and all. He's rated in seven figures now."
+
+They turned their horses back for the Big House. Dick flirted his
+wrist to see his watch.
+
+"Lots of time," he assured his guest. "I'm glad you saw those
+yearlings. There was one reason why that young German stuck it out. He
+had to. You had your father's money to fall back on, and, I imagine
+not only that your feet itched, but that your chief weakness lay in
+that you could afford to solace the itching."
+
+ "Over there are the fish ponds," Dick said, indicating with a nod of
+his head to the right an invisible area beyond the lilacs. "You'll
+have plenty of opportunity to catch a mess of trout, or bass, or even
+catfish. You see, I'm a miser. I love to make things work. There may
+be a justification for the eight-hour labor day, but I make the work-
+day of water just twenty-four hours' long. The ponds are in series,
+according to the nature of the fish. But the water starts working up
+in the mountains. It irrigates a score of mountain meadows before it
+makes the plunge and is clarified to crystal clearness in the next few
+rugged miles; and at the plunge from the highlands it generates half
+the power and all the lighting used on the ranch. Then it sub-
+irrigates lower levels, flows in here to the fish ponds, and runs out
+and irrigates miles of alfalfa farther on. And, believe me, if by that
+time it hadn't reached the flat of the Sacramento, I'd be pumping out
+the drainage for more irrigation."
+
+"Man, man," Graham laughed, "you could make a poem on the wonder of
+water. I've met fire-worshipers, but you're the first real water-
+worshiper I've ever encountered. And you're no desert-dweller, either.
+You live in a land of water--pardon the bull--but, as I was saying..."
+
+Graham never completed his thought. From the right, not far away, came
+the unmistakable ring of shod hoofs on concrete, followed by a mighty
+splash and an outburst of women's cries and laughter. Quickly the
+cries turned to alarm, accompanied by the sounds of a prodigious
+splashing and floundering as of some huge, drowning beast. Dick bent
+his head and leaped his horse through the lilacs, Graham, on Altadena,
+followed at his heels. They emerged in a blaze of sunshine, on an open
+space among the trees, and Graham came upon as unexpected a picture as
+he had ever chanced upon in his life.
+
+Tree-surrounded, the heart of the open space was a tank, four-sided of
+concrete. The upper end of the tank, full width, was a broad spillway,
+sheened with an inch of smooth-slipping water. The sides were
+perpendicular. The lower end, roughly corrugated, sloped out gently to
+solid footing. Here, in distress that was consternation, and in fear
+that was panic, excitedly bobbed up and down a cowboy in bearskin
+chaps, vacuously repeating the exclamation, "Oh God! Oh God!"--the
+first division of it rising in inflection, the second division
+inflected fallingly with despair. On the edge of the farther side,
+facing him, in bathing suits, legs dangling toward the water, sat
+three terrified nymphs.
+
+And in the tank, the center of the picture, a great horse, bright bay
+and wet and ruddy satin, vertical in the water, struck upward and
+outward into the free air with huge fore-hoofs steel-gleaming in the
+wet and sun, while on its back, slipping and clinging, was the white
+form of what Graham took at first to be some glorious youth. Not until
+the stallion, sinking, emerged again by means of the powerful beat of
+his legs and hoofs, did Graham realize that it was a woman who rode
+him--a woman as white as the white silken slip of a bathing suit that
+molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery. As marble
+was her back, save that the fine delicate muscles moved and crept
+under the silken suit as she strove to keep her head above water. Her
+slim round arms were twined in yards of half-drowned stallion-mane,
+while her white round knees slipped on the sleek, wet, satin pads of
+the great horse's straining shoulder muscles. The white toes of her
+dug for a grip into the smooth sides of the animal, vainly seeking a
+hold on the ribs beneath.
+
+In a breath, or the half of a breath, Graham saw the whole breathless
+situation, realized that the white wonderful creature was a woman, and
+sensed the smallness and daintiness of her despite her gladiatorial
+struggles. She reminded him of some Dresden china figure set absurdly
+small and light and strangely on the drowning back of a titanic beast.
+So dwarfed was she by the bulk of the stallion that she was a midget,
+or a tiny fairy from fairyland come true.
+
+As she pressed her cheek against the great arching neck, her golden-
+brown hair, wet from being under, flowing and tangled, seemed tangled
+in the black mane of the stallion. But it was her face that smote
+Graham most of all. It was a boy's face; it was a woman's face; it was
+serious and at the same time amused, expressing the pleasure it found
+woven with the peril. It was a white woman's face--and modern; and
+yet, to Graham, it was all-pagan. This was not a creature and a
+situation one happened upon in the twentieth century. It was straight
+out of old Greece. It was a Maxfield Parrish reminiscence from the
+Arabian Nights. Genii might be expected to rise from those troubled
+depths, or golden princes, astride winged dragons, to swoop down out
+of the blue to the rescue.
+
+The stallion, forcing itself higher out of water, missed, by a shade,
+from turning over backward as it sank. Glorious animal and glorious
+rider disappeared together beneath the surface, to rise together, a
+second later, the stallion still pawing the air with fore-hoofs the
+size of dinner plates, the rider still clinging to the sleek, satin-
+coated muscles. Graham thought, with a gasp, what might have happened
+had the stallion turned over. A chance blow from any one of those four
+enormous floundering hoofs could have put out and quenched forever the
+light and sparkle of that superb, white-bodied, fire-animated woman.
+
+"Ride his neck!" Dick shouted. "Catch his foretop and get on his neck
+till he balances out!"
+
+The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for
+the quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane,
+the other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and
+clutching the foretop. The next moment, as the stallion balanced out
+horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped
+back to the shoulders. Holding with one hand to the mane, she waved a
+white arm in the air and flashed a smile of acknowledgment to Forrest;
+and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse
+beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and
+the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in
+aesthetic wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all,
+sheer joy of daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the
+life that was she.
+
+"Not many women'd tackle that," Dick said quietly, as Mountain Lad,
+easily retaining his horizontal position once it had been attained,
+swam to the lower end of the tank and floundered up the rough slope to
+the anxious cowboy.
+
+The latter swiftly adjusted the halter with a turn of chain between
+the jaws. But Paula, still astride, leaned forward, imperiously took
+the lead-part from the cowboy, whirled Mountain Lad around to face
+Forrest, and saluted.
+
+"Now you will have to go away," she called. "This is our hen party,
+and the stag public is not admitted."
+
+Dick laughed, saluted acknowledgment, and led the way back through the
+lilacs to the road.
+
+"Who ... who was it?" Graham queried.
+
+"Paula--Mrs. Forrest--the boy girl, the child that never grew up, the
+grittiest puff of rose-dust that was ever woman."
+
+"My breath is quite taken away," Graham said. "Do your people do such
+stunts frequently?"
+
+"First time she ever did that," Forrest replied. "That was Mountain
+Lad. She rode him straight down the spill-way--tobogganed with him,
+twenty-two hundred and forty pounds of him."
+
+"Risked his neck and legs as well as her own," was Graham's comment.
+
+"Thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of neck and legs," Dick smiled.
+"That's what a pool of breeders offered me for him last year after
+he'd cleaned up the Coast with his get as well as himself. And as for
+Paula, she could break necks and legs at that price every day in the
+year until I went broke--only she doesn't. She never has accidents."
+
+"I wouldn't have given tuppence for her chance if he'd turned over."
+
+"But he didn't," Dick answered placidly. "That's Paula's luck. She's
+tough to kill. Why, I've had her under shell-fire where she was
+actually disappointed because she didn't get hit, or killed, or near-
+killed. Four batteries opened on us, shrapnel, at mile-range, and we
+had to cover half a mile of smooth hill-brow for shelter. I really
+felt I was justified in charging her with holding back. She did admit
+a 'trifle.' We've been married ten or a dozen years now, and, d'ye
+know, sometimes it seems to me I don't know her at all, and that
+nobody knows her, and that she doesn't know herself--just the same way
+as you and I can look at ourselves in a mirror and wonder who the
+devil we are anyway. Paula and I have one magic formula: _Damn the
+expense when fun is selling_. And it doesn't matter whether the
+price is in dollars, hide, or life. It's our way and our luck. It
+works. And, d'ye know, we've never been gouged on the price yet."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+
+It was a stag lunch. As Forrest explained, the girls were "hen-
+partying."
+
+"I doubt you'll see a soul of them till four o'clock, when Ernestine,
+that's one of Paula's sisters, is going to wallop me at tennis--at
+least so she's threatened and pledged."
+
+And Graham sat through the lunch, where only men sat, took his part in
+the conversation on breeds and breeding, learned much, contributed a
+mite from his own world-experiences, and was unable to shake from his
+eyes the persistent image of his hostess, the vision of the rounded
+and delicate white of her against the dark wet background of the
+swimming stallion. And all the afternoon, looking over prize Merinos
+and Berkshire gilts, continually that vision burned up under his
+eyelids. Even at four, in the tennis court, himself playing against
+Ernestine, he missed more than one stroke because the image of the
+flying ball would suddenly be eclipsed by the image of a white marble
+figure of a woman that strove and clung on the back of a great horse.
+
+Graham, although an outlander, knew his California, and, while every
+girl of the swimming suits was gowned for dinner, was not surprised to
+find no man similarly accoutered. Nor had he made the mistake of so
+being himself, despite the Big House and the magnificent scale on which
+it operated.
+
+Between the first and second gongs, all the guests drifted into the
+long dining room. Sharp after the second gong, Dick Forrest arrived
+and precipitated cocktails. And Graham impatiently waited the
+appearance of the woman who had worried his eyes since noon. He was
+prepared for all manner of disappointment. Too many gorgeous stripped
+athletes had he seen slouched into conventional garmenting, to expect
+too much of the marvelous creature in the white silken swimming suit
+when it should appear garbed as civilized women garb.
+
+He caught his breath with an imperceptible gasp when she entered. She
+paused, naturally, for just the right flash of an instant in the
+arched doorway, limned against the darkness behind her, the soft glow
+of the indirect lighting full upon her. Graham's lips gasped apart,
+and remained apart, his eyes ravished with the beauty and surprise of
+her he had deemed so small, so fairy-like. Here was no delicate midget
+of a child-woman or boy-girl on a stallion, but a grand lady, as only
+a small woman can be grand on occasion.
+
+Taller in truth was she, as well as in seeming, than he had judged
+her, and as finely proportioned in her gown as in her swimming suit.
+He noted her shining gold-brown hair piled high; the healthy tinge of
+her skin that was clean and clear and white; the singing throat, full
+and round, incomparably set on a healthy chest; and the gown, dull
+blue, a sort of medieval thing with half-fitting, half-clinging body,
+with flowing sleeves and trimmings of gold-jeweled bands.
+
+She smiled an embracing salutation and greeting. Graham recognized it
+as kin to the one he had seen when she smiled from the back of the
+stallion. When she started forward, he could not fail to see the
+inimitable way she carried the cling and weight of her draperies with
+her knees--round knees, he knew, that he had seen press desperately
+into the round muscle-pads of Mountain Lad. Graham observed, also,
+that she neither wore nor needed corseting. Nor could he fail, as she
+crossed the floor, to see two women: one, the grand lady, the mistress
+of the Big House; one, the lovely equestrienne statue beneath the
+dull-blue, golden-trimmed gown, that no gowning could ever make his
+memory forget.
+
+She was upon them, among them, and Graham's hand held hers in the
+formal introduction as he was made welcome to the Big House and all
+the hacienda in a voice that he knew was a singing voice and that
+could proceed only from a throat that pillared, such as hers, from a
+chest deep as hers despite her smallness.
+
+At table, across the corner from her, he could not help a
+surreptitious studying of her. While he held his own in the general
+fun and foolishness, it was his hostess that mostly filled the circle
+of his eye and the content of his mind.
+
+It was as bizarre a company as Graham had ever sat down to dinner
+with. The sheep-buyer and the correspondent for the _Breeders'
+Gazette_ were still guests. Three machine-loads of men, women, and
+girls, totaling fourteen, had arrived shortly before the first gong
+and had remained to ride home in the moonlight. Graham could not
+remember their names; but he made out that they came from some valley
+town thirty miles away called Wickenberg, and that they were of the
+small-town banking, professional, and wealthy-farmer class. They were
+full of spirits, laughter, and the latest jokes and catches sprung in
+the latest slang.
+
+"I see right now," Graham told Paula, "if your place continues to be
+the caravanserai which it has been since my arrival, that I might as
+well give up trying to remember names and people."
+
+"I don't blame you," she laughed concurrence. "But these are
+neighbors. They drop in any time. Mrs. Watson, there, next to Dick, is
+of the old land-aristocracy. Her grandfather, Wicken, came across the
+Sierras in 1846. Wickenberg is named after him. And that pretty dark-
+eyed girl is her daughter...."
+
+And while Paula gave him a running sketch of the chance guests, Graham
+heard scarce half she said, so occupied was he in trying to sense his
+way to an understanding of her. Naturalness was her keynote, was his
+first judgment. In not many moments he had decided that her key-note
+was joy. But he was dissatisfied with both conclusions, and knew he
+had not put his finger on her. And then it came to him--pride. That
+was it! It was in her eye, in the poise of her head, in the curling
+tendrils of her hair, in her sensitive nostrils, in the mobile lips,
+in the very pitch and angle of the rounded chin, in her hands, small,
+muscular and veined, that he knew at sight to be the hard-worked hands
+of one who had spent long hours at the piano. Pride it was, in every
+muscle, nerve, and quiver of her--conscious, sentient, stinging pride.
+
+She might be joyous and natural, boy and woman, fun and frolic; but
+always the pride was there, vibrant, tense, intrinsic, the basic stuff
+of which she was builded. She was a woman, frank, outspoken, straight-
+looking, plastic, democratic; but toy she was not. At times, to him,
+she seemed to glint an impression of steel--thin, jewel-like steel.
+She seemed strength in its most delicate terms and fabrics. He fondled
+the impression of her as of silverspun wire, of fine leather, of
+twisted hair-sennit from the heads of maidens such as the Marquesans
+make, of carven pearl-shell for the lure of the bonita, and of barbed
+ivory at the heads of sea-spears such as the Eskimos throw.
+
+"All right, Aaron," they heard Dick Forrest's voice rising, in a lull,
+from the other end of the table. "Here's something from Phillips
+Brooks for you to chew on. Brooks said that no man 'has come to true
+greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his
+race, and that what God gives him, he gives him for mankind.'"
+
+"So at last you believe in God?" the man, addressed Aaron, genially
+sneered back. He was a slender, long-faced olive-brunette, with
+brilliant black eyes and the blackest of long black beards.
+
+"I'm hanged if I know," Dick answered. "Anyway, I quoted only
+figuratively. Call it morality, call it good, call it evolution."
+
+"A man doesn't have to be intellectually correct in order to be
+great," intruded a quiet, long-faced Irishman, whose sleeves were
+threadbare and frayed. "And by the same token many men who are most
+correct in sizing up the universe have been least great."
+
+"True for you, Terrence," Dick applauded.
+
+"It's a matter of definition," languidly spoke up an unmistakable
+Hindoo, crumbling his bread with exquisitely slender and small-boned
+fingers. "What shall we mean as _great?"_
+
+"Shall we say _beauty?"_ softly queried a tragic-faced youth,
+sensitive and shrinking, crowned with an abominably trimmed head of
+long hair.
+
+Ernestine rose suddenly at her place, hands on table, leaning forward
+with a fine simulation of intensity.
+
+ "They're off!" she cried. "They're off! Now we'll have the universe
+settled all over again for the thousandth time. Theodore"--to the
+youthful poet--"it's a poor start. Get into the running. Ride your
+father ion and your mother ion, and you'll finish three lengths
+ahead."
+
+A roar of laughter was her reward, and the poet blushed and receded
+into his sensitive shell.
+
+Ernestine turned on the black-bearded one:
+
+"Now, Aaron. He's not in form. You start it. You know how. Begin: 'As
+Bergson so well has said, with the utmost refinement of philosophic
+speech allied with the most comprehensive intellectual outlook
+that....'"
+
+More laughter roared down the table, drowning Ernestine's conclusion
+as well as the laughing retort of the black-bearded one.
+
+"Our philosophers won't have a chance to-night," Paula stole in an
+aside to Graham.
+
+"Philosophers?" he questioned back. "They didn't come with the
+Wickenberg crowd. Who and what are they? I'm all at sea."
+
+"They--" Paula hesitated. "They live here. They call themselves the
+jungle-birds. They have a camp in the woods a couple of miles away,
+where they never do anything except read and talk. I'll wager, right
+now, you'll find fifty of Dick's latest, uncatalogued books in their
+cabins. They have the run of the library, as well, and you'll see them
+drifting in and out, any time of the day or night, with their arms
+full of books--also, the latest magazines. Dick says they are
+responsible for his possessing the most exhaustive and up-to-date
+library on philosophy on the Pacific Coast. In a way, they sort of
+digest such things for him. It's great fun for Dick, and, besides, it
+saves him time. He's a dreadfully hard worker, you know."
+
+"I understand that they... that Dick takes care of them?" Graham
+asked, the while he pleasured in looking straight into the blue eyes
+that looked so straight into his.
+
+As she answered, he was occupied with noting the faintest hint of
+bronze--perhaps a trick of the light--in her long, brown lashes.
+Perforce, he lifted his gaze to her eyebrows, brown, delicately
+stenciled, and made sure that the hint of bronze was there. Still
+lifting his gaze to her high-piled hair, he again saw, but more
+pronounced, the bronze note glinting from the brown-golden hair. Nor
+did he fail to startle and thrill to a dazzlement of smile and teeth
+and eye that frequently lived its life in her face. Hers was no thin
+smile of restraint, he judged. When she smiled she smiled all of
+herself, generously, joyously, throwing the largess of all her being
+into the natural expression of what was herself and which domiciled
+somewhere within that pretty head of hers.
+
+"Yes," she was saying. "They have never to worry, as long as they
+live, over mere bread and butter. Dick is most generous, and, rather
+immoral, in his encouragement of idleness on the part of men like
+them. It's a funny place, as you'll find out until you come to
+understand us. They... they are appurtenances, and--and hereditaments,
+and such things. They will be with us always until we bury them or
+they bury us. Once in a while one or another of them drifts away--for
+a time. Like the cat, you know. Then it costs Dick real money to get
+them back. Terrence, there--Terrence McFane--he's an epicurean
+anarchist, if you know what that means. He wouldn't kill a flea. He
+has a pet cat I gave him, a Persian of the bluest blue, and he
+carefully picks her fleas, not injuring them, stores them in a vial,
+and turns them loose in the forest on his long walks when he tires of
+human companionship and communes with nature.
+
+"Well, only last year, he got a bee in his bonnet--the alphabet. He
+started for Egypt--without a cent, of course--to run the alphabet down
+in the home of its origin and thereby to win the formula that would
+explain the cosmos. He got as far as Denver, traveling as tramps
+travel, when he mixed up in some I. W. W. riot for free speech or
+something. Dick had to hire lawyers, pay fines, and do just about
+everything to get him safe home again.
+
+"And the one with a beard--Aaron Hancock. Like Terrence, he won't
+work. Aaron's a Southerner. Says none of his people ever did work, and
+that there have always been peasants and fools who just couldn't be
+restrained from working. That's why he wears a beard. To shave, he
+holds, is unnecessary work, and, therefore, immoral. I remember, at
+Melbourne, when he broke in upon Dick and me, a sunburnt wild man from
+out the Australian bush. It seems he'd been making original researches
+in anthropology, or folk-lore-ology, or something like that. Dick had
+known him years before in Paris, and Dick assured him, if he ever
+drifted back to America, of food and shelter. So here he is."
+
+"And the poet?" Graham asked, glad that she must still talk for a
+while, enabling him to study the quick dazzlement of smile that played
+upon her face.
+
+"Oh, Theo--Theodore Malken, though we call him Leo. He won't work,
+either. His people are old Californian stock and dreadfully wealthy;
+but they disowned him and he disowned them when he was fifteen. They
+say he is lunatic, and he says they are merely maddening. He really
+writes some remarkable verse... when he does write; but he prefers to
+dream and live in the jungle with Terrence and Aaron. He was tutoring
+immigrant Jews in San Francisco, when Terrence and Aaron rescued him,
+or captured him, I don't know which. He's been with us two years now,
+and he's actually filling out, despite the facts that Dick is absurdly
+generous in furnishing supplies and that they'd rather talk and read
+and dream than cook. The only good meals they get is when they descend
+upon us, like to-night."
+
+"And the Hindoo, there--who's he?"
+
+"That's Dar Hyal. He's their guest. The three of them invited him up,
+just as Aaron first invited Terrence, and as Aaron and Terrence
+invited Leo. Dick says, in time, three more are bound to appear, and
+then he'll have his Seven Sages of the Madroño Grove. Their jungle
+camp is in a madroño grove, you know. It's a most beautiful spot, with
+living springs, a canyon--but I was telling you about Dar Hyal.
+
+"He's a revolutionist, of sorts. He's dabbled in our universities,
+studied in France, Italy, Switzerland, is a political refugee from
+India, and he's hitched his wagon to two stars: one, a new synthetic
+system of philosophy; the other, rebellion against the tyranny of
+British rule in India. He advocates individual terrorism and direct
+mass action. That's why his paper, _Kadar,_ or _Badar,_ or
+something like that, was suppressed here in California, and why he
+narrowly escaped being deported; and that's why he's up here just now,
+devoting himself to formulating his philosophy.
+
+"He and Aaron quarrel tremendously--that is, on philosophical matters.
+And now--" Paula sighed and erased the sigh with her smile--"and now,
+I'm done. Consider yourself acquainted. And, oh, if you encounter our
+sages more intimately, a word of warning, especially if the encounter
+be in the stag room: Dar Hyal is a total abstainer; Theodore Malken
+can get poetically drunk, and usually does, on one cocktail; Aaron
+Hancock is an expert wine-bibber; and Terrence McFane, knowing little
+of one drink from another, and caring less, can put ninety-nine men
+out of a hundred under the table and go right on lucidly expounding
+epicurean anarchy."
+
+One thing Graham noted as the dinner proceeded. The sages called Dick
+Forrest by his first name; but they always addressed Paula as "Mrs.
+Forrest," although she called them by their first names. There was
+nothing affected about it. Quite unconsciously did they, who respected
+few things under the sun, and among such few things not even work--
+quite unconsciously, and invariably, did they recognize the certain
+definite aloofness in Dick Forrest's wife so that her given name was
+alien to their lips. By such tokens Evan Graham was not slow in
+learning that Dick Forrest's wife had a way with her, compounded of
+sheerest democracy and equally sheer royalty.
+
+It was the same thing, after dinner, in the big living room. She dared
+as she pleased, but nobody assumed. Before the company settled down,
+Paula seemed everywhere, bubbling over with more outrageous spirits
+than any of them. From this group or that, from one corner or another,
+her laugh rang out. And her laugh fascinated Graham. There was a
+fibrous thrill in it, most sweet to the ear, that differentiated it
+from any laugh he had ever heard. It caused Graham to lose the thread
+of young Mr. Wombold's contention that what California needed was not
+a Japanese exclusion law but at least two hundred thousand Japanese
+coolies to do the farm labor of California and knock in the head the
+threatened eight-hour day for agricultural laborers. Young Mr.
+Wombold, Graham gleaned, was an hereditary large land-owner in the
+vicinity of Wickenberg who prided himself on not yielding to the trend
+of the times by becoming an absentee landlord.
+
+From the piano, where Eddie Mason was the center of a group of girls,
+came much noise of ragtime music and slangtime song. Terrence McFane
+and Aaron Hancock fell into a heated argument over the music of
+futurism. And Graham was saved from the Japanese situation with Mr.
+Wombold by Dar Hyal, who proceeded to proclaim Asia for the Asiatics
+and California for the Californians.
+
+Paula, catching up her skirts for speed, fled down the room in some
+romp, pursued by Dick, who captured her as she strove to dodge around
+the Wombold group.
+
+"Wicked woman," Dick reproved her in mock wrath; and, the next moment,
+joined her in persuading Dar Hyal to dance.
+
+And Dar Hyal succumbed, flinging Asia and the Asiatics to the winds,
+along with his arms and legs, as he weirdly parodied the tango in what
+he declared to be the "blastic" culmination of modern dancing.
+
+"And now, Red Cloud, sing Mr. Graham your Acorn Song," Paula commanded
+Dick.
+
+Forrest, his arm still about her, detaining her for the threatened
+punishment not yet inflicted, shook his head somberly.
+
+"The Acorn Song!" Ernestine called from the piano; and the cry was
+taken up by Eddie Mason and the girls.
+
+"Oh, do, Dick," Paula pleaded. "Mr. Graham is the only one who hasn't
+heard it."
+
+Dick shook his head.
+
+"Then sing him your Goldfish Song."
+
+"I'll sing him Mountain Lad's song," Dick bullied, a whimsical sparkle
+in his eyes. He stamped his feet, pranced, nickered a not bad
+imitation of Mountain Lad, tossed an imaginary mane, and cried:
+
+"Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!"
+
+"The Acorn Song," Paula interrupted quickly and quietly, with just the
+hint of steel in her voice.
+
+Dick obediently ceased his chant of Mountain Lad, but shook his head
+like a stubborn colt.
+
+"I have a new song," he said solemnly. "It is about you and me, Paula.
+I got it from the Nishinam."
+
+"The Nishinam are the extinct aborigines of this part of California,"
+Paula shot in a swift aside of explanation to Graham.
+
+Dick danced half a dozen steps, stiff-legged, as Indians dance,
+slapped his thighs with his palms, and began a new chant, still
+retaining his hold on his wife.
+
+"Me, I am Ai-kut, the first man of the Nishinam. Ai-kut is the short
+for Adam, and my father and my mother were the coyote and the moon.
+And this is Yo-to-to-wi, my wife. She is the first woman of the
+Nishinam. Her father and her mother were the grasshopper and the ring-
+tailed cat. They were the best father and mother left after my father
+and mother. The coyote is very wise, the moon is very old; but who
+ever heard much of anything of credit to the grasshopper and the ring-
+tailed cat? The Nishinam are always right. The mother of all women had
+to be a cat, a little, wizened, sad-faced, shrewd ring-tailed cat."
+
+Whereupon the song of the first man and woman was interrupted by
+protests from the women and acclamations from the men.
+
+"This is Yo-to-to-wi, which is the short for Eve," Dick chanted on,
+drawing Paula bruskly closer to his side with a semblance of savage
+roughness. "Yo-to-to-wi is not much to look at. But be not hard upon
+her. The fault is with the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat. Me, I
+am Ai-kut, the first man; but question not my taste. I was the first
+man, and this, I saw, was the first woman. Where there is but one
+choice, there is not much to choose. Adam was so circumstanced. He
+chose Eve. Yo-to-to-wi was the one woman in all the world for me, so I
+chose Yo-to-to-wi."
+
+And Evan Graham, listening, his eyes on that possessive, encircling
+arm of all his hostess's fairness, felt an awareness of hurt, and
+arose unsummoned the thought, to be dismissed angrily, "Dick Forrest
+is lucky--too lucky."
+
+"Me, I am Ai-kut," Dick chanted on. "This is my dew of woman. She is
+my honey-dew of woman. I have lied to you. Her father and her mother
+were neither hopper nor cat. They were the Sierra dawn and the summer
+east wind of the mountains. Together they conspired, and from the air
+and earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love
+the leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed with the
+honey-dew.
+
+"Yo-to-to-wi is my honey-dew woman. Hear me! I am Ai-kut. Yo-to-to-wi
+is my quail woman, my deer-woman, my lush-woman of all soft rain and
+fat soil. She was born of the thin starlight and the brittle dawn-
+light before the sun . . .
+
+"And," Forrest concluded, relapsing into his natural voice and
+enunciation, having reached the limit of extemporization,--"and if you
+think old, sweet, blue-eyed Solomon has anything on me in singing the
+Song of Songs, just put your names down for the subscription edition
+of _my_ Song of Songs."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+
+It was Mrs. Mason who first asked that Paula play; but it was Terrence
+McFane and Aaron Hancock who evicted the rag-time group from the piano
+and sent Theodore Malken, a blushing ambassador, to escort Paula.
+
+"'Tis for the confounding of this pagan that I'm askin' you to play
+'Reflections on the Water,'" Graham heard Terrence say to her.
+
+"And 'The Girl with Flaxen Hair,' after, please," begged Hancock, the
+indicted pagan. "It will aptly prove my disputation. This wild Celt
+has a bog-theory of music that predates the cave-man--and he has the
+unadulterated stupidity to call himself ultra-modern."
+
+"Oh, Debussy!" Paula laughed. "Still wrangling over him, eh? I'll try
+and get around to him. But I don't know with what I'll begin."
+
+Dar Hyal joined the three sages in seating Paula at the concert grand
+which, Graham decided, was none too great for the great room. But no
+sooner was she seated than the three sages slipped away to what were
+evidently their chosen listening places. The young poet stretched
+himself prone on a deep bearskin forty feet from the piano, his hands
+buried in his hair. Terrence and Aaron lolled into a cushioned
+embrasure of a window seat, sufficiently near to each other to nudge
+the points of their respective contentions as Paula might expound
+them. The girls were huddled in colored groups on wide couches or
+garlanded in twos and threes on and in the big koa-wood chairs.
+
+Evan Graham half-started forward to take the honor of turning Paula's
+music, but saw in time that Dar Hyal had already elected to himself
+that office. Graham glimpsed the scene with quiet curious glances. The
+grand piano, under a low arch at the far-end of the room, was
+cunningly raised and placed as on and in a sounding board. All jollity
+and banter had ceased. Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a
+way with her and was accepted as a player of parts. And from this he
+was perversely prepared for disappointment.
+
+Ernestine leaned across from a chair to whisper to him:
+
+"She can do anything she wants to do. And she doesn't work . . . much.
+She studied under Leschetizky and Madame Carreno, you know, and she
+abides by their methods. She doesn't play like a woman, either. Listen
+to that!"
+
+Graham knew that he expected disappointment from her confident hands,
+even as she rippled them over the keys in little chords and runs with
+which he could not quarrel but which he had heard too often before
+from technically brilliant but musically mediocre performers. But
+whatever he might have fancied she would play, he was all unprepared
+for Rachmaninoff's sheerly masculine Prelude, which he had heard only
+men play when decently played.
+
+She took hold of the piano, with the first two ringing bars,
+masterfully, like a man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding
+wires, with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of
+maleness. And then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or
+leaped--he could scarcely say which--to the sureness and pureness and
+ineffable softness of the _Andante_ following.
+
+She played on, with the calm and power of anything but the little,
+almost girlish woman he glimpsed through half-closed lids across the
+ebony board of the enormous piano, which she commanded, as she
+commanded herself, as she commanded the composer. Her touch was
+definite, authoritative, was his judgment, as the Prelude faded away
+in dying chords hauntingly reminiscent of its full vigor that seemed
+still to linger in the air.
+
+While Aaron and Terrence debated in excited whispers in the window
+seat, and while Dar Hyal sought other music at Paula's direction, she
+glanced at Dick, who turned off bowl after bowl of mellow light till
+Paula sat in an oasis of soft glow that brought out the dull gold
+lights in her dress and hair.
+
+Graham watched the lofty room grow loftier in the increasing shadows.
+Eighty feet in length, rising two stories and a half from masonry
+walls to tree-trunked roof, flung across with a flying gallery from
+the rail of which hung skins of wild animals, hand-woven blankets of
+Oaxaca and Ecuador, and tapas, woman-pounded and vegetable-dyed, from
+the islands of the South Pacific, Graham knew it for what it was--a
+feast-hall of some medieval castle; and almost he felt a poignant
+sense of lack of the long spread table, with pewter below the salt and
+silver above the salt, and with huge hound-dogs scuffling beneath for
+bones.
+
+Later, when Paula had played sufficient Debussy to equip Terrence and
+Aaron for fresh war, Graham talked with her about music for a few
+vivid moments. So well did she prove herself aware of the philosophy
+of music, that, ere he knew it, he was seduced into voicing his own
+pet theory.
+
+"And so," he concluded, "the true psychic factor of music took nearly
+three thousand years to impress itself on the Western mind. Debussy
+more nearly attains the idea-engendering and suggestive serenity--say
+of the time of Pythagoras--than any of his fore-runners--"
+
+Here, Paula put a pause in his summary by beckoning over Terrence and
+Aaron from their battlefield in the windowseat.
+
+"Yes, and what of it?" Terrence was demanding, as they came up side by
+side. "I defy you, Aaron, I defy you, to get one thought out of
+Bergson on music that is more lucid than any thought he ever uttered
+in his 'Philosophy of Laughter,' which is not lucid at all."
+
+"Oh!--listen!" Paula cried, with sparkling eyes. "We have a new
+prophet. Hear Mr. Graham. He's worthy of your steel, of both your
+steel. He agrees with you that music is the refuge from blood and iron
+and the pounding of the table. That weak souls, and sensitive souls,
+and high-pitched souls flee from the crassness and the rawness of the
+world to the drug-dreams of the over-world of rhythm and vibration--"
+
+"Atavistic!" Aaron Hancock snorted. "The cave-men, the monkey-folk,
+and the ancestral bog-men of Terrence did that sort of thing--"
+
+"But wait," Paula urged. "It's his conclusions and methods and
+processes. Also, there he disagrees with you, Aaron, fundamentally. He
+quoted Pater's 'that all art aspires toward music'--"
+
+"Pure prehuman and micro-organic chemistry," Aaron broke in. "The
+reactions of cell-elements to the doggerel punch of the wave-lengths
+of sunlight, the foundation of all folk-songs and rag-times. Terrence
+completes his circle right there and stultifies all his windiness. Now
+listen to me, and I will present--"
+
+"But wait," Paula pleaded. "Mr. Graham argues that English puritanism
+barred music, real music, for centuries...."
+
+"True," said Terrence.
+
+"And that England had to win to its sensuous delight in rhythm through
+Milton and Shelley--"
+
+"Who was a metaphysician." Aaron broke in.
+
+"A lyrical metaphysician," Terrence defined instantly. "_That_
+you must acknowledge, Aaron."
+
+"And Swinburne?" Aaron demanded, with a significance that tokened
+former arguments.
+
+"He says Offenbach was the fore-runner of Arthur Sullivan," Paula
+cried challengingly. "And that Auber was before Offenbach. And as for
+Wagner, ask him, just ask him--"
+
+And she slipped away, leaving Graham to his fate. He watched her,
+watched the perfect knee-lift of her draperies as she crossed to Mrs.
+Mason and set about arranging bridge quartets, while dimly he could
+hear Terrence beginning:
+
+"It is agreed that music was the basis of inspiration of all the arts
+of the Greeks...."
+
+Later, when the two sages were obliviously engrossed in a heated
+battle as to whether Berlioz or Beethoven had exposited in their
+compositions the deeper intellect, Graham managed his escape. Clearly,
+his goal was to find his hostess again. But she had joined two of the
+girls in the whispering, giggling seclusiveness of one of the big
+chairs, and, most of the company being deep in bridge, Graham found
+himself drifted into a group composed of Dick Forrest, Mr. Wombold,
+Dar Hyal, and the correspondent of the _Breeders' Gazette_.
+
+"I'm sorry you won't be able to run over with me," Dick was saying to
+the correspondent. "It would mean only one more day. I'll take you
+tomorrow."
+
+"Sorry," was the reply. "But I must make Santa Rosa. Burbank has
+promised me practically a whole morning, and you know what that means.
+Yet I know the _Gazette_ would be glad for an account of the
+experiment. Can't you outline it?--briefly, just briefly? Here's Mr.
+Graham. It will interest him, I am sure."
+
+"More water-works?" Graham queried.
+
+"No; an asinine attempt to make good farmers out of hopelessly poor
+ones," Mr. Wombold answered. "I contend that any farmer to-day who has
+no land of his own, proves by his lack of it that he is an inefficient
+farmer."
+
+"On the contrary," spoke up Dar Hyal, weaving his slender Asiatic
+fingers in the air to emphasize his remarks. "Quite on the contrary.
+Times have changed. Efficiency no longer implies the possession of
+capital. It is a splendid experiment, an heroic experiment. And it
+will succeed."
+
+"What is it, Dick?" Graham urged. "Tell us."
+
+"Oh, nothing, just a white chip on the table," Forrest answered
+lightly. "Most likely it will never come to anything, although just
+the same I have my hopes--"
+
+"A white chip!" Wombold broke in. "Five thousand acres of prime valley
+land, all for a lot of failures to batten on, to farm, if you please,
+on salary, with food thrown in!"
+
+"The food that is grown on the land only," Dick corrected. "Now I will
+have to put it straight. I've set aside five thousand acres midway
+between here and the Sacramento River."
+
+"Think of the alfalfa it grew, and that you need," Wombold again
+interrupted.
+
+"My dredgers redeemed twice that acreage from the marshes in the past
+year," Dick replied. "The thing is, I believe the West and the world
+must come to intensive farming. I want to do my share toward blazing
+the way. I've divided the five thousand acres into twenty-acre
+holdings. I believe each twenty acres should support, comfortably, not
+only a family, but pay at least six per cent."
+
+"When it is all allotted it will mean two hundred and fifty families,"
+the _Gazette_ man calculated; "and, say five to the family, it
+will mean twelve hundred and fifty souls."
+
+"Not quite," Dick corrected. "The last holding is occupied, and we
+have only a little over eleven hundred on the land." He smiled
+whimsically. "But they promise, they promise. Several fat years and
+they'll average six to the family."
+
+"Who is _we_?" Graham inquired.
+
+"Oh, I have a committee of farm experts on it--my own men, with the
+exception of Professor Lieb, whom the Federal Government has loaned
+me. The thing is: they _must_ farm, with individual responsibility,
+according to the scientific methods embodied in our instructions. The
+land is uniform. Every holding is like a pea in the pod to every other
+holding. The results of each holding will speak in no uncertain terms.
+The failure of any farmer, through laziness or stupidity, measured by
+the average result of the entire two hundred and fifty farmers, will
+not be tolerated. Out the failures must go, convicted by the average
+of their fellows.
+
+"It's a fair deal. No farmer risks anything. With the food he may grow
+and he and his family may consume, plus a cash salary of a thousand a
+year, he is certain, good seasons and bad, stupid or intelligent, of
+at least a hundred dollars a month. The stupid and the inefficient
+will be bound to be eliminated by the intelligent and the efficient.
+That's all. It will demonstrate intensive farming with a vengeance.
+And there is more than the certain salary guaranty. After the salary
+is paid, the adventure must yield six per cent, to me. If more than
+this is achieved, then the entire hundred per cent, of the additional
+achievement goes to the farmer."
+
+"Which means that each farmer with go in him will work nights to make
+good--I see," said the _Gazette_ man. "And why not? Hundred-
+dollar jobs aren't picked up for the asking. The average farmer in the
+United States doesn't net fifty a month on his own land, especially
+when his wages of superintendence and of direct personal labor are
+subtracted. Of course able men will work their heads off to hold to
+such a proposition, and they'll see to it that every member of the
+family does the same."
+
+"'Tis the one objection I have to this place," Terrence McFane, who
+had just joined the group, announced. "Ever one hears but the one
+thing--work. 'Tis repulsive, the thought of the work, each on his
+twenty acres, toilin' and moilin', daylight till dark, and after dark--
+an' for what? A bit of meat, a bit of bread, and, maybe, a bit of jam
+on the bread. An' to what end? Is meat an' bread an' jam the end of it
+all, the meaning of life, the goal of existence? Surely the man will
+die, like a work horse dies, after a life of toil. And what end has
+been accomplished? Bread an' meat an' jam? Is that it? A full belly
+and shelter from the cold till one's body drops apart in the dark
+moldiness of the grave?"
+
+"But, Terrence, you, too, will die," Dick Forrest retorted.
+
+"But, oh, my glorious life of loafing," came the instant answer. "The
+hours with the stars and the flowers, under the green trees with the
+whisperings of breezes in the grass. My books, my thinkers and their
+thoughts. Beauty, music, all the solaces of all the arts. What? When I
+fade into the dark I shall have well lived and received my wage for
+living. But these twenty-acre work-animals of two-legged men of yours!
+Daylight till dark, toil and moil, sweat on the shirts on the backs of
+them that dries only to crust, meat and bread in their bellies, roofs
+that don't leak, a brood of youngsters to live after them, to live the
+same beast-lives of toil, to fill their bellies with the same meat and
+bread, to scratch their backs with the same sweaty shirts, and to go
+into the dark knowing only meat and bread, and, mayhap, a bit of jam."
+
+"But somebody must do the work that enables you to loaf," Mr. Wombold
+spoke up indignantly.
+
+"'Tis true, 'tis sad 'tis true," Terrence replied lugubriously. Then
+his face beamed. "And I thank the good Lord for it, for the work-
+beasties that drag and drive the plows up and down the fields, for the
+bat-eyed miner-beasties that dig the coal and gold, for all the stupid
+peasant-beasties that keep my hands soft, and give power to fine
+fellows like Dick there, who smiles on me and shares the loot with me,
+and buys the latest books for me, and gives me a place at his board
+that is plenished by the two-legged work-beasties, and a place at his
+fire that is builded by the same beasties, and a shack and a bed in
+the jungle under the madroño trees where never work intrudes its
+monstrous head."
+
+Evan Graham was slow in getting ready for bed that night. He was
+unwontedly stirred both by the Big House and by the Little Lady who
+was its mistress. As he sat on the edge of the bed, half-undressed,
+and smoked out a pipe, he kept seeing her in memory, as he had seen
+her in the flesh the past twelve hours, in her varied moods and
+guises--the woman who had talked music with him, and who had expounded
+music to him to his delight; who had enticed the sages into the
+discussion and abandoned him to arrange the bridge tables for her
+guests; who had nestled in the big chair as girlish as the two girls
+with her; who had, with a hint of steel, quelled her husband's
+obstreperousness when he had threatened to sing Mountain Lad's song;
+who, unafraid, had bestridden the half-drowning stallion in the
+swimming tank; and who, a few hours later, had dreamed into the dining
+room, distinctive in dress and person, to meet her many guests.
+
+The Big House, with all its worthy marvels and bizarre novelties,
+competed with the figure of Paula Forrest in filling the content of
+his imagination. Once again, and yet again, many times, he saw the
+slender fingers of Dar Hyal weaving argument in the air, the black
+whiskers of Aaron Hancock enunciating Bergsonian dogmas, the frayed
+coat-cuffs of Terrence McFane articulating thanks to God for the two-
+legged work-beasties that enabled him to loaf at Dick Forrest's board
+and under Dick Forrest's madroño trees.
+
+Graham knocked out his pipe, took a final sweeping survey of the
+strange room which was the last word in comfort, pressed off the
+lights, and found himself between cool sheets in the wakeful dark.
+Again he heard Paula Forrest laugh; again he sensed her in terms of
+silver and steel and strength; again, against the dark, he saw that
+inimitable knee-lift of her gown. The bright vision of it was almost
+an irk to him, so impossible was it for him to shake it from his eyes.
+Ever it returned and burned before him, a moving image of light and
+color that he knew to be subjective but that continually asserted the
+illusion of reality.
+
+He saw stallion and rider sink beneath the water, and rise again, a
+flurry of foam and floundering of hoofs, and a woman's face that
+laughed while she drowned her hair in the drowning mane of the beast.
+And the first ringing bars of the Prelude sounded in his ears as again
+he saw the same hands that had guided the stallion lift the piano to
+all Rachmaninoff's pure splendor of sound.
+
+And when Graham finally fell asleep, it was in the thick of marveling
+over the processes of evolution that could produce from primeval mire
+and dust the glowing, glorious flesh and spirit of woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+The next morning Graham learned further the ways of the Big House. Oh
+My had partly initiated him in particular things the preceding day and
+had learned that, after the waking cup of coffee, he preferred to
+breakfast at table, rather than in bed. Also, Oh My had warned him
+that breakfast at table was an irregular affair, anywhere between
+seven and nine, and that the breakfasters merely drifted in at their
+convenience. If he wanted a horse, or if he wanted a swim or a motor
+car, or any ranch medium or utility he desired, Oh My informed him,
+all he had to do was to call for it.
+
+Arriving in the breakfast room at half past seven, Graham found
+himself just in time to say good-by to the _Gazette_ man and the
+Idaho buyer, who, finishing, were just ready to catch the ranch
+machine that connected at Eldorado with the morning train for San
+Francisco. He sat alone, being perfectly invited by a perfect Chinese
+servant to order as he pleased, and found himself served with his
+first desire--an ice-cold, sherried grapefruit, which, the table-boy
+proudly informed him, was "grown on the ranch." Declining variously
+suggested breakfast foods, mushes, and porridges, Graham had just
+ordered his soft-boiled eggs and bacon, when Bert Wainwright drifted
+in with a casualness that Graham recognized as histrionic, when, five
+minutes later, in boudoir cap and delectable negligee, Ernestine
+Desten drifted in and expressed surprise at finding such a multitude
+of early risers.
+
+Later, as the three of them were rising from table, they greeted Lute
+Desten and Rita Wainwright arriving. Over the billiard table with
+Bert, Graham learned that Dick Forrest never appeared for breakfast,
+that he worked in bed from terribly wee small hours, had coffee at
+six, and only on unusual occasions appeared to his guests before the
+twelve-thirty lunch. As for Paula Forrest, Bert explained, she was a
+poor sleeper, a late riser, lived behind a door without a knob in a
+spacious wing with a rare and secret patio that even he had seen but
+once, and only on infrequent occasion was she known to appear before
+twelve-thirty, and often not then.
+
+"You see, she's healthy and strong and all that," he explained, "but
+she was born with insomnia. She never could sleep. She couldn't sleep
+as a little baby even. But it's never hurt her any, because she's got
+a will, and won't let it get on her nerves. She's just about as tense
+as they make them, yet, instead of going wild when she can't sleep,
+she just wills to relax, and she does relax. She calls them her `white
+nights,' when she gets them. Maybe she'll fall asleep at daybreak, or
+at nine or ten in the morning; and then she'll sleep the rest of the
+clock around and get down to dinner as chipper as you please."
+
+"It's constitutional, I fancy," Graham suggested.
+
+Bert nodded.
+
+"It would be a handicap to nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a
+thousand. But not to her. She puts up with it, and if she can't sleep
+one time--she should worry--she just sleeps some other time and makes
+it up."
+
+More and other things Bert Wainwright told of his hostess, and Graham
+was not slow in gathering that the young man, despite the privileges
+of long acquaintance, stood a good deal in awe of her.
+
+"I never saw anybody whose goat she couldn't get if she went after
+it," he confided. "Man or woman or servant, age, sex, and previous
+condition of servitude--it's all one when she gets on the high and
+mighty. And I don't see how she does it. Maybe it's just a kind of
+light that comes into her eyes, or some kind of an expression on her
+lips, or, I don't know what--anyway, she puts it across and nobody
+makes any mistake about it."
+
+"She has a ... a way with her," Graham volunteered.
+
+ "That's it!" Bert's face beamed. "It's a way she has. She just puts
+it over. Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don't know why. Maybe
+she's learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she's
+learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting
+sour. The chances are she didn't bat an eye all last night--
+excitement, you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such
+things. Now ordinary things that'd keep most women awake, like danger,
+or storm at sea, and such things, Dick says don't faze her. She can
+sleep like a baby, he says, when the town she's in is being bombarded
+or when the ship she's in is trying to claw off a lee shore. She's a
+wonder, and no mistake. You ought to play billiards with her--the
+English game. She'll go some."
+
+A little later, Graham, along with Bert, encountered the girls in the
+morning room, where, despite an hour of rag-time song and dancing and
+chatter, he was scarcely for a moment unaware of a loneliness, a lack,
+and a desire to see his hostess, in some fresh and unguessed mood and
+way, come in upon them through the open door.
+
+Still later, mounted on Altadena and accompanied by Bert on a
+thoroughbred mare called Mollie, Graham made a two hours' exploration
+of the dairy center of the ranch, and arrived back barely in time to
+keep an engagement with Ernestine in the tennis court.
+
+He came to lunch with an eagerness for which his keen appetite could
+not entirely account; and he knew definite disappointment when his
+hostess did not appear.
+
+"A white night," Dick Forrest surmised for his guest's benefit, and
+went into details additional to Bert's of her constitutional
+inaptitude for normal sleep. "Do you know, we were married years
+before I ever saw her sleep. I knew she did sleep, but I never saw
+her. I've seen her go three days and nights without closing an eye and
+keep sweet and cheerful all the time, and when she did sleep, it was
+out of exhaustion. That was when the _All Away_ went ashore in
+the Carolines and the whole population worked to get us off. It wasn't
+the danger, for there wasn't any. It was the noise. Also, it was the
+excitement. She was too busy living. And when it was almost all over,
+I actually saw her asleep for the first time in my life."
+
+A new guest had arrived that morning, a Donald Ware, whom Graham met
+at lunch. He seemed well acquainted with all, as if he had visited
+much in the Big House; and Graham gathered that, despite his youth, he
+was a violinist of note on the Pacific Coast.
+
+"He has conceived a grand passion for Paula," Ernestine told Graham as
+they passed out from the dining room.
+
+Graham raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Oh, but she doesn't mind," Ernestine laughed. "Every man that comes
+along does the same thing. She's used to it. She has just a charming
+way of disregarding all their symptoms, and enjoys them, and gets the
+best out of them in consequence. It's lots of fun to Dick. You'll be
+doing the same before you're here a week. If you don't, we'll all be
+surprised mightily. And if you don't, most likely you'll hurt Dick's
+feelings. He's come to expect it as a matter of course. And when a
+fond, proud husband gets a habit like that, it must hurt terribly to
+see his wife not appreciated."
+
+"Oh, well, if I am expected to, I suppose I must," Graham sighed. "But
+just the same I hate to do whatever everybody does just because
+everybody does it. But if it's the custom--well, it's the custom,
+that's all. But it's mighty hard on one with so many other nice girls
+around."
+
+There was a quizzical light in his long gray eyes that affected
+Ernestine so profoundly that she gazed into his eyes over long, became
+conscious of what she was doing, dropped her own eyes away, and
+flushed.
+
+"Little Leo--the boy poet you remember last night," she rattled on in
+a patent attempt to escape from her confusion. "He's madly in love
+with Paula, too. I've heard Aaron Hancock chaffing him about some
+sonnet cycle, and it isn't difficult to guess the inspiration. And
+Terrence--the Irishman, you know--he's mildly in love with her. They
+can't help it, you see; and can you blame them?"
+
+"She surely deserves it all," Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt
+in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an
+Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even
+mildly be in love with the Little Lady. "She is most deserving of all
+men's admiration," he continued smoothly. "From the little I've seen
+of her she's quite remarkable and most charming."
+
+"She's my half-sister," Ernestine vouchsafed, "although you wouldn't
+dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins. She's so different.
+She's different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew--
+though she isn't exactly a girl. She's thirty-eight, you know--"
+
+"Pussy, pussy," Graham whispered.
+
+The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment,
+taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.
+
+"Cat," he censured in mock reproof.
+
+"Oh!" she cried. "I never meant it that way. You will find we are
+very frank here. Everybody knows Paula's age. She tells it herself.
+I'm eighteen--so, there. And now, just for your meanness, how old are
+you?"
+
+"As old as Dick," he replied promptly.
+
+"And he's forty," she laughed triumphantly. "Are you coming swimming?
+--the water will be dreadfully cold."
+
+Graham shook his head. "I'm going riding with Dick."
+
+Her face fell with all the ingenuousness of eighteen.
+
+"Oh," she protested, "some of his eternal green manures, or hillside
+terracing, or water-pocketing."
+
+"But he said something about swimming at five."
+
+Her face brightened joyously.
+
+"Then we'll meet at the tank. It must be the same party. Paula said
+swimming at five."
+
+As they parted under a long arcade, where his way led to the tower
+room for a change into riding clothes, she stopped suddenly and
+called:
+
+"Oh, Mr. Graham."
+
+He turned obediently.
+
+"You really are not compelled to fall in love with Paula, you know. It
+was just my way of putting it."
+
+"I shall be very, very careful," he said solemnly, although there was
+a twinkle in his eye as he concluded.
+
+Nevertheless, as he went on to his room, he could not but admit to
+himself that the Paula Forrest charm, or the far fairy tentacles of
+it, had already reached him and were wrapping around him. He knew,
+right there, that he would prefer the engagement to ride to have been
+with her than with his old-time friend, Dick.
+
+As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the
+ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess. Only Dick was there,
+and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in
+the shade promised possibilities. But Dick and he rode away alone.
+Dick pointed out her horse, an alert bay thoroughbred, stallion at
+that, under a small Australian saddle with steel stirrups, and double-
+reined and single-bitted.
+
+"I don't know her plans," he said. "She hasn't shown up yet, but at
+any rate she'll be swimming later. We'll meet her then."
+
+Graham appreciated and enjoyed the ride, although more than once he
+found himself glancing at his wrist-watch to ascertain how far away
+five o'clock might yet be. Lambing time was at hand, and through home
+field after home field he rode with his host, now one and now the
+other dismounting to turn over onto its feet rotund and glorious
+Shropshire and Ramboullet-Merino ewes so hopelessly the product of
+man's selection as to be unable to get off, of themselves, from their
+own broad backs, once they were down with their four legs helplessly
+sky-aspiring.
+
+"I've really worked to make the American Merino," Dick was saying; "to
+give it the developed leg, the strong back, the well-sprung rib, and
+the stamina. The old-country breed lacked the stamina. It was too much
+hand-reared and manicured."
+
+"You're doing things, big things," Graham assured him. "Think of
+shipping rams to Idaho! That speaks for itself."
+
+Dick Forrest's eyes were sparkling, as he replied:
+
+"Better than Idaho. Incredible as it may sound, and asking forgiveness
+for bragging, the great flocks to-day of Michigan and Ohio can trace
+back to my California-bred Ramboullet rams. Take Australia. Twelve
+years ago I sold three rams for three hundred each to a visiting
+squatter. After he took them back and demonstrated them he sold them
+for as many thousand each and ordered a shipload more from me.
+Australia will never be the worse for my having been. Down there they
+say that lucerne, artesian wells, refrigerator ships, and Forrest's
+rams have tripled the wool and mutton production."
+
+Quite by chance, on the way back, meeting Mendenhall, the horse
+manager, they were deflected by him to a wide pasture, broken by
+wooded canyons and studded with oaks, to look over a herd of yearling
+Shires that was to be dispatched next morning to the upland pastures
+and feeding sheds of the Miramar Hills. There were nearly two hundred
+of them, rough-coated, beginning to shed, large-boned and large for
+their age.
+
+"We don't exactly crowd them," Dick Forrest explained, "but Mr.
+Mendenhall sees to it that they never lack full nutrition from the
+time they are foaled. Up there in the hills, where they are going,
+they'll balance their grass with grain. This makes them assemble every
+night at the feeding places and enables the feeders to keep track of
+them with a minimum of effort. I've shipped fifty stallions, two-year-
+olds, every year for the past five years, to Oregon alone. They're
+sort of standardized, you know. The people up there know what they're
+getting. They know my standard so well that they'll buy unsight and
+unseen."
+
+"You must cull a lot, then," Graham ventured.
+
+"And you'll see the culls draying on the streets of San Francisco,"
+Dick answered.
+
+"Yes, and on the streets of Denver," Mr. Mendenhall amplified, "and of
+Los Angeles, and--why, two years ago, in the horse-famine, we shipped
+twenty carloads of four-year geldings to Chicago, that averaged
+seventeen hundred each. The lightest were sixteen, and there were
+matched pairs up to nineteen hundred. Lord, Lord, that was a year for
+horse-prices--blue sky, and then some."
+
+As Mr. Mendenhall rode away, a man, on a slender-legged, head-tossing
+Palomina, rode up to them and was introduced to Graham as Mr.
+Hennessy, the ranch veterinary.
+
+"I heard Mrs. Forrest was looking over the colts," he explained to his
+employer, "and I rode across to give her a glance at The Fawn here.
+She'll be riding her in less than a week. What horse is she on to-day?"
+
+"The Fop," Dick replied, as if expecting the comment that was prompt
+as the disapproving shake of Mr. Hennessy's head.
+
+"I can never become converted to women riding stallions," muttered the
+veterinary. "The Fop is dangerous. Worse--though I take my hat off to
+his record--he's malicious and vicious. She--Mrs. Forrest ought to
+ride him with a muzzle--but he's a striker as well, and I don't see
+how she can put cushions on his hoofs."
+
+"Oh, well," Dick placated, "she has a bit that _is_ a bit in his
+mouth, and she's not afraid to use it--"
+
+"If he doesn't fall over on her some day," Mr. Hennessy grumbled.
+"Anyway, I'll breathe easier when she takes to The Fawn here. Now
+_she's_ a lady's mount--all the spirit in the world, but nothing
+vicious. She's a sweet mare, a sweet mare, and she'll steady down from
+her friskiness. But she'll always be a gay handful--no riding academy
+proposition."
+
+"Let's ride over," Dick suggested. "Mrs. Forrest'll have a gay handful
+in The Fop if she's ridden him into that bunch of younglings.--It's
+her territory, you know," he elucidated to Graham. "All the house
+horses and lighter stock is her affair. And she gets grand results. I
+can't understand it, myself. It's like a little girl straying into an
+experimental laboratory of high explosives and mixing the stuff around
+any old way and getting more powerful combinations than the graybeard
+chemists."
+
+The three men took a cross-ranch road for half a mile, turned up a
+wooded canyon where ran a spring-trickle of stream, and emerged on a
+wide rolling terrace rich in pasture. Graham's first glimpse was of a
+background of many curious yearling and two-year-old colts, against
+which, in the middleground, he saw his hostess, on the back of the
+bright bay thoroughbred, The Fop, who, on hind legs, was striking his
+forefeet in the air and squealing shrilly. They reined in their mounts
+and watched.
+
+"He'll get her yet," the veterinary muttered morosely. "That Fop isn't
+safe."
+
+But at that moment Paula Forrest, unaware of her audience, with a
+sharp cry of command and a cavalier thrust of sharp spurs into The
+Fop's silken sides, checked him down to four-footedness on the ground
+and a restless, champing quietness.
+
+"Taking chances?" Dick mildly reproached her, as the three rode up.
+
+"Oh, I can manage him," she breathed between tight teeth, as, with
+ears back and vicious-gleaming eyes, The Fop bared his teeth in a bite
+that would have been perilously near to Graham's leg had she not
+reined the brute abruptly away across the neck and driven both spurs
+solidly into his sides.
+
+The Fop quivered, squealed, and for the moment stood still.
+
+"It's the old game, the white man's game," Dick laughed. "She's not
+afraid of him, and he knows it. She outgames him, out-savages him,
+teaches him what savagery is in its intimate mood and tense."
+
+Three times, while they looked on, ready to whirl their own steeds
+away if he got out of hand, The Fop attempted to burst into rampage,
+and three times, solidly, with careful, delicate hand on the bitter
+bit, Paula Forrest dealt him double spurs in the ribs, till he stood,
+sweating, frothing, fretting, beaten, and in hand.
+
+"It's the way the white man has always done," Dick moralized, while
+Graham suffered a fluttery, shivery sensation of admiration of the
+beast-conquering Little Lady. "He's out-savaged the savage the world
+around," Dick went on. "He's out-endured him, out-filthed him, out-
+scalped him, out-tortured him, out-eaten him--yes, out-eaten him. It's
+a fair wager that the white man, in extremis, has eaten more of the
+genus homo, than the savage, in extremis, has eaten."
+
+"Good afternoon," Paula greeted her guest, the ranch veterinary, and
+her husband. "I think I've got him now. Let's look over the colts.
+Just keep an eye, Mr. Graham, on his mouth. He's a dreadful snapper.
+Ride free from him, and you'll save your leg for old age."
+
+Now that The Fop's demonstration was over, the colts, startled into
+flight by some impish spirit amongst them, galloped and frisked away
+over the green turf, until, curious again, they circled back, halted
+at gaze, and then, led by one particularly saucy chestnut filly, drew
+up in half a circle before the riders, with alert pricking ears.
+
+Graham scarcely saw the colts at first. He was seeing his protean
+hostess in a new role. Would her proteanness never end? he wondered,
+as he glanced over the magnificent, sweating, mastered creature she
+bestrode. Mountain Lad, despite his hugeness, was a mild-mannered pet
+beside this squealing, biting, striking Fop who advertised all the
+spirited viciousness of the most spirited vicious thoroughbred.
+
+"Look at her," Paula whispered to Dick, in order not to alarm the
+saucy chestnut filly. "Isn't she wonderful! That's what I've been
+working for." Paula turned to Evan. "Always they have some fault, some
+miss, at the best an approximation rather than an achievement. But
+she's an achievement. Look at her. She's as near right as I shall
+probably ever get. Her sire is Big Chief, if you know our racing
+register. He sold for sixty thousand when he was a cripple. We
+borrowed the use of him. She was his only get of the season. But look
+at her! She's got his chest and lungs. I had my choices--mares
+eligible for the register. Her dam wasn't eligible, but I chose her.
+She was an obstinate old maid, but she was the one mare for Big Chief.
+This is her first foal and she was eighteen years old when she bred.
+But I knew it was there. All I had to do was to look at Big Chief and
+her, and it just had to be there."
+
+"The dam was only half thoroughbred," Dick explained.
+
+"But with a lot of Morgan on the other side," Paula added instantly,
+"and a streak along the back of mustang. This shall be called Nymph,
+even if she has no place in the books. She'll be my first
+unimpeachable perfect saddle horse--I know it--the kind I like--my
+dream come true at last."
+
+"A hoss has four legs, one on each corner," Mr. Hennessy uttered
+profoundly.
+
+"And from five to seven gaits," Graham took up lightly,
+
+"And yet I don't care for those many-gaited Kentuckians," Paula said
+quickly, "--except for park work. But for California, rough roads,
+mountain trails, and all the rest, give me the fast walk, the fox
+trot, the long trot that covers the ground, and the not too-long,
+ground-covering gallop. Of course, the close-coupled, easy canter; but
+I scarcely call that a gait--it's no more than the long lope reduced
+to the adjustment of wind or rough ground."
+
+"She's a beauty," Dick admired, his eyes warm in contemplation of the
+saucy chestnut filly, who was daringly close and alertly sniffing of
+the subdued Fop's tremulous and nostril-dilated muzzle.
+
+"I prefer my own horses to be near thoroughbred rather than all
+thoroughbred," Paula proclaimed. "The running horse has its place on
+the track, but it's too specialized for mere human use."
+
+"Nicely coupled," Mr. Hennessy said, indicating the Nymph. "Short
+enough for good running and long enough for the long trot. I'll admit
+I didn't have any faith in the combination; but you've got a grand
+animal out of it just the same."
+
+"I didn't have horses when I was a young girl," Paula said to Graham;
+"and the fact that I can now not only have them but breed them and
+mold them to my heart's desire is always too good to be true.
+Sometimes I can't believe it myself, and have to ride out and look
+them over to make sure."
+
+She turned her head and raised her eyes gratefully to Forrest; and
+Graham watched them look into each other's eyes for a long half-
+minute. Forrest's pleasure in his wife's pleasure, in her young
+enthusiasm and joy of life, was clear to Graham's observation. "Lucky
+devil," was Graham's thought, not because of his host's vast ranch and
+the success and achievement of it, but because of the possession of a
+wonder-woman who could look unabashed and appreciative into his eyes
+as the Little Lady had looked.
+
+Graham was meditating, with skepticism, Ernestine's information that
+Paula Forrest was thirty-eight, when she turned to the colts and
+pointed her riding whip at a black yearling nibbling at the spring
+green.
+
+"Look at that level rump, Dick," she said, "and those trotting feet
+and pasterns." And, to Graham: "Rather different from Nymph's long
+wrists, aren't they? But they're just what I was after." She laughed a
+little, with just a shade of annoyance. "The dam was a bright sorrel--
+almost like a fresh-minted twenty-dollar piece--and I did so want a
+pair out of her, of the same color, for my own trap. Well, I can't say
+that I exactly got them, although I bred her to a splendid, sorrel
+trotting horse. And this is my reward, this black--and, wait till we
+get to the brood mares and you'll see the other, a full brother and
+mahogany brown. I'm so disappointed."
+
+She singled out a pair of dark bays, feeding together: "Those are two
+of Guy Dillon's get--brother, you know, to Lou Dillon. They're out of
+different mares, not quite the same bay, but aren't they splendidly
+matched? And they both have Guy Dillon's coat."
+
+She moved her subdued steed on, skirting the flank of the herd quietly
+in order not to alarm it; but a number of colts took flight.
+
+"Look at them!" she cried. "Five, there, are hackneys. Look at the
+lift of their fore-legs as they run."
+
+"I'll be terribly disappointed if you don't get a prize-winning four-
+in-hand out of them," Dick praised, and brought again the flash of
+grateful eyes that hurt Graham as he noted it.
+
+"Two are out of heavier mares--see that one in the middle and the one
+on the far left--and there's the other three to pick from for the
+leaders. Same sire, five different dams, and a matched and balanced
+four, out of five choices, all in the same season, is a stroke of
+luck, isn't it?"
+
+She turned quickly to Mr. Hennessy: "I can begin to see the ones that
+will have to sell for polo ponies--among the two-year-olds. You can
+pick them."
+
+"If Mr. Mendenhall doesn't sell that strawberry roan for a clean
+fifteen hundred, it'll be because polo has gone out of fashion," the
+veterinary approved, with waxing enthusiasm. "I've had my eye on them.
+That pale sorrel, there. You remember his set-back. Give him an extra
+year and he'll--look at his coupling!--watch him turn!--a cow-skin?--
+he'll turn on a silver dollar! Give him a year to make up, and he'll
+stand a show for the international. Listen to me. I've had my faith in
+him from the beginning. Cut out that Burlingame crowd. When he's ripe,
+ship him straight East."
+
+Paula nodded and listened to Mr. Hennessy's judgment, her eyes
+kindling with his in the warmth of the sight of the abounding young
+life for which she was responsible.
+
+"It always hurts, though," she confessed to Graham, "selling such
+beauties to have them knocked out on the field so quickly."
+
+Her sheer absorption in the animals robbed her speech of any hint of
+affectation or show--so much so, that Dick was impelled to praise her
+judgment to Evan.
+
+"I can dig through a whole library of horse practice, and muddle and
+mull over the Mendelian Law until I'm dizzy, like the clod that I am;
+but she is the genius. She doesn't have to study law. She just knows
+it in some witch-like, intuitional way. All she has to do is size up a
+bunch of mares with her eyes, and feel them over a little with her
+hands, and hunt around till she finds the right sires, and get pretty
+nearly what she wants in the result--except color, eh, Paul?" he
+teased.
+
+She showed her laughing teeth in the laugh at her expense, in which
+Mr. Hennessy joined, and Dick continued: "Look at that filly there. We
+all knew Paula was wrong. But look at it! She bred a rickety old
+thoroughbred, that we wanted to put out of her old age, to a standard
+stallion; got a filly; bred it back with a thoroughbred; bred its
+filly foal with the same standard again; knocked all our
+prognostications into a cocked hat, and--well, look at it, a world-
+beater polo pony. There is one thing we have to take off our hats to
+her for: she doesn't let any woman sentimentality interfere with her
+culling. Oh, she's cold-blooded enough. She's as remorseless as any
+man when it comes to throwing out the undesirables and selecting for
+what she wants. But she hasn't mastered color yet. There's where her
+genius falls down, eh, Paul? You'll have to put up with Duddy and
+Fuddy for a while longer for your trap. By the way, how is Duddy?"
+
+"He's come around," she answered, "thanks to Mr. Hennessy."
+
+"Nothing serious," the veterinarian added. "He was just off his feed a
+trifle. It was more a scare of the stableman than anything else."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+
+From the colt pasture to the swimming tank Graham talked with his
+hostess and rode as nearly beside her as The Fop's wickedness
+permitted, while Dick and Hennessy, on ahead, were deep in ranch
+business.
+
+"Insomnia has been a handicap all my life," she said, while she
+tickled The Fop with a spur in order to check a threatened
+belligerence. "But I early learned to keep the irritation of it off my
+nerves and the weight of it off my mind. In fact, I early came to make
+a function of it and actually to derive enjoyment from it. It was the
+only way to master a thing I knew would persist as long as I
+persisted. Have you--of course you have--learned to win through an
+undertow?"
+
+"Yes, by never fighting it," Graham answered, his eyes on the spray of
+color in her cheeks and the tiny beads of sweat that arose from her
+continuous struggle with the high-strung creature she rode. Thirty-
+eight! He wondered if Ernestine had lied. Paula Forrest did not look
+twenty-eight. Her skin was the skin of a girl, with all the delicate,
+fine-pored and thin transparency of the skin of a girl.
+
+"Exactly," she went on. "By not fighting the undertow. By yielding to
+its down-drag and out-drag, and working with it to reach air again.
+Dick taught me that trick. So with my insomnia. If it is excitement
+from immediate events that holds me back from the City of Sleep, I
+yield to it and come quicker to unconsciousness from out the
+entangling currents. I invite my soul to live over again, from the
+same and different angles, the things that keep me from
+unconsciousness.
+
+"Take the swimming of Mountain Lad yesterday. I lived it over last
+night as I had lived it in reality. Then I lived it as a spectator--as
+the girls saw it, as you saw it, as the cowboy saw it, and, most of
+all, as my husband saw it. Then I made up a picture of it, many
+pictures of it, from all angles, and painted them, and framed them,
+and hung them, and then, a spectator, looked at them as if for the
+first time. And I made myself many kinds of spectators, from crabbed
+old maids and lean pantaloons to girls in boarding school and Greek
+boys of thousands of years ago.
+
+"After that I put it to music. I played it on the piano, and guessed
+the playing of it on full orchestras and blaring bands. I chanted it,
+I sang it-epic, lyric, comic; and, after a weary long while, of course
+I slept in the midst of it, and knew not that I slept until I awoke at
+twelve to-day. The last time I had heard the clock strike was six. Six
+unbroken hours is a capital prize for me in the sleep lottery."
+
+As she finished, Mr. Hennessy rode away on a cross path, and Dick
+Forrest dropped back to squire his wife on the other side.
+
+"Will you sport a bet, Evan?" he queried.
+
+"I'd like to hear the terms of it first," was the answer.
+
+"Cigars against cigars that you can't catch Paula in the tank inside
+ten minutes--no, inside five, for I remember you're some swimmer."
+
+"Oh, give him a chance, Dick," Paula cried generously. "Ten minutes
+will worry him."
+
+"But you don't know him," Dicked argued. "And you don't value my
+cigars. I tell you he is a swimmer. He's drowned kanakas, and you know
+what that means."
+
+"Perhaps I should reconsider. Maybe he'll slash a killing crawl-stroke
+at me before I've really started. Tell me his history and prizes."
+
+"I'll just tell you one thing. They still talk of it in the Marquesas.
+It was the big hurricane of 1892. He did forty miles in forty-five
+hours, and only he and one other landed on the land. And they were all
+kanakas. He was the only white man; yet he out-endured and drowned the
+last kanaka of them--"
+
+"I thought you said there was one other?" Paula interrupted.
+
+"She was a woman," Dick answered. "He drowned the last kanaka."
+
+"And the woman was then a white woman?" Paula insisted.
+
+Graham looked quickly at her, and although she had asked the question
+of her husband, her head turned to the turn of his head, so that he
+found her eyes meeting his straightly and squarely in interrogation.
+Graham held her gaze with equal straightness as he answered: "She was
+a kanaka."
+
+"A queen, if you please," Dick took up. "A queen out of the ancient
+chief stock. She was Queen of Huahoa."
+
+"Was it the chief stock that enabled her to out-endure the native
+men?" Paula asked. "Or did you help her?"
+
+"I rather think we helped each other toward the end," Graham replied.
+"We were both out of our heads for short spells and long spells.
+Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, that was all in. We made
+the land at sunset--that is, a wall of iron coast, with the surf
+bursting sky-high. She took hold of me and clawed me in the water to
+get some sense in me. You see, I wanted to go in, which would have
+meant finish.
+
+"She got me to understand that she knew where she was; that the
+current set westerly along shore and in two hours would drift us
+abreast of a spot where we could land. I swear I either slept or was
+unconscious most of those two hours; and I swear she was in one state
+or the other when I chanced to come to and noted the absence of the
+roar of the surf. Then it was my turn to claw and maul her back to
+consciousness. It was three hours more before we made the sand. We
+slept where we crawled out of the water. Next morning's sun burnt us
+awake, and we crept into the shade of some wild bananas, found fresh
+water, and went to sleep again. Next I awoke it was night. I took
+another drink, and slept through till morning. She was still asleep
+when the bunch of kanakas, hunting wild goats from the next valley,
+found us."
+
+"I'll wager, for a man who drowned a whole kanaka crew, it was you who
+did the helping," Dick commented.
+
+"She must have been forever grateful," Paula challenged, her eyes
+directly on Graham's. "Don't tell me she wasn't young, wasn't
+beautiful, wasn't a golden brown young goddess."
+
+"Her mother was the Queen of Huahoa," Graham answered. "Her father was
+a Greek scholar and an English gentleman. They were dead at the time
+of the swim, and Nomare was queen herself. She _was_ young. She
+was beautiful as any woman anywhere in the world may be beautiful.
+Thanks to her father's skin, she as not golden brown. She was tawny
+golden. But you've heard the story undoubtedly--"
+
+He broke off with a look of question to Dick, who shook his head.
+
+Calls and cries and splashings of water from beyond a screen of trees
+warned them that they were near the tank.
+
+"You'll have to tell me the rest of the story some time," Paula said.
+
+"Dick knows it. I can't see why he hasn't told you."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Perhaps because he's never had the time or the provocation."
+
+"God wot, it's had wide circulation," Graham laughed. "For know that I
+was once morganatic--or whatever you call it--king of the cannibal
+isles, or of a paradise of a Polynesian isle at any rate.--'By a
+purple wave on an opal beach in the hush of the Mahim woods,'" he
+hummed carelessly, in conclusion, and swung off from his horse.
+
+"'The white moth to the closing vine, the bee to the opening clover,'"
+she hummed another line of the song, while The Fop nearly got his
+teeth into her leg and she straightened him out with the spur, and
+waited for Dick to help her off and tie him.
+
+"Cigars!--I'm in on that!--you can't catch her!" Bert Wainwright
+called from the top of the high dive forty feet above. "Wait a minute!
+I'm coming!"
+
+And come he did, in a swan dive that was almost professional and that
+brought handclapping approval from the girls.
+
+"A sweet dive, balanced beautifully," Graham told him as he emerged
+from the tank.
+
+Bert tried to appear unconscious of the praise, failed, and, to pass
+it off, plunged into the wager.
+
+"I don't know what kind of a swimmer you are, Graham," he said, "but I
+just want in with Dick on the cigars."
+
+"Me, too; me, too!" chorused Ernestine, and Lute, and Rita.
+
+"Boxes of candy, gloves, or any truck you care to risk," Ernestine
+added.
+
+"But I don't know Mrs. Forrest's records, either," Graham protested,
+after having taken on the bets. "However, if in five minutes--"
+
+"Ten minutes," Paula said, "and to start from opposite ends of the
+tank. Is that fair? Any touch is a catch." Graham looked his hostess
+over with secret approval. She was clad, not in the single white silk
+slip she evidently wore only for girl parties, but in a coquettish
+imitation of the prevailing fashion mode, a suit of changeable light
+blue and green silk--almost the color of the pool; the skirt slightly
+above the knees whose roundedness he recognized; with long stockings
+to match, and tiny bathing shoes bound on with crossed ribbons. On her
+head was a jaunty swimming cap no jauntier than herself when she urged
+the ten minutes in place of five.
+
+Rita Wainwright held the watch, while Graham walked down to the other
+end of the hundred-and-fifty-foot tank.
+
+"Paula, you'll be caught if you take any chances," Dick warned. "Evan
+Graham is a real fish man."
+
+"I guess Paula'll show him a few, even without the pipe," Bert bragged
+loyally. "And I'll bet she can out-dive him."
+
+"There you lose," Dick answered. "I saw the rock he dived from at
+Huahoa. That was after his time, and after the death of Queen Nomare.
+He was only a youngster--twenty-two; he had to be to do it. It was off
+the peak of the Pau-wi Rock--one hundred and twenty-eight feet by
+triangulation. And he couldn't do it legitimately or technically with
+a swan-dive, because he had to clear two lower ledges while he was in
+the air. The upper ledge of the two, by their own traditions, was the
+highest the best of the kanakas had ever dared since their traditions
+began. Well, he did it. He became tradition. As long as the kanakas of
+Huahoa survive he will remain tradition--Get ready, Rita. Start on the
+full minute."
+
+"It's almost a shame to play tricks on so reputable a swimmer," Paula
+confided to them, as she faced her guest down the length of the tank
+and while both waited the signal.
+
+"He may get you before you can turn the trick," Dick warned again. And
+then, to Bert, with just a shade of anxiety: "Is it working all right?
+Because if it isn't, Paula will have a bad five seconds getting out of
+it."
+
+"All O.K.," Bert assured. "I went in myself. The pipe is working.
+There's plenty of air."
+
+"Ready!" Rita called. "Go!"
+
+Graham ran toward their end like a foot-racer, while Paula darted up
+the high dive. By the time she had gained the top platform, his hands
+and feet were on the lower rungs. When he was half-way up she
+threatened a dive, compelling him to cease from climbing and to get
+out on the twenty-foot platform ready to follow her to the water.
+Whereupon she laughed down at him and did not dive. "Time is passing--
+the precious seconds are ticking off," Ernestine chanted.
+
+When he started to climb, Paula again chased him to the half-way
+platform with a threat to dive. But not many seconds did Graham waste.
+His next start was determined, and Paula, poised for her dive, could
+not send him scuttling back. He raced upward to gain the thirty-foot
+platform before she should dive, and she was too wise to linger. Out
+into space she launched, head back, arms bent, hands close to chest,
+legs straight and close together, her body balanced horizontally on
+the air as it fell outward and downward.
+
+"Oh you Annette Kellerman!" Bert Wamwright's admiring cry floated up.
+
+Graham ceased pursuit to watch the completion of the dive, and saw his
+hostess, a few feet above the water, bend her head forward, straighten
+out her arms and lock the hands to form the arch before her head, and,
+so shifting the balance of her body, change it from the horizontal to
+the perfect, water-cleaving angle.
+
+The moment she entered the water, he swung out on the thirty-foot
+platform and waited. From this height he could make out her body
+beneath the surface swimming a full stroke straight for the far end of
+the tank. Not till then did he dive. He was confident that he could
+outspeed her, and his dive, far and flat, entered him in the water
+twenty feet beyond her entrance.
+
+But at the instant he was in, Dick dipped two flat rocks into the
+water and struck them together. This was the signal for Paula to
+change her course. Graham heard the concussion and wondered. He broke
+surface in the full swing of the crawl and went down the tank to the
+far end at a killing pace. He pulled himself out and watched the
+surface of the tank. A burst of handclapping from the girls drew his
+eyes to the Little Lady drawing herself out of the tank at the other
+end.
+
+Again he ran down the side of the tank, and again she climbed the
+scaffold. But this time his wind and endurance enabled him to cut down
+her lead, so that she was driven to the twenty-foot platform. She took
+no time for posturing or swanning, but tilted immediately off in a
+stiff dive, angling toward the west side of the tank. Almost they were
+in the air at the same time. In the water and under it, he could feel
+against his face and arms the agitation left by her progress; but she
+led into the deep shadow thrown by the low afternoon sun, where the
+water was so dark he could see nothing.
+
+When he touched the side of the tank he came up. She was not in sight.
+He drew himself out, panting, and stood ready to dive in at the first
+sign of her. But there were no signs.
+
+"Seven minutes!" Rita called. "And a half! ... Eight!... And a half!"
+
+And no Paula Forrest broke surface. Graham refused to be alarmed
+because he could see no alarm on the faces of the others.
+
+"I lose," he announced at Rita's "Nine minutes!"
+
+"She's been under over two minutes, and you're all too blessed calm
+about it to get me excited," he said. "I've still a minute--maybe I
+don't lose," he added quickly, as he stepped off feet first into the
+tank.
+
+As he went down he turned over and explored the cement wall of tank
+with his hands. Midway, possibly ten feet under the surface he
+estimated, his hands encountered an opening in the wall. He felt
+about, learned it Was unscreened, and boldly entered. Almost before he
+was in, he found he could come up; but he came up slowly, breaking
+surface in pitchy blackness and feeling about him without splashing.
+
+His fingers touched a cool smooth arm that shrank convulsively at
+contact while the possessor of it cried sharply with the startle of
+fright. He held on tightly and began to laugh, and Paula laughed with
+him. A line from "The First Chanty" flashed into his consciousness--
+"_Hearing her laugh in the gloom greatly I loved her._"
+
+"You did frighten me when you touched me," she said. "You came without
+a sound, and I was a thousand miles away, dreaming..."
+
+"What?" Graham asked.
+
+"Well, honestly, I had just got an idea for a gown--a dusty, musty,
+mulberry-wine velvet, with long, close lines, and heavy, tarnished
+gold borders and cords and things. And the only jewelery a ring--one
+enormous pigeon-blood ruby that Dick gave me years ago when we sailed
+the _All Away_."
+
+"Is there anything you don't do?" he laughed.
+
+She joined with him, and their mirth sounded strangely hollow in the
+pent and echoing dark.
+
+"Who told you?" she next asked.
+
+"No one. After you had been under two minutes I knew it had to be
+something like this, and I came exploring."
+
+"It was Dick's idea. He had it built into the tank afterward. You will
+find him full of whimsies. He delighted in scaring old ladies into
+fits by stepping off into the tank with their sons or grandsons and
+hiding away in here. But after one or two nearly died of shock--old
+ladies, I mean--he put me up, as to-day, to fooling hardier persons
+like yourself.--Oh, he had another accident. There was a Miss
+Coghlan, friend of Ernestine, a little seminary girl. They artfully
+stood her right beside the pipe that leads out, and Dick went off the
+high dive and swam in here to the inside end of the pipe. After
+several minutes, by the time she was in collapse over his drowning, he
+spoke up the pipe to her in most horrible, sepulchral tones. And right
+there Miss Coghlan fainted dead away."
+
+"She must have been a weak sister," Graham commented; while he
+struggled with a wanton desire for a match so that he could strike it
+and see how Paula Forrest looked paddling there beside him to keep
+afloat.
+
+"She had a fair measure of excuse," Paula answered. "She was a young
+thing--eighteen; and she had a sort of school-girl infatuation for
+Dick. They all get it. You see, he's such a boy when he's playing that
+they can't realize that he's a hard-bitten, hard-working, deep-
+thinking, mature, elderly benedict. The embarrassing thing was that
+the little girl, when she was first revived and before she could
+gather her wits, exposed all her secret heart. Dick's face was a study
+while she babbled her--"
+
+"Well?--going to stay there all night?" Bert Wainwright's voice came
+down the pipe, sounding megaphonically close.
+
+"Heavens!" Graham sighed with relief; for he had startled and clutched
+Paula's arm. "That's the time I got my fright. The little maiden is
+avenged. Also, at last, I know what a lead-pipe cinch is."
+
+"And it's time we started for the outer world," she suggested. "It's
+not the coziest gossiping place in the world. Shall I go first?"
+
+"By all means--and I'll be right behind; although it's a pity the
+water isn't phosphorescent. Then I could follow your incandescent heel
+like that chap Byron wrote about--don't you remember?"
+
+He heard her appreciative gurgle in the dark, and then her: "Well, I'm
+going now."
+
+Unable to see the slightest glimmer, nevertheless, from the few sounds
+she made he knew she had turned over and gone down head first, and he
+was not beyond visioning with inner sight the graceful way in which
+she had done it--an anything but graceful feat as the average swimming
+woman accomplishes it.
+
+"Somebody gave it away to you," was Bert's prompt accusal, when Graham
+rose to the surface of the tank and climbed out.
+
+"And you were the scoundrel who rapped stone under water," Graham
+challenged. "If I'd lost I'd have protested the bet. It was a crooked
+game, a conspiracy, and competent counsel, I am confident, would
+declare it a felony. It's a case for the district attorney."
+
+"But you won," Ernestine cried.
+
+"I certainly did, and, therefore, I shall not prosecute you, nor any
+one of your crooked gang--if the bets are paid promptly. Let me see--
+you owe me a box of cigars--"
+
+"One cigar, sir!"
+
+"A box! A box!" "Cross tag!" Paula cried. "Let's play cross-tag!--
+You're IT!"
+
+Suiting action to word, she tagged Graham on the shoulder and plunged
+into the tank. Before he could follow, Bert seized him, whirled him in
+a circle, was himself tagged, and tagged Dick before he could escape.
+And while Dick pursued his wife through the tank and Bert and Graham
+sought a chance to cross, the girls fled up the scaffold and stood in
+an enticing row on the fifteen-foot diving platform.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+
+An indifferent swimmer, Donald Ware had avoided the afternoon sport in
+the tank; but after dinner, somewhat to the irritation of Graham, the
+violinist monopolized Paula at the piano. New guests, with the casual
+expectedness of the Big House, had drifted in--a lawyer, by name
+Adolph Well, who had come to confer with Dick over some big water-
+right suit; Jeremy Braxton, straight from Mexico, Dick's general
+superintendent of the Harvest Group, which bonanza, according to
+Jeremy Braxton, was as "unpetering" as ever; Edwin O'Hay, a red-headed
+Irish musical and dramatic critic; and Chauncey Bishop, editor and
+owner of the _San Francisco Dispatch_, and a member of Dick's
+class and frat, as Graham gleaned.
+
+Dick had started a boisterous gambling game which he called "Horrible
+Fives," wherein, although excitement ran high and players plunged, the
+limit was ten cents, and, on a lucky coup, the transient banker might
+win or lose as high as ninety cents, such coup requiring at least ten
+minutes to play out. This game went on at a big table at the far end
+of the room, accompanied by much owing and borrowing of small sums and
+an incessant clamor for change.
+
+With nine players, the game was crowded, and Graham, rather than draw
+cards, casually and occasionally backed Ernestine's cards, the while
+he glanced down the long room at the violinist and Paula Forrest
+absorbed in Beethoven Symphonies and Delibes' Ballets. Jeremy Braxton
+was demanding raising the limit to twenty cents, and Dick, the
+heaviest loser, as he averred, to the tune of four dollars and sixty
+cents, was plaintively suggesting the starting of a "kitty" in order
+that some one should pay for the lights and the sweeping out of the
+place in the morning, when Graham, with a profound sigh at the loss of
+his last bet--a nickel which he had had to pay double--announced to
+Ernestine that he was going to take a turn around the room to change
+his luck.
+
+"I prophesied you would," she told him under her breath.
+
+"What?" he asked.
+
+She glanced significantly in Paula's direction.
+
+"Just for that I simply must go down there now," he retorted.
+
+"Can't dast decline a dare," she taunted.
+
+"If it were a dare I wouldn't dare do it."
+
+"In which case I dare you," she took up.
+
+He shook his head: "I had already made up my mind to go right down
+there to that one spot and cut that fiddler out of the running. You
+can't dare me out of it at this late stage. Besides, there's Mr. O'Hay
+waiting for you to make your bet."
+
+Ernestine rashly laid ten cents, and scarcely knew whether she won or
+lost, so intent was she on watching Graham go down the room, although
+she did know that Bert Wainwright had not been unobservant of her gaze
+and its direction. On the other hand, neither she nor Bert, nor any
+other at the table, knew that Dick's quick-glancing eyes, sparkling
+with merriment while his lips chaffed absurdities that made them all
+laugh, had missed no portion of the side play.
+
+Ernestine, but little taller than Paula, although hinting of a plus
+roundness to come, was a sun-healthy, clear blonde, her skin sprayed
+with the almost transparent flush of maidenhood at eighteen. To the
+eye, it seemed almost that one could see through the pink daintiness
+of fingers, hand, wrist, and forearm, neck and cheek. And to this
+delicious transparency of rose and pink, was added a warmth of tone
+that did not escape Dick's eyes as he glimpsed her watch Evan Graham
+move down the length of room. Dick knew and classified her wild
+imagined dream or guess, though the terms of it were beyond his
+divination.
+
+What she saw was what she imagined was the princely walk of Graham,
+the high, light, blooded carriage of his head, the delightful
+carelessness of the gold-burnt, sun-sanded hair that made her fingers
+ache to be into with caresses she for the first time knew were
+possible of her fingers.
+
+Nor did Paula, during an interval of discussion with the violinist in
+which she did not desist from stating her criticism of O'Hay's latest
+criticism of Harold Bauer, fail to see and keep her eyes on Graham's
+progress. She, too, noted with pleasure his grace of movement, the
+high, light poise of head, the careless hair, the clear bronze of the
+smooth cheeks, the splendid forehead, the long gray eyes with the hint
+of drooping lids and boyish sullenness that fled before the smile with
+which he greeted her.
+
+She had observed that smile often since her first meeting with him. It
+was an irresistible smile, a smile that lighted the eyes with the
+radiance of good fellowship and that crinkled the corners into tiny,
+genial lines. It was provocative of smiles, for she found herself
+smiling a silent greeting in return as she continued stating to Ware
+her grievance against O'Hay's too-complacent praise of Bauer.
+
+But her engagement was tacitly with Donald Ware at the piano, and with
+no more than passing speech, she was off and away in a series of
+Hungarian dances that made Graham marvel anew as he loafed and smoked
+in a window-seat.
+
+He marveled at the proteanness of her, at visions of those nimble
+fingers guiding and checking The Fop, swimming and paddling in
+submarine crypts, and, falling in swan-like flight through forty feet
+of air, locking just above the water to make the diver's head-
+protecting arch of arm.
+
+In decency, he lingered but few minutes, returned to the gamblers, and
+put the entire table in a roar with a well-acted Yiddisher's chagrin
+and passion at losing entire nickels every few minutes to the
+fortunate and chesty mine superintendent from Mexico.
+
+Later, when the game of Horrible Fives broke up, Bert and Lute Desten
+spoiled the Adagio from Beethoven's _Sonata Pathetique_ by
+exaggeratedly ragging to it in what Dick immediately named "The Loving
+Slow-Drag," till Paula broke down in a gale of laughter and ceased
+from playing.
+
+New groupings occurred. A bridge table formed with Weil, Rita, Bishop,
+and Dick. Donald Ware was driven from his monopoly of Paula by the
+young people under the leadership of Jeremy Braxton; while Graham and
+O'Hay paired off in a window-seat and O'Hay talked shop.
+
+After a time, in which all at the piano had sung Hawaiian
+_hulas_, Paula sang alone to her own accompaniment. She sang
+several German love-songs in succession, although it was merely for
+the group about her and not for the room; and Evan Graham, almost to
+his delight, decided that at last he had found a weakness in her. She
+might be a magnificent pianist, horsewoman, diver, and swimmer, but it
+was patent, despite her singing throat, that she was not a magnificent
+singer. This conclusion he was quickly compelled to modify. A singer
+she was, a consummate singer. Weakness was only comparative after all.
+She lacked the magnificent voice. It was a sweet voice, a rich voice,
+with the same warm-fibered thrill of her laugh; but the volume so
+essential to the great voice was not there. Ear and voice seemed
+effortlessly true, and in her singing were feeling, artistry,
+training, intelligence. But volume--it was scarcely a fair average,
+was his judgment.
+
+But quality--there he halted. It was a woman's voice. It was haunted
+with richness of sex. In it resided all the temperament in the world--
+with all the restraint of discipline, was the next step of his
+analysis. He had to admire the way she refused to exceed the
+limitations of her voice. In this she achieved triumphs.
+
+And, while he nodded absently to O'Hay's lecturette on the state of
+the--opera, Graham fell to wondering if Paula Forrest, thus so
+completely the mistress of her temperament, might not be equally
+mistress of her temperament in the deeper, passional ways. There was a
+challenge there--based on curiosity, he conceded, but only partly so
+based; and, over and beyond, and, deeper and far beneath, a challenge
+to a man made in the immemorial image of man.
+
+It was a challenge that bade him pause, and even look up and down the
+great room and to the tree-trunked roof far above, and to the flying
+gallery hung with the spoils of the world, and to Dick Forrest, master
+of all this material achievement and husband of the woman, playing
+bridge, just as he worked, with all his heart, his laughter ringing
+loud as he caught Rita in renig. For Graham had the courage not to
+shun the ultimate connotations. Behind the challenge in his
+speculations lurked the woman. Paula Forrest was splendidly,
+deliciously woman, all woman, unusually woman. From the blow between
+the eyes of his first striking sight of her, swimming the great
+stallion in the pool, she had continued to witch-ride his man's
+imagination. He was anything but unused to women; and his general
+attitude was that of being tired of the mediocre sameness of them. To
+chance upon the unusual woman was like finding the great pearl in a
+lagoon fished out by a generation of divers.
+
+"Glad to see you're still alive," Paula laughed to him, a little
+later.
+
+She was prepared to depart with Lute for bed. A second bridge quartet
+had been arranged--Ernestine, Bert, Jeremy Braxton, and Graham; while
+O'Hay and Bishop were already deep in a bout of two-handed pinochle.
+
+"He's really a charming Irishman when he keeps off his one string,"
+Paula went on.
+
+"Which, I think I am fair, is music," Graham said.
+
+"And on music he is insufferable," Lute observed. "It's the only thing
+he doesn't know the least thing about. He drives one frantic."
+
+"Never mind," Paula soothed, in gurgling tones. "You will all be
+avenged. Dick just whispered to me to get the philosophers up to-
+morrow night. You know how they talk music. A musical critic is their
+awful prey."
+
+"Terrence said the other night that there was no closed season on
+musical critics," Lute contributed.
+
+"Terrence and Aaron will drive him to drink," Paula laughed her joy of
+anticipation. "And Dar Hyal, alone, with his blastic theory of art,
+can specially apply it to music to the confutation of all the first
+words and the last. He doesn't believe a thing he says about blastism,
+any more than was he serious when he danced the other evening. It's
+his bit of fun. He's such a deep philosopher that he has to get his
+fun somehow."
+
+"And if O'Hay ever locks horns with Terrence," Lute prophesied, "I can
+see Terrence tucking arm in arm with him, leading him down to the stag
+room, and heating the argument with the absentest-minded variety of
+drinks that ever O'Hay accomplished."
+
+"Which means a very sick O'Hay next day," Paula continued her gurgles
+of anticipation.
+
+"I'll tell him to do it!" exclaimed Lute.
+
+"You mustn't think we're all bad," Paula protested to Graham. "It's
+just the spirit of the house. Dick likes it. He's always playing jokes
+himself. He relaxes that way. I'll wager, right now, it was Dick's
+suggestion, to Lute, and for Lute to carry out, for Terrence to get
+O'Hay into the stag room. Now, 'fess up, Lute."
+
+"Well, I will say," Lute answered with meticulous circumspection,
+"that the idea was not entirely original with me."
+
+At this point, Ernestine joined them and appropriated Graham with:
+
+"We're all waiting for you. We've cut, and you and I are partners.
+Besides, Paula's making her sleep noise. So say good night, and let
+her go."
+
+Paula had left for bed at ten o'clock. Not till one did the bridge
+break up. Dick, his arm about Ernestine in brotherly fashion, said
+good night to Graham where one of the divided ways led to the watch
+tower, and continued on with his pretty sister-in-law toward her
+quarters.
+
+"Just a tip, Ernestine," he said at parting, his gray eyes frankly and
+genially on hers, but his voice sufficiently serious to warn her.
+
+"What have I been doing now?" she pouted laughingly.
+
+"Nothing... as yet. But don't get started, or you'll be laying up a
+sore heart for yourself. You're only a kid yet--eighteen; and a darned
+nice, likable kid at that. Enough to make 'most any man sit up and
+take notice. But Evan Graham is not 'most any man--"
+
+"Oh, I can take care of myself," she blurted out in a fling of quick
+resentment.
+
+"But listen to me just the same. There comes a time in the affairs of
+a girl when the love-bee gets a buzzing with a very loud hum in her
+pretty noddle. Then is the time she mustn't make a mistake and start
+in loving the wrong man. You haven't fallen in love with Evan Graham
+yet, and all you have to do is just not to fall in love with him. He's
+not for you, nor for any young thing. He's an oldster, an ancient, and
+possibly has forgotten more about love, romantic love, and young
+things, than you'll ever learn in a dozen lives. If he ever marries
+again--"
+
+"Again!" Ernestine broke in.
+
+"Why, he's been a widower, my dear, for over fifteen years."
+
+"Then what of it?" she demanded defiantly.
+
+"Just this," Dick continued quietly. "He's lived the young-thing
+romance, and lived it wonderfully; and, from the fact that in fifteen
+years he has not married again, means--"
+
+"That he's never recovered from his loss?" Ernestine interpolated.
+"But that's no proof--"
+
+"--Means that he's got over his apprenticeship to wild young romance,"
+Dick held on steadily. "All you have to do is look at him and realize
+that he has not lacked opportunities, and that, on occasion, some very
+fine women, real wise women, mature women, have given him foot-races
+that tested his wind and endurance. But so far they've not succeeded
+in catching him. And as for young things, you know how filled the
+world is with them for a man like him. Think it over, and just keep
+your heart-thoughts away from him. If you don't let your heart start
+to warm toward him, it will save your heart from a grievous chill
+later on."
+
+He took one of her hands in his, and drew her against him, an arm
+soothingly about her shoulder. For several minutes of silence Dick
+idly speculated on what her thoughts might be.
+
+"You know, we hard-bitten old fellows--" he began half-apologetically,
+half-humorously.
+
+But she made a restless movement of distaste, and cried out:
+
+"Are the only ones worth while! The young men are all youngsters, and
+that's what's the matter with them. They're full of life, and coltish
+spirits, and dance, and song. But they're not serious. They're not
+big. They're not--oh, they don't give a girl that sense of all-
+wiseness, of proven strength, of, of... well, of manhood."
+
+"I understand," Dick murmured. "But please do not forget to glance at
+the other side of the shield. You glowing young creatures of women
+must affect the old fellows in precisely similar ways. They may look
+on you as toys, playthings, delightful things to whom to teach a few
+fine foolishnesses, but not as comrades, not as equals, not as
+sharers--full sharers. Life is something to be learned. They have
+learned it... some of it. But young things like you, Ernestine, have
+you learned any of it yet?"
+
+"Tell me," she asked abruptly, almost tragically, "about this wild
+young romance, about this young thing when he was young, fifteen years
+ago."
+
+"Fifteen?" Dick replied promptly. "Eighteen. They were married three
+years before she died. In fact--figure it out for yourself--they were
+actually married, by a Church of England dominie, and living in
+wedlock, about the same moment that you were squalling your first
+post-birth squalls in this world."
+
+"Yes, yes--go on," she urged nervously. "What was she like?"
+
+"She was a resplendent, golden-brown, or tan-golden half-caste, a
+Polynesian queen whose mother had been a queen before her, whose
+father was an Oxford man, an English gentleman, and a real scholar.
+Her name was Nomare. She was Queen of Huahoa. She was barbaric. He was
+young enough to out-barbaric her. There was nothing sordid in their
+marriage. He was no penniless adventurer. She brought him her island
+kingdom and forty thousand subjects. He brought to that island his
+fortune--and it was no inconsiderable fortune. He built a palace that
+no South Sea island ever possessed before or will ever possess again.
+It was the real thing, grass-thatched, hand-hewn beams that were
+lashed with cocoanut sennit, and all the rest. It was rooted in the
+island; it sprouted out of the island; it _belonged_, although he
+fetched Hopkins out from New York to plan it.
+
+"Heavens! they had their own royal yacht, their mountain house, their
+canoe house--the last a veritable palace in itself. I know. I have
+been at great feasts in it--though it was after their time. Nomare was
+dead, and no one knew where Graham was, and a king of collateral line
+was the ruler.
+
+"I told you he out-barbaricked her. Their dinner service was gold.--
+Oh, what's the use in telling any more. He was only a boy. She was
+half-English, half-Polynesian, and a really and truly queen. They were
+flowers of their races. They were a pair of wonderful children. They
+lived a fairy tale. And... well, Ernestine, the years have passed, and
+Evan Graham has passed from the realm of the young thing. It will be a
+remarkable woman that will ever infatuate him now. Besides, he's
+practically broke. Though he didn't wastrel his money. As much
+misfortune, and more, than anything else."
+
+"Paula would be more his kind," Ernestine said meditatively.
+
+"Yes, indeed," Dick agreed. "Paula, or any woman as remarkable as
+Paula, would attract him a thousand times more than all the sweet,
+young, lovely things like you in the world. We oldsters have our
+standards, you know."
+
+"And I'll have to put up with the youngsters," Ernestine sighed.
+
+"In the meantime, yes," he chuckled. "Remembering, always, that you,
+too, in time, may grow into the remarkable, mature woman, who can
+outfoot a man like Evan in a foot-race of love for possession."
+
+"But I shall be married long before that," she pouted.
+
+"Which will be your good fortune, my dear. And, now, good night. And
+you are not angry with me?"
+
+She smiled pathetically and shook her head, put up her lips to be
+kissed, then said as they parted:
+
+"I promise not to be angry if you will only show me the way that in
+the end will lead me to ancient graybeards like you and Graham."
+
+Dick Forrest, turning off lights as he went, penetrated the library,
+and, while selecting half a dozen reference volumes on mechanics and
+physics, smiled as if pleased with himself at recollection of the
+interview with his sister-in-law. He was confident that he had spoken
+in time and not a moment too soon. But, half way up the book-concealed
+spiral staircase that led to his work room, a remark of Ernestine,
+echoing in his consciousness, made him stop from very suddenness to
+lean his shoulder against the wall.--_"Paula would be more his
+kind."_
+
+"Silly ass!" he laughed aloud, continuing on his way. "And married a
+dozen years!"
+
+Nor did he think again about it, until, in bed, on his sleeping porch,
+he took a glance at his barometers and thermometers, and prepared to
+settle down to the solution of the electrical speculation that had
+been puzzling him. Then it was, as he peered across the great court to
+his wife's dark wing and dark sleeping porch to see if she were still
+waking, that Ernestine's remark again echoed. He dismissed it with a
+"Silly ass!" of scorn, lighted a cigarette, and began running, with
+trained eye, the indexes of the books and marking the pages sought
+with matches.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+
+It was long after ten in the morning, when Graham, straying about
+restlessly and wondering if Paula Forrest ever appeared before the
+middle of the day, wandered into the music room. Despite the fact that
+he was a several days' guest in the Big House, so big was it that the
+music room was new territory. It was an exquisite room, possibly
+thirty-five by sixty and rising to a lofty trussed ceiling where a
+warm golden light was diffused from a skylight of yellow glass. Red
+tones entered largely into the walls and furnishing, and the place, to
+him, seemed to hold the hush of music.
+
+Graham was lazily contemplating a Keith with its inevitable triumph of
+sun-gloried atmosphere and twilight-shadowed sheep, when, from the
+tail of his eye, he saw his hostess come in from the far entrance.
+Again, the sight of her, that was a picture, gave him the little
+catch-breath of gasp. She was clad entirely in white, and looked very
+young and quite tall in the sweeping folds of a _holoku_ of
+elaborate simplicity and apparent shapelessness. He knew the
+_holoku_ in the home of its origin, where, on the _lanais_
+of Hawaii, it gave charm to a plain woman and double-folded the charm
+of a charming woman.
+
+While they smiled greeting across the room, he was noting the set of
+her body, the poise of head and frankness of eyes--all of which seemed
+articulate with a friendly, comradely, "Hello, friends." At least such
+was the form Graham's fancy took as she came toward him.
+
+"You made a mistake with this room," he said gravely.
+
+"No, don't say that! But how?"
+
+"It should have been longer, much longer, twice as long at least."
+
+"Why?" she demanded, with a disapproving shake of head, while he
+delighted in the girlish color in her cheeks that gave the lie to her
+thirty-eight years.
+
+"Because, then," he answered, "you should have had to walk twice as
+far this morning and my pleasure of watching you would have been
+correspondingly increased. I've always insisted that the _holoku_
+is the most charming garment ever invented for women."
+
+"Then it was my _holoku_ and not I," she retorted. "I see you are
+like Dick--always with a string on your compliments, and lo, when we
+poor sillies start to nibble, back goes the compliment dragging at the
+end of the string.
+
+"Now I want to show you the room," she hurried on, closing his
+disclaimer. "Dick gave me a free hand with it. It's all mine, you see,
+even to its proportions."
+
+"And the pictures?"
+
+"I selected them," she nodded, "every one of them, and loved them onto
+the walls myself. Although Dick did quarrel with me over that
+Vereschagin. He agreed on the two Millets and the Corot over there,
+and on that Isabey; and even conceded that some Vereschagins might do
+in a music room, but not that particular Vereschagin. He's jealous for
+our local artists, you see. He wanted more of them, wanted to show his
+appreciation of home talent."
+
+"I don't know your Pacific Coast men's work very well," Graham said.
+"Tell me about them. Show me that--Of course, that's a Keith, there;
+but whose is that next one? It's beautiful."
+
+"A McComas--" she was answering; and Graham, with a pleasant
+satisfaction, was settling himself to a half-hour's talk on pictures,
+when Donald Ware entered with questing eyes that lighted up at sight
+of the Little Lady.
+
+His violin was under his arm, and he crossed to the piano in a brisk,
+business-like way and proceeded to lay out music.
+
+"We're going to work till lunch," Paula explained to Graham. "He
+swears I'm getting abominably rusty, and I think he's half right.
+We'll see you at lunch. You can stay if you care, of course; but I
+warn you it's really going to be work. And we're going swimming this
+afternoon. Four o'clock at the tank, Dick says. Also, he says he's got
+a new song he's going to sing then.--What time is it, Mr. Ware?"
+
+"Ten minutes to eleven," the musician answered briefly, with a touch
+of sharpness.
+
+"You're ahead of time--the engagement was for eleven. And till eleven
+you'll have to wait, sir. I must run and see Dick, first. I haven't
+said good morning to him yet."
+
+Well Paula knew her husband's hours. Scribbled secretly in the back of
+the note-book that lay always on the reading stand by her couch were
+hieroglyphic notes that reminded her that he had coffee at six-thirty;
+might possibly be caught in bed with proof-sheets or books till eight-
+forty-five, if not out riding; was inaccessible between nine and ten,
+dictating correspondence to Blake; was inaccessible between ten and
+eleven, conferring with managers and foremen, while Bonbright, the
+assistant secretary, took down, like any court reporter, every word
+uttered by all parties in the rapid-fire interviews.
+
+At eleven, unless there were unexpected telegrams or business, she
+could usually count on finding Dick alone for a space, although
+invariably busy. Passing the secretaries' room, the click of a
+typewriter informed her that one obstacle was removed. In the library,
+the sight of Mr. Bonbright hunting a book for Mr. Manson, the
+Shorthorn manager, told her that Dick's hour with his head men was
+over.
+
+She pressed the button that swung aside a section of filled book-
+shelves and revealed the tiny spiral of steel steps that led up to
+Dick's work room. At the top, a similar pivoting section of shelves
+swung obediently to her press of button and let her noiselessly into
+his room. A shade of vexation passed across her face as she recognized
+Jeremy Braxton's voice. She paused in indecision, neither seeing nor
+being seen.
+
+"If we flood we flood," the mine superintendent was saying. "It will
+cost a mint--yes, half a dozen mints--to pump out again. And it's a
+damned shame to drown the old Harvest that way."
+
+"But for this last year the books show that we've worked at a positive
+loss," Paula heard Dick take up. "Every petty bandit from Huerta down
+to the last peon who's stolen a horse has gouged us. It's getting too
+stiff--taxes extraordinary--bandits, revolutionists, and federals. We
+could survive it, if only the end were in sight; but we have no
+guarantee that this disorder may not last a dozen or twenty years."
+
+"Just the same, the old Harvest--think of flooding her!" the
+superintendent protested.
+
+"And think of Villa," Dick replied, with a sharp laugh the bitterness
+of which did not escape Paula. "If he wins he says he's going to
+divide all the land among the peons. The next logical step will be the
+mines. How much do you think we've coughed up to the constitutionalists
+in the past twelvemonth?"
+
+"Over a hundred and twenty thousand," Braxton answered promptly. "Not
+counting that fifty thousand cold bullion to Torenas before he
+retreated. He jumped his army at Guaymas and headed for Europe with
+it--I wrote you all that."
+
+"If we keep the workings afloat, Jeremy, they'll go on gouging, gouge
+without end, Amen. I think we'd better flood. If we can make wealth
+more efficiently than those rapscallions, let us show them that we can
+destroy wealth with the same facility."
+
+"That's what I tell them. And they smile and repeat that such and such
+a free will offering, under exigent circumstances, would be very
+acceptable to the revolutionary chiefs--meaning themselves. The big
+chiefs never finger one peso in ten of it. Good Lord! I show them what
+we've done. Steady work for five thousand peons. Wages raised from ten
+centavos a day to a hundred and ten. I show them peons--ten-centavo
+men when we took them, and five-peso men when I showed them. And the
+same old smile and the same old itching palm, and the same old
+acceptability of a free will offering from us to the sacred cause of
+the revolution. By God! Old Diaz was a robber, but he was a decent
+robber. I said to Arranzo: 'If we shut down, here's five thousand
+Mexicans out of a job--what'll you do with them?' And Arranzo smiled
+and answered me pat. 'Do with them?' he said. 'Why, put guns in their
+hands and march 'em down to take Mexico City.'"
+
+In imagination Paula could see Dick's disgusted shrug of shoulders as
+she heard him say:
+
+"The curse of it is--that the stuff is there, and that we're the only
+fellows that can get it out. The Mexicans can't do it. They haven't
+the brains. All they've got is the guns, and they're making us shell
+out more than we make. There's only one thing for us, Jeremy. We'll
+forget profits for a year or so, lay off the men, and just keep the
+engineer force on and the pumping going."
+
+"I threw that into Arranzo," Jeremy Braxton's voice boomed. "And what
+was his comeback? That if we laid off the peons, he'd see to it that
+the engineers laid off, too, and the mine could flood and be damned to
+us.--No, he didn't say that last. He just smiled, but the smile meant
+the same thing. For two cents I'd a-wrung his yellow neck, except that
+there'd have been another patriot in his boots and in my office next
+day proposing a stiffer gouge.
+
+"So Arranzo got his 'bit,' and, on top of it, before he went across to
+join the main bunch around Juarez, he let his men run off three
+hundred of our mules--thirty thousand dollars' worth of mule-flesh
+right there, after I'd sweetened him, too. The yellow skunk!"
+
+"Who is revolutionary chief in our diggings right now?" Paula heard
+her husband ask with one of his abrupt shifts that she knew of old
+time tokened his drawing together the many threads of a situation and
+proceeding to action.
+
+"Raoul Bena."
+
+"What's his rank?"
+
+"Colonel--he's got about seventy ragamuffins."
+
+"What did he do before he quit work?"
+
+"Sheep-herder."
+
+"Very well." Dick's utterance was quick and sharp. "You've got to
+play-act. Become a patriot. Hike back as fast as God will let you.
+Sweeten this Raoul Bena. He'll see through your play, or he's no
+Mexican. Sweeten him and tell him you'll make him a general---a second
+Villa."
+
+"Lord, Lord, yes, but how?" Jeremy Braxton demanded.
+
+"By putting him at the head of an army of five thousand. Lay off the
+men. Make him make them volunteer. We're safe, because Huerta is
+doomed. Tell him you're a real patriot. Give each man a rifle. We'll
+stand that for a last gouge, and it will prove you a patriot. Promise
+every man his job back when the war is over. Let them and Raoul Bena
+depart with your blessing. Keep on the pumping force only. And if we
+cut out profits for a year or so, at the same time we are cutting down
+losses. And perhaps we won't have to flood old Harvest after all."
+
+Paula smiled to herself at Dick's solution as she stole back down the
+spiral on her way to the music room. She was depressed, but not by the
+Harvest Group situation. Ever since her marriage there had always been
+trouble in the working of the Mexican mines Dick had inherited. Her
+depression was due to her having missed her morning greeting to him.
+But this depression vanished at meeting Graham, who had lingered with
+Ware at the piano and who, at her coming, was evidencing signs of
+departure.
+
+"Don't run away," she urged. "Stay and witness a spectacle of industry
+that should nerve you up to starting on that book Dick has been
+telling me about."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+
+On Dick's face, at lunch, there was no sign of trouble over the
+Harvest Group; nor could anybody have guessed that Jeremy Braxton's
+visit had boded anything less gratifying than a report of unfailing
+earnings. Although Adolph Weil had gone on the early morning train,
+which advertised that the business which had brought him had been
+transacted with Dick at some unheard of hour, Graham discovered a
+greater company than ever at the table. Besides a Mrs. Tully, who
+seemed a stout and elderly society matron, and whom Graham could not
+make out, there were three new men, of whose identity he gleaned a
+little: a Mr. Gulhuss, State Veterinary; a Mr. Deacon, a portrait
+painter of evident note on the Coast; and a Captain Lester, then
+captain of a Pacific Mail liner, who had sailed skipper for Dick
+nearly twenty years before and who had helped Dick to his navigation.
+
+The meal was at its close, and the superintendent was glancing at his
+watch, when Dick said:
+
+"Jeremy, I want to show you what I've been up to. We'll go right now.
+You'll have time on your way to the train."
+
+"Let us all go," Paula suggested, "and make a party of it. I'm dying
+to see it myself, Dick's been so obscure about it."
+
+Sanctioned by Dick's nod, she was ordering machines and saddle horses
+the next moment.
+
+"What is it?" Graham queried, when she had finished.
+
+"Oh, one of Dick's stunts. He's always after something new. This is an
+invention. He swears it will revolutionize farming--that is, small
+farming. I have the general idea of it, but I haven't seen it set up
+yet. It was ready a week ago, but there was some delay about a cable
+or something concerning an adjustment."
+
+"There's billions in it... if it works," Dick smiled over the table.
+"Billions for the farmers of the world, and perhaps a trifle of
+royalty for me... if it works."
+
+"But what is it?" O'Hay asked. "Music in the dairy barns to make the
+cows give down their milk more placidly?"
+
+"Every farmer his own plowman while sitting on his front porch," Dick
+baffled back. "In fact, the labor-eliminating intermediate stage
+between soil production and sheer laboratory production of food. But
+wait till you see it. Gulhuss, this is where I kill my own business,
+if it works, for it will do away with the one horse of every ten-acre
+farmer between here and Jericho."
+
+In ranch machines and on saddle animals, the company was taken a mile
+beyond the dairy center, where a level field was fenced squarely off
+and contained, as Dick announced, just precisely ten acres.
+
+"Behold," he said, "the one-man and no-horse farm where the farmer
+sits on the porch. Please imagine the porch."
+
+In the center of the field was a stout steel pole, at least twenty
+feet in height and guyed very low.
+
+From a drum on top of the pole a thin wire cable ran to the extreme
+edge of the field and was attached to the steering lever of a small
+gasoline tractor. About the tractor two mechanics fluttered. At
+command from Dick they cranked the motor and started it on its way.
+
+"This is the porch," Dick said. "Just imagine we're all that future
+farmer sitting in the shade and reading the morning paper while the
+manless, horseless plowing goes on."
+
+Alone, unguided, the drum on the head of the pole in the center
+winding up the cable, the tractor, at the circumference permitted by
+the cable, turned a single furrow as it described a circle, or,
+rather, an inward trending spiral about the field.
+
+"No horse, no driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the
+tractor and start it on its way," Dick exulted, as the uncanny
+mechanism turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever
+spiraling toward the field's center. "Plow, harrow, roll, seed,
+fertilize, cultivate, harvest--all from the front porch. And where the
+farmer can buy juice from a power company, all he, or his wife, will
+have to do is press the button, and he to his newspaper, and she to
+her pie-crust."
+
+"All you need, now, to make it absolutely perfect," Graham praised,
+"is to square the circle."
+
+"Yes," Mr. Gulhuss agreed. "As it is, a circle in a square field loses
+some acreage."
+
+Graham's face advertised a mental arithmetic trance for a minute, when
+he announced: "Loses, roughly, three acres out of every ten."
+
+"Sure," Dick concurred. "But the farmer has to have his front porch
+somewhere on his ten acres. And the front porch represents the house,
+the barn, the chicken yard and the various outbuildings. Very well.
+Let him get tradition out of his mind, and, instead of building these
+things in the center of his ten acres, let him build them on the three
+acres of fringe. And let him plant his fruit and shade trees and berry
+bushes on the fringe. When you come to consider it, the traditionary
+method of erecting the buildings in the center of a rectangular ten
+acres compels him to plow around the center in broken rectangles."
+
+Gulhuss nodded enthusiastically. "Sure. And there's always the roadway
+from the center out to the county road or right of way. That breaks
+the efficiency of his plowing. Break ten acres into the consequent
+smaller rectangles, and it's expensive cultivation."
+
+"Wish navigation was as automatic," was Captain Lester's contribution.
+
+"Or portrait painting," laughed Rita Wainwright with a significant
+glance at Mr. Deacon.
+
+"Or musical criticism," Lute remarked, with no glance at all, but with
+a pointedness of present company that brought from O'Hay:
+
+"Or just being a charming young woman."
+
+"What price for the outfit?" Jeremy Braxton asked.
+
+"Right now, we could manufacture and lay down, at a proper profit, for
+five hundred. If the thing came into general use, with up to date,
+large-scale factory methods, three hundred. But say five hundred. And
+write off fifteen per cent, for interest and constant, it would cost
+the farmer seventy dollars a year. What ten-acre farmer, on two-
+hundred-dollar land, who keeps books, can keep a horse for seventy
+dollars a year? And on top of that, it would save him, in labor,
+personal or hired, at the abjectest minimum, two hundred dollars a
+year."
+
+"But what guides it?" Rita asked.
+
+"The drum on the post. The drum is graduated for the complete radius--
+which took some tall figuring, I assure you--and the cable, winding
+around the drum and shortening, draws the tractor in toward the
+center."
+
+"There are lots of objections to its general introduction, even among
+small farmers," Gulhuss said.
+
+Dick nodded affirmation.
+
+"Sure," he replied. "I have over forty noted down and classified. And
+I've as many more for the machine itself. If the thing is a success,
+it will take a long time to perfect it and introduce it."
+
+Graham found himself divided between watching the circling tractor and
+casting glances at the picture Paula Forrest was on her mount. It was
+her first day on The Fawn, which was the Palomina mare Hennessy had
+trained for her. Graham smiled with secret approval of her femininity;
+for Paula, whether she had designed her habit for the mare, or had
+selected one most peculiarly appropriate, had achieved a triumph.
+
+In place of a riding coat, for the afternoon was warm, she wore a tan
+linen blouse with white turnback collar. A short skirt, made like the
+lower part of a riding coat, reached the knees, and from knees to
+entrancing little bespurred champagne boots tight riding trousers
+showed. Skirt and trousers were of fawn-colored silk corduroy. Soft
+white gauntlets on her hands matched with the collar in the one
+emphasis of color. Her head was bare, the hair done tight and low
+around her ears and nape of neck.
+
+"I don't see how you can keep such a skin and expose yourself to the
+sun this way," Graham ventured, in mild criticism.
+
+"I don't," she smiled with a dazzle of white teeth. "That is, I don't
+expose my face this way more than a few times a year. I'd like to,
+because I love the sun-gold burn in my hair; but I don't dare a
+thorough tanning."
+
+The mare frisked, and a breeze of air blew back a flap of skirt,
+showing an articulate knee where the trouser leg narrowed tightly over
+it. Again Graham visioned the white round of knee pressed into the
+round muscles of the swimming Mountain Lad, as he noted the firm knee-
+grip on her pigskin English saddle, quite new and fawn-colored to
+match costume and horse.
+
+When the magneto on the tractor went wrong, and the mechanics busied
+themselves with it in the midst of the partly plowed field, the
+company, under Paula's guidance, leaving Dick behind with his
+invention, resolved itself into a pilgrimage among the brood-centers
+on the way to the swimming tank. Mr. Crellin, the hog-manager, showed
+them Lady Isleton, who, with her prodigious, fat, recent progeny of
+eleven, won various naïve encomiums, while Mr. Crellin warmly
+proclaimed at least four times, "And not a runt, not a runt, in the
+bunch."
+
+Other glorious brood-sows, of Berkshire, Duroc-Jersey, and O. I. C.
+blood, they saw till they were wearied, and new-born kids and lambs,
+and rotund does and ewes. From center to center, Paula kept the
+telephones warning ahead of the party's coming, so that Mr. Manson
+waited to exhibit the great King Polo, and his broad-backed Shorthorn
+harem, and the Shorthorn harems of bulls that were only little less
+than King Polo in magnificence and record; and Parkman, the Jersey
+manager, was on hand, with staffed assistants, to parade Sensational
+Drake, Golden Jolly, Fontaine Royal, Oxford Master, and Karnak's Fairy
+Boy--blue ribbon bulls, all, and founders and scions of noble houses
+of butter-fat renown, and Rosaire Queen, Standby's Dam, Golden Jolly's
+Lass, Olga's Pride, and Gertie of Maitlands--equally blue-ribboned
+and blue-blooded Jersey matrons in the royal realm of butter-fat; and
+Mr. Mendenhall, who had charge of the Shires, proudly exhibited a
+string of mighty stallions, led by the mighty Mountain Lad, and a
+longer string of matrons, headed by the Fotherington Princess of the
+silver whinny. Even old Alden Bessie, the Princess's dam, retired to
+but part-day's work, he sent for that they might render due honor to
+so notable a dam.
+
+As four o'clock approached, Donald Ware, not keen on swimming,
+returned in one of the machines to the Big House, and Mr. Gulhuss
+remained to discuss Shires with Mr. Mendenhall. Dick was at the tank
+when the party arrived, and the girls were immediately insistent for
+the new song.
+
+"It isn't exactly a new song," Dick explained, his gray eyes twinkling
+roguery, "and it's not my song. It was sung in Japan before I was
+born, and, I doubt not, before Columbus discovered America. Also, it
+is a duet--a competitive duet with forfeit penalties attached. Paula
+will have to sing it with me.--I'll teach you. Sit down there, that's
+right.--Now all the rest of you gather around and sit down."
+
+Still in her riding habit, Paula sat down on the concrete, facing her
+husband, in the center of the sitting audience. Under his direction,
+timing her movements to his, she slapped her hands on her knees,
+slapped her palms together, and slapped her palms against his palms
+much in the fashion of the nursery game of "Bean Porridge Hot." Then
+he sang the song, which was short and which she quickly picked up,
+singing it with him and clapping the accent. While the air of it was
+orientally catchy, it was chanted slowly, almost monotonously, but it
+was quickly provocative of excitement to the spectators:
+
+  "_Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena,
+    Jong-Jong, Keena-Keena,
+    Yo-ko-ham-a, Nag-a-sak-i,
+    Kobe-mar-o--hoy!!!_"
+
+The last syllable, _hoy_, was uttered suddenly, explosively, and
+an octave and more higher than the pitch of the melody. At the same
+moment that it was uttered, Paula's and Dick's hands were abruptly
+shot toward each other's, either clenched or open. The point of the
+game was that Paula's hands, open or closed, at the instant of
+uttering hoy, should match Dick's. Thus, the first time, she did match
+him, both his and her hands being closed, whereupon he took off his
+hat and tossed it into Lute's lap.
+
+"My forfeit," he explained. "Come on, Paul, again." And again they
+sang and clapped:
+
+  "_Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena,
+    Jong-Jong, Keena-Keena,
+    Yo-ko-ham-a, Nag-a-sak-i,
+    Kobe-mar-o--hoy!!!_"
+
+This time, with the _hoy_, her hands were closed and his were
+open.
+
+"Forfeit!--forfeit!" the girls cried.
+
+She looked her costume over with alarm, asking, "What can I give?"
+
+"A hair pin," Dick advised; and one of her turtleshell hair pins
+joined his hat in Lute's lap.
+
+"Bother it!" she exclaimed, when the last of her hair pins had gone
+the same way, she having failed seven times to Dick's once. "I can't
+see why I should be so slow and stupid. Besides, Dick, you're too
+clever. I never could out-guess you or out-anticipate you."
+
+Again they sang the song. She lost, and, to Mrs. Tully's shocked
+"Paula!" she forfeited a spur and threatened a boot when the remaining
+spur should be gone. A winning streak of three compelled Dick to give
+up his wrist watch and both spurs. Then she lost her wrist watch and
+the remaining spur.
+
+"Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena," they began again, while Mrs. Tully
+remonstrated, "Now, Paula, you simply must stop this.--Dick, you ought
+to be ashamed of yourself."
+
+But Dick, emitting a triumphant "_Hoy!_" won, and joined in the
+laughter as Paula took off one of her little champagne boots and added
+it to the heap in Lute's lap.
+
+"It's all right, Aunt Martha," Paula assured Mrs. Tully. "Mr. Ware's
+not here, and he's the only one who would be shocked.--Come on, Dick.
+You can't win every time."
+
+"Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena," she chanted on with her husband. The
+repetition, at first slow, had accelerated steadily, so that now they
+fairly rippled through with it, while their slapping, striking palms
+made a continuous patter. The exercise and excitement had added to the
+sun's action on her skin, so that her laughing face was all a rosy
+glow.
+
+Evan Graham, a silent spectator, was aware of hurt and indignity. He
+knew the "Jong-Keena" of old time from the geishas of the tea houses
+of Nippon, and, despite the unconventionality that ruled the Forrests
+and the Big House, he experienced shock in that Paula should take part
+in such a game. It did not enter his head at the moment that he would
+have been merely curious to see how far the madness would go had the
+player been Lute, or Ernestine, or Rita. Not till afterward did he
+realize that his concern and sense of outrage were due to the fact
+that the player was Paula, and that, therefore, she was bulking bigger
+in his imagination than he was conscious of. What he was conscious of
+at the moment was that he was growing angry and that he had
+deliberately to check himself from protesting.
+
+By this time Dick's cigarette case and matches and Paula's second
+boot, belt, skirt-pin, and wedding ring had joined the mound of
+forfeits. Mrs. Tully, her face set in stoic resignation, was silent.
+
+"Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena," Paula laughed and sang on, and Graham heard
+Ernestine laugh to Bert, "I don't see what she can spare next."
+
+"Well, you know her," he heard Bert answer. "She's game once she gets
+started, and it certainly looks like she's started."
+
+"_Hoy_!" Paula and Dick cried simultaneously, as they thrust out
+their hands.
+
+But Dick's were closed, and hers were open. Graham watched her vainly
+quest her person for the consequent forfeit.
+
+"Come on, Lady Godiva," Dick commanded. "You hae sung, you hae danced;
+now pay the piper."
+
+"Was the man a fool?" was Graham's thought. "And a man with a wife
+like that."
+
+"Well," Paula sighed, her fingers playing with the fastenings of her
+blouse, "if I must, I must."
+
+Raging inwardly, Graham averted his gaze, and kept it averted. There
+was a pause, in which he knew everybody must be hanging on what she
+would do next. Then came a giggle from Ernestine, a burst of laughter
+from all, and, "A frame-up!" from Bert, that overcame Graham's
+resoluteness. He looked quickly. The Little Lady's blouse was off,
+and, from the waist up, she appeared in her swimming suit. It was
+evident that she had dressed over it for the ride.
+
+"Come on, Lute--you next," Dick was challenging.
+
+ But Lute, not similarly prepared for _Jong-Keena_, blushingly
+led the retreat of the girls to the dressing rooms.
+
+Graham watched Paula poise at the forty-foot top of the diving
+scaffold and swan-dive beautifully into the tank; heard Bert's
+admiring "Oh, you Annette Kellerman!" and, still chagrined by the
+trick that had threatened to outrage him, fell to wondering about the
+wonder woman, the Little Lady of the Big House, and how she had
+happened so wonderfully to be. As he fetched down the length of tank,
+under water, moving with leisurely strokes and with open eyes watching
+the shoaling bottom, it came to him that he did not know anything
+about her. She was Dick Forrest's wife. That was all he knew. How she
+had been born, how she had lived, how and where her past had been--of
+all this he knew nothing.
+
+Ernestine had told him that Lute and she were half sisters of Paula.
+That was one bit of data, at any rate. (Warned by the increasing
+brightness of the bottom that he had nearly reached the end of the
+tank, and recognizing Dick's and Bert's legs intertwined in what must
+be a wrestling bout, Graham turned about, still under water, and swam
+back a score or so of feet.) There was that Mrs. Tully whom Paula had
+addressed as Aunt Martha. Was she truly an aunt? Or was she a courtesy
+Aunt through sisterhood with the mother of Lute and Ernestine?
+
+He broke surface, was hailed by the others to join in bull-in-the-
+ring; in which strenuous sport, for the next half hour, he was
+compelled more than once to marvel at the litheness and agility, as
+well as strategy, of Paula in her successful efforts at escaping
+through the ring. Concluding the game through weariness, breathing
+hard, the entire party raced the length of the tank and crawled out to
+rest in the sunshine in a circle about Mrs. Tully.
+
+Soon there was more fun afoot, and Paula was contending impossible
+things with Mrs. Tully.
+
+"Now, Aunt Martha, just because you never learned to swim is no reason
+for you to take such a position. I am a real swimmer, and I tell you I
+can dive right into the tank here, and stay under for ten minutes."
+
+"Nonsense, child," Mrs. Tully beamed. "Your father, when he was young,
+a great deal younger than you, my dear, could stay under water longer
+than any other man; and his record, as I know, was three minutes and
+forty seconds, as I very well know, for I held the watch myself and
+kept the time when he won against Harry Selby on a wager."
+
+"Oh, I know my father was some man in his time," Paula swaggered; "but
+times have changed. If I had the old dear here right now, in all his
+youthful excellence, I'd drown him if he tried to stay under water
+with me. Ten minutes? Of course I can do ten minutes. And I will. You
+hold the watch, Aunt Martha, and time me. Why, it's as easy as--"
+
+"Shooting fish in a bucket," Dick completed for her.
+
+Paula climbed to the platform above the springboard.
+
+"Time me when I'm in the air," she said.
+
+"Make your turn and a half," Dick called.
+
+She nodded, smiled, and simulated a prodigious effort at filling her
+lungs to their utmost capacity. Graham watched enchanted. A diver
+himself, he had rarely seen the turn and a half attempted by women
+other than professionals. Her wet suit of light blue and green silk
+clung closely to her, showing the lines of her justly proportioned
+body. With what appeared to be an agonized gulp for the last cubic
+inch of air her lungs could contain, she sprang up, out, and down, her
+body vertical and stiff, her legs straight, her feet close together as
+they impacted on the springboard end. Flung into the air by the board,
+she doubled her body into a ball, made a complete revolution, then
+straightened out in perfect diver's form, and in a perfect dive, with
+scarcely a ripple, entered the water.
+
+"A Toledo blade would have made more splash," was Graham's verdict.
+
+"If only I could dive like that," Ernestine breathed her admiration.
+"But I never shall. Dick says diving is a matter of timing, and that's
+why Paula does it so terribly well. She's got the sense of time--"
+
+"And of abandon," Graham added.
+
+"Of willed abandon," Dick qualified.
+
+"Of relaxation by effort," Graham agreed. "I've never seen a
+professional do so perfect a turn and a half."
+
+"And I'm prouder of it than she is," Dick proclaimed. "You see, I
+taught her, though I confess it was an easy task. She coordinates
+almost effortlessly. And that, along with her will and sense of time--
+why her first attempt was better than fair."
+
+"Paula is a remarkable woman," Mrs. Tully said proudly, her eyes
+fluttering between the second hand of the watch and the unbroken
+surface of the pool. "Women never swim so well as men. But she does.--
+Three minutes and forty seconds! She's beaten her father!"
+
+"But she won't stay under any five minutes, much less ten," Dick
+solemnly stated. "She'll burst her lungs first."
+
+At four minutes, Mrs. Tully began to show excitement and to look
+anxiously from face to face. Captain Lester, not in the secret,
+scrambled to his feet with an oath and dived into the tank.
+
+"Something has happened," Mrs. Tully said with controlled quietness.
+"She hurt herself on that dive. Go in after her, you men."
+
+But Graham and Bert and Dick, meeting under water, gleefully grinned
+and squeezed hands. Dick made signs for them to follow, and led the
+way through the dark-shadowed water into the crypt, where, treading
+water, they joined Paula in subdued whisperings and gigglings.
+
+"Just came to make sure you were all right," Dick explained. "And now
+we've got to beat it.--You first, Bert. I'll follow Evan."
+
+And, one by one, they went down through the dark water and came up on
+the surface of the pool. By this time Mrs. Tully was on her feet and
+standing by the edge of the tank.
+
+"If I thought this was one of your tricks, Dick Forrest," she began.
+
+But Dick, paying no attention, acting preternaturally calmly, was
+directing the men loudly enough for her to hear.
+
+"We've got to make this systematic, fellows. You, Bert, and you, Evan,
+join with me. We start at this end, five feet apart, and search the
+bottom across. Then move along and repeat it back."
+
+"Don't exert yourselves, gentlemen," Mrs. Tully called, beginning to
+laugh. "As for you, Dick, you come right out. I want to box your
+ears."
+
+"Take care of her, you girls," Dick shouted. "She's got hysterics."
+
+"I haven't, but I will have," she laughed.
+
+"But damn it all, madam, this is no laughing matter!" Captain Lester
+spluttered breathlessly, as he prepared for another trip to explore
+the bottom.
+
+"Are you on, Aunt Martha, really and truly on?" Dick asked, after the
+valiant mariner had gone down.
+
+Mrs. Tully nodded. "But keep it up, Dick, you've got one dupe. Elsie
+Coghlan's mother told me about it in Honolulu last year."
+
+Not until eleven minutes had elapsed did the smiling face of Paula
+break the surface. Simulating exhaustion, she slowly crawled out and
+sank down panting near her aunt. Captain Lester, really exhausted by
+his strenuous exertions at rescue, studied Paula keenly, then marched
+to the nearest pillar and meekly bumped his head three times against
+the concrete.
+
+"I'm afraid I didn't stay down ten minutes," Paula said. "But I wasn't
+much under that, was I, Aunt Martha?"
+
+"You weren't much under at all," Mrs. Tully replied, "if it's my
+opinion you were asking. I'm surprised that you are even wet.--There,
+there, breathe naturally, child. The play-acting is unnecessary. I
+remember, when I was a young girl, traveling in India, there was a
+school of fakirs who leaped into deep wells and stayed down much
+longer than you, child, much longer indeed."
+
+"You knew!" Paula charged.
+
+"But you didn't know I did," her Aunt retorted. "And therefore your
+conduct was criminal. When you consider a woman of my age, with my
+heart--"
+
+"And with your blessed, brass-tack head," Paula cried.
+
+"For two apples I'd box your ears."
+
+"And for one apple I'd hug you, wet as I am," Paula laughed back.
+"Anyway, we did fool Captain Lester.--Didn't we, Captain?"
+
+"Don't speak to me," that doughty mariner muttered darkly. "I'm busy
+with myself, meditating what form my vengeance shall take.--As for
+you, Mr. Dick Forrest, I'm divided between blowing up your dairy, or
+hamstringing Mountain Lad. Maybe I'll do both. In the meantime I am
+going out to kick that mare you ride."
+
+Dick on The Outlaw, and Paula on The Fawn, rode back side by side to
+the Big House.
+
+"How do you like Graham?" he asked.
+
+"Splendid," was her reply. "He's your type, Dick. He's universal, like
+you, and he's got the same world-marks branded on him--the Seven
+Seas, the books, and all the rest. He's an artist, too, and pretty
+well all-around. And he's good fun. Have you noticed his smile? It's
+irresistible. It makes one want to smile with him."
+
+"And he's got his serious scars, as well," Dick nodded concurrence.
+
+"Yes--right in the corners of the eyes, just after he has smiled,
+you'll see them come. They're not tired marks exactly, but rather the
+old eternal questions: Why? What for? What's it worth? What's it all
+about?"
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+And bringing up the rear of the cavalcade, Ernestine and Graham
+talked.
+
+"Dick's deep," she was saying. "You don't know him any too well. He's
+dreadfully deep. I know him a little. Paula knows him a lot. But very
+few others ever get under the surface of him. He's a real philosopher,
+and he has the control of a stoic or an Englishman, and he can play-
+act to fool the world."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+At the long hitching rails under the oaks, where the dismounting party
+gathered, Paula was in gales of laughter.
+
+"Go on, go on," she urged Dick, "more, more."
+
+"She's been accusing me of exhausting my vocabulary in naming the
+house-boys by my system," he explained.
+
+"And he's given me at least forty more names in a minute and a half.--
+Go on, Dick, more."
+
+"Then," he said, striking a chant, "we can have Oh Sin and Oh Pshaw,
+Oh Sing and Oh Song, Oh Sung and Oh Sang, Oh Last and Oh Least, Oh
+Ping and Oh Pong, Oh Some, Oh More, and Oh Most, Oh Naught and Oh
+Nit..."
+
+And Dick jingled away into the house still chanting his extemporized
+directory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+
+A week of dissatisfaction and restlessness ensued for Graham. Tom
+between belief that his business was to leave the Big House on the
+first train, and desire to see, and see more of Paula, to be with her,
+and to be more with her--he succeeded in neither leaving nor in
+seeing as much of her as during the first days of his visit.
+
+At first, and for the five days that he lingered, the young violinist
+monopolized nearly her entire time of visibility. Often Graham strayed
+into the music room, and, quite neglected by the pair, sat for moody
+half-hours listening to their "work." They were oblivious of his
+presence, either flushed and absorbed with the passion of their music,
+or wiping their foreheads and chatting and laughing companionably in
+pauses to rest. That the young musician loved her with an ardency that
+was almost painful, was patent to Graham; but what hurt him was the
+abandon of devotion with which she sometimes looked at Ware after he
+had done something exceptionally fine. In vain Graham tried to tell
+himself that all this was mental on her part--purely delighted
+appreciation of the other's artistry. Nevertheless, being man, it
+hurt, and continued to hurt, until he could no longer suffer himself
+to remain.
+
+Once, chancing into the room at the end of a Schumann song and just
+after Ware had departed, Graham found Paula still seated at the piano,
+an expression of rapt dreaming on her face. She regarded him almost
+unrecognizingly, gathered herself mechanically together, uttered an
+absent-minded commonplace or so, and left the room. Despite his
+vexation and hurt, Graham tried to think it mere artist-dreaming on
+her part, a listening to the echo of the just-played music in her
+soul. But women were curious creatures, he could not help moralizing,
+and were prone to lose their hearts most strangely and
+inconsequentially. Might it not be that by his very music this
+youngster of a man was charming the woman of her?
+
+With the departure of Ware, Paula Forrest retired almost completely
+into her private wing behind the door without a knob. Nor did this
+seem unusual, Graham gleaned from the household.
+
+"Paula is a woman who finds herself very good company," Ernestine
+explained, "and she often goes in for periods of aloneness, when Dick
+is the only person who sees her."
+
+"Which is not flattering to the rest of the company," Graham smiled.
+
+"Which makes her such good company whenever she is in company,"
+Ernestine retorted.
+
+The driftage through the Big House was decreasing. A few guests, on
+business or friendship, continued to come, but more departed. Under Oh
+Joy and his Chinese staff the Big House ran so frictionlessly and so
+perfectly, that entertainment of guests seemed little part of the
+host's duties. The guests largely entertained themselves and one
+another.
+
+Dick rarely appeared, even for a moment, until lunch, and Paula, now
+carrying out her seclusion program, never appeared before dinner.
+
+"Rest cure," Dick laughed one noon, and challenged Graham to a
+tournament with boxing gloves, single-sticks, and foils.
+
+"And now's the time," he told Graham, as they breathed between bouts,
+"for you to tackle your book. I'm only one of the many who are looking
+forward to reading it, and I'm looking forward hard. Got a letter from
+Havely yesterday--he mentioned it, and wondered how far along you
+were."
+
+So Graham, in his tower room, arranged his notes and photographs,
+schemed out the work, and plunged into the opening chapters. So
+immersed did he become that his nascent interest in Paula might have
+languished, had it not been for meeting her each evening at dinner.
+Then, too, until Ernestine and Lute left for Santa Barbara, there were
+afternoon swims and rides and motor trips to the pastures of the
+Miramar Hills and the upland ranges of the Anselmo Mountains. Other
+trips they made, sometimes accompanied by Dick, to his great dredgers
+working in the Sacramento basin, or his dam-building on the Little
+Coyote and Los Cuatos creeks, or to his five-thousand-acre colony of
+twenty-acre farmers, where he was trying to enable two hundred and
+fifty heads of families, along with their families, to make good on
+the soil.
+
+That Paula sometimes went for long solitary rides, Graham knew, and,
+once, he caught her dismounting from the Fawn at the hitching rails.
+
+"Don't you think you are spoiling that mare for riding in company?" he
+twitted.
+
+Paula laughed and shook her head.
+
+"Well, then," he asserted stoutly, "I'm spoiling for a ride with you."
+
+"There's Lute, and Ernestine, and Bert, and all the rest."
+
+"This is new country," he contended. "And one learns country through
+the people who know it. I've seen it through the eyes of Lute, and
+Ernestine and all the rest; but there is a lot I haven't seen and
+which I can see only through your eyes."
+
+"A pleasant theory," she evaded. "A--a sort of landscape vampirism."
+
+"But without the ill effects of vampirism," he urged quickly.
+
+Her answer was slow in coming. Her look into his eyes was frank and
+straight, and he could guess her words were weighed and gauged.
+
+"I don't know about that," was all she said finally; but his fancy
+leaped at the several words, ranging and conjecturing their possible
+connotations.
+
+"But we have so much we might be saying to each other," he tried
+again. "So much we... ought to be saying to each other."
+
+"So I apprehend," she answered quietly; and again that frank, straight
+look accompanied her speech.
+
+So she did apprehend--the thought of it was flame to him, but his
+tongue was not quick enough to serve him to escape the cool, provoking
+laugh as she turned into the house.
+
+Still the company of the Big House thinned. Paula's aunt, Mrs. Tully,
+much to Graham's disappointment (for he had expected to learn from her
+much that he wanted to know of Paula), had gone after only a several
+days' stay. There was vague talk of her return for a longer stay; but,
+just back from Europe, she declared herself burdened with a round of
+duty visits which must be performed before her pleasure visiting
+began.
+
+O'Hay, the critic, had been compelled to linger several days in order
+to live down the disastrous culmination of the musical raid made upon
+him by the philosophers. The idea and the trick had been Dick's.
+Combat had joined early in the evening, when a seeming chance remark
+of Ernestine had enabled Aaron Hancock to fling the first bomb into
+the thick of O'Hay's deepest convictions. Dar Hyal, a willing and
+eager ally, had charged around the flank with his blastic theory of
+music and taken O'Hay in reverse. And the battle had raged until the
+hot-headed Irishman, beside himself with the grueling the pair of
+skilled logomachists were giving him, accepted with huge relief the
+kindly invitation of Terrence McFane to retire with him to the
+tranquillity and repose of the stag room, where, over a soothing
+highball and far from the barbarians, the two of them could have a
+heart to heart talk on real music. At two in the morning, wild-eyed
+and befuddled, O'Hay had been led to bed by the upright-walking and
+unshakably steady Terrence.
+
+"Never mind," Ernestine had told O'Hay later, with a twinkle in her
+eye that made him guess the plot. "It was only to be expected. Those
+rattle-brained philosophers would drive even a saint to drink."
+
+"I thought you were safe in Terrence's hands," had been Dick's mock
+apology. "A pair of Irishmen, you know. I'd forgot Terrence was case-
+hardened. Do you know, after he said good night to you, he came up to
+me for a yarn. And he was steady as a rock. He mentioned casually of
+having had several sips, so I... I... never dreamed ... er... that he
+had indisposed you."
+
+When Lute and Ernestine departed for Santa Barbara, Bert Wainwright
+and his sister remembered their long-neglected home in Sacramento. A
+pair of painters, proteges of Paula, arrived the same day. But they
+were little in evidence, spending long days in the hills with a trap
+and driver and smoking long pipes in the stag room.
+
+The free and easy life of the Big House went on in its frictionless
+way. Dick worked. Graham worked. Paula maintained her seclusion. The
+sages from the madrono grove strayed in for wordy dinners--and wordy
+evenings, except when Paula played for them. Automobile parties, from
+Sacramento, Wickenberg, and other valley towns, continued to drop in
+unexpectedly, but never to the confusion of Oh Joy and the house boys,
+whom Graham saw, on occasion, with twenty minutes' warning, seat a
+score of unexpected guests to a perfect dinner. And there were even
+nights--rare ones--when only Dick and Graham and Paula sat at dinner,
+and when, afterward, the two men yarned for an hour before an early
+bed, while she played soft things to herself or disappeared earlier
+than they.
+
+But one moonlight evening, when the Watsons and Masons and Wombolds
+arrived in force, Graham found himself out, when every bridge table
+was made up. Paula was at the piano. As he approached he caught the
+quick expression of pleasure in her eyes at sight of him, which as
+quickly vanished. She made a slight movement as if to rise, which did
+not escape his notice any more than did her quiet mastery of the
+impulse that left her seated.
+
+She was immediately herself as he had always seen her--although it was
+little enough he had seen of her, he thought, as he talked whatever
+came into his head, and rummaged among her songs with her. Now one and
+now another song he tried with her, subduing his high baritone to her
+light soprano with such success as to win cries of more from the
+bridge players.
+
+"Yes, I am positively aching to be out again over the world with
+Dick," she told him in a pause. "If we could only start to-morrow! But
+Dick can't start yet. He's in too deep with too many experiments and
+adventures on the ranch here. Why, what do you think he's up to now?
+As if he did not have enough on his hands, he's going to revolutionize
+the sales end, or, at least, the California and Pacific Coast portion
+of it, by making the buyers come to the ranch."
+
+"But they do do that," Graham said. "The first man I met here was a
+buyer from Idaho."
+
+"Oh, but Dick means as an institution, you know--to make them come en
+masse at a stated time. Not simple auction sales, either, though he
+says he will bait them with a bit of that to excite interest.
+It will be an annual fair, to last three days, in which he will be the
+only exhibitor. He's spending half his mornings now in conference with
+Mr. Agar and Mr. Pitts. Mr. Agar is his sales manager, and Mr. Pitts
+his showman."
+
+She sighed and rippled her fingers along the keyboard.
+
+"But, oh, if only we could get away--Timbuctoo, Mokpo, or Jericho."
+
+"Don't tell me you've ever been to Mokpo," Graham laughed.
+
+She nodded. "Cross my heart, solemnly, hope to die. It was with Dick
+in the _All Away_ and in the long ago. It might almost be said we
+honeymooned in Mokpo."
+
+And while Graham exchanged reminiscences of Mokpo with her, he
+cudgeled his brain to try and decide whether her continual reference
+to her husband was deliberate.
+
+"I should imagine you found it such a paradise here," he was saying.
+
+"I do, I do," she assured him with what seemed unnecessary vehemence.
+"But I don't know what's come over me lately. I feel it imperative to
+be up and away. The spring fret, I suppose; the Red Gods and their
+medicine. And if only Dick didn't insist on working his head off and
+getting tied down with projects! Do you know, in all the years of our
+marriage, the only really serious rival I have ever had has been this
+ranch. He's pretty faithful, and the ranch _is_ his first love.
+He had it all planned and started before he ever met me or knew I
+existed."
+
+"Here, let us try this together," Graham said abruptly, placing the
+song on the rack before her.
+
+"Oh, but it's the 'Gypsy Trail,'" she protested. "It will only make my
+mood worse." And she hummed:
+
+  "'Follow the Romany patteran
+     West to the sinking sun,
+     Till the junk sails lift through the homeless drift,
+     And the East and the West are one.'
+
+"What is the Romany patteran?" she broke off to ask. "I've always
+thought of it as patter, or patois, the Gypsy patois, and somehow it
+strikes me as absurd to follow a language over the world--a sort of
+philological excursion."
+
+"In a way the patteran is speech," he answered. "But it always says
+one thing: 'This way I have passed.' Two sprigs, crossed in certain
+ways and left upon the trail, compose the patteran. But they must
+always be of different trees or shrubs. Thus, on the ranch here, a
+patteran could be made of manzanita and madrono, of oak and spruce, of
+buckeye and alder, of redwood and laurel, of huckleberry and lilac. It
+is a sign of Gypsy comrade to Gypsy comrade, of Gypsy lover to Gypsy
+lover." And he hummed:
+
+  "'Back to the road again, again,
+      Out of a clear sea track;
+    Follow the cross of the Gypsy trail,
+      Over the world and back.'"
+
+She nodded comprehension, looked for a moment with troubled eyes down
+the long room to the card-players, caught herself in her momentary
+absentness, and said quickly:
+
+"Heaven knows there's a lot of Gypsy in some of us. I have more than
+full share. In spite of his bucolic proclivities, Dick is a born
+Gypsy. And from what he has told of you, you are hopelessly one."
+
+"After all, the white man is the real Gypsy, the king Gypsy," Graham
+propounded. "He has wandered wider, wilder, and with less equipment,
+than any Gypsy. The Gypsy has followed in his trails, but never made
+trail for him.--Come; let us try it."
+
+And as they sang the reckless words to their merry, careless lilt, he
+looked down at her and wondered--wondered at her--at himself. This
+was no place for him by this woman's side, under her husband's roof-
+tree. Yet here he was, and he should have gone days before. After the
+years he was just getting acquainted with himself. This was
+enchantment, madness. He should tear himself away at once. He had
+known enchantments and madnesses before, and had torn himself away.
+Had he softened with the years? he questioned himself. Or was this a
+profounder madness than he had experienced? This meant the violation
+of dear things--things so dear, so jealously cherished and guarded in
+his secret life, that never yet had they suffered violation.
+
+And still he did not tear himself away. He stood there beside her,
+looking down on her brown crown of hair glinting gold and bronze and
+bewitchingly curling into tendrils above her ears, singing a song that
+was fire to him--that must be fire to her, she being what she was and
+feeling what she had already, in flashes, half-unwittingly, hinted to
+him.
+
+She is a witch, and her voice is not the least of her witchery, he
+thought, as _her_ voice, so richly a woman's voice, so
+essentially her voice in contradistinction to all women's voices in
+the world, sang and throbbed in his ear. And he knew, beyond shade of
+doubt, that she felt some touch of this madness that afflicted him;
+that she sensed, as he sensed, that the man and the woman were met.
+
+They thrilled together as they sang, and the thought and the sure
+knowledge of it added fuel to his own madness till his voice warmed
+unconsciously to the daring of the last lines, as, voices and thrills
+blending, they sang:
+
+  "'The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky,
+      The deer to the wholesome wold,
+      And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid
+      As it was in the days of old--
+      The heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
+    Light of my tents be fleet,
+      Morning waits at the end of the world,
+    And the world is all at our feet.'"
+
+He looked for her to look up as the last notes died away, but she
+remained quiet a moment, her eyes bent on the keys. And then the face
+that was turned to his was the face of the Little Lady of the Big
+House, the mouth smiling mischievously, the eyes filled with roguery,
+as she said:
+
+"Let us go and devil Dick--he's losing. I've never seen him lose his
+temper at cards, but he gets ridiculously blue after a long siege of
+losing.
+
+"And he does love gambling," she continued, as she led the way to the
+tables. "It's one of his modes of relaxing. It does him good. About
+once or twice a year, if it's a good poker game, he'll sit in all
+night to it and play to the blue sky if they take off the limit."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+
+Almost immediately after the singing of the "Gypsy Trail," Paula
+emerged from her seclusion, and Graham found himself hard put, in the
+tower room, to keep resolutely to his work when all the morning he
+could hear snatches of song and opera from her wing, or laughter and
+scolding of dogs from the great patio, or the continuous pulse for
+hours of the piano from the distant music room. But Graham, patterning
+after Dick, devoted his mornings to work, so that he rarely
+encountered Paula before lunch.
+
+She made announcement that her spell of insomnia was over and that she
+was ripe for all gaieties and excursions Dick had to offer her.
+Further, she threatened, in case Dick grudged these personal
+diversions, to fill the house with guests and teach him what
+liveliness was. It was at this time that her Aunt Martha--Mrs. Tully--
+returned for a several days' visit, and that Paula resumed the driving
+of Duddy and Fuddy in the high, one-seated Stude-baker trap. Duddy and
+Fuddy were spirited trotters, but Mrs. Tully, despite her elderliness
+and avoirdupois, was without timidity when Paula held the reins.
+
+As Mrs. Tully told Graham: "And that is a concession I make to no
+woman save Paula. She is the only woman I can trust myself to with
+horses. She has the horse-way about her. When she was a child she was
+wild over horses. It's a wonder she didn't become a circus rider."
+
+More, much more, Graham learned about Paula in various chats with her
+aunt. Of Philip Desten, Paula's father, Mrs. Tully could never say
+enough. Her eldest brother, and older by many years, he had been her
+childhood prince. His ways had been big ways, princely ways--ways
+that to commoner folk had betokened a streak of madness. He was
+continually guilty of the wildest things and the most chivalrous
+things. It was this streak that had enabled him to win various
+fortunes, and with equal facility to lose them, in the great gold
+adventure of Forty-nine. Himself of old New England stock, he had had
+for great grandfather a Frenchman--a trifle of flotsam from a mid-
+ocean wreck and landed to grow up among the farmer-sailormen of the
+coast of Maine.
+
+"And once, and once only, in each generation, that French Desten crops
+out," Mrs. Tully assured Graham. "Philip was that Frenchman in his
+generation, and who but Paula, and in full measure, received that same
+inheritance in her generation. Though Lute and Ernestine are her half-
+sisters, no one would imagine one drop of the common blood was shared.
+That's why Paula, instead of going circus-riding, drifted inevitably
+to France. It was that old original Desten that drew her over."
+
+And of the adventure in France, Graham learned much. Philip Desten's
+luck had been to die when the wheel of his fortune had turned over and
+down. Ernestine and Lute, little tots, had been easy enough for
+Desten's sisters to manage. But Paula, who had fallen to Mrs. Tully,
+had been the problem--"because of that Frenchman."
+
+"Oh, she is rigid New England," Mrs. Tully insisted, "the solidest of
+creatures as to honor and rectitude, dependableness and faithfulness.
+As a girl she really couldn't bring herself to lie, except to save
+others. In which case all her New England ancestry took flight and she
+would lie as magnificently as her father before her. And he had the
+same charm of manner, the same daring, the same ready laughter, the
+same vivacity. But what is lightsome and blithe in her, was debonaire
+in him. He won men's hearts always, or, failing that, their bitterest
+enmity. No one was left cold by him in passing. Contact with him
+quickened them to love or hate. Therein Paula differs, being a woman,
+I suppose, and not enjoying man's prerogative of tilting at windmills.
+I don't know that she has an enemy in the world. All love her, unless,
+it may well be, there are cat-women who envy her her nice husband."
+
+And as Graham listened, Paula's singing came through the open window
+from somewhere down the long arcades, and there was that ever-haunting
+thrill in her voice that he could not escape remembering afterward.
+She burst into laughter, and Mrs. Tully beamed to him and nodded at
+the sound.
+
+"There laughs Philip Desten," she murmured, "and all the Frenchwomen
+behind the original Frenchman who was brought into Penobscot, dressed
+in homespun, and sent to meeting. Have you noticed how Paula's laugh
+invariably makes everybody look up and smile? Philip's laugh did the
+same thing."
+
+"Paula had always been passionately fond of music, painting, drawing.
+As a little girl she could be traced around the house and grounds by
+the trail she left behind her of images and shapes, made in whatever
+medium she chanced upon--drawn on scraps of paper, scratched on bits
+of wood, modeled in mud and sand.
+
+"She loved everything, and everything loved her," said Mrs. Tully.
+"She was never timid of animals. And yet she always stood in awe of
+them; but she was born sense-struck, and her awe was beauty-awe. Yes,
+she was an incorrigible hero-worshiper, whether the person was merely
+beautiful or did things. And she never will outgrow that beauty--awe
+of anything she loves, whether it is a grand piano, a great painting,
+a beautiful mare, or a bit of landscape.
+
+"And Paula had wanted to do, to make beauty herself. But she was
+sorely puzzled whether she should devote herself to music or painting.
+In the full swing of work under the best masters in Boston, she could
+not refrain from straying back to her drawing. From her easel she was
+lured to modeling.
+
+ "And so, with her love of the best, her soul and heart full of
+beauty, she grew quite puzzled and worried over herself, as to which
+talent was the greater and if she had genius at all. I suggested a
+complete rest from work and took her abroad for a year. And of all
+things, she developed a talent for dancing. But always she harked back
+to her music and painting. No, she was not flighty. Her trouble was
+that she was too talented--"
+
+"Too diversely talented," Graham amplified.
+
+"Yes, that is better," Mrs. Tully nodded. "But from talent to genius
+is a far cry, and to save my life, at this late day, I don't know
+whether the child ever had a trace of genius in her. She has certainly
+not done anything big in any of her chosen things."
+
+"Except to be herself," Graham added.
+
+"Which _is_ the big thing," Mrs. Tully accepted with a smile of
+enthusiasm. "She is a splendid, unusual woman, very unspoiled, very
+natural. And after all, what does doing things amount to? I'd give
+more for one of Paula's madcap escapades--oh, I heard all about
+swimming the big stallion--than for all her pictures if every one was
+a masterpiece. But she was hard for me to understand at first. Dick
+often calls her the girl that never grew up. But gracious, she can put
+on the grand air when she needs to. I call her the most mature child I
+have ever seen. Dick was the finest thing that ever happened to her.
+It was then that she really seemed for the first time to find herself.
+It was this way."
+
+And Mrs. Tully went on to sketch the year of travel in Europe, the
+resumption of Paula's painting in Paris, and the conviction she
+finally reached that success could be achieved only by struggle and
+that her aunt's money was a handicap.
+
+"And she had her way," Mrs. Tully sighed. "She--why, she dismissed me,
+sent me home. She would accept no more than the meagerest allowance,
+and went down into the Latin Quarter on her own, batching with two
+other American girls. And she met Dick. Dick was a rare one. You
+couldn't guess what he was doing then. Running a cabaret--oh, not
+these modern cabarets, but a real students' cabaret of sorts. It was
+very select. They were a lot of madmen. You see, he was just back from
+some of his wild adventuring at the ends of the earth, and, as he
+stated it, he wanted to stop living life for a while and to talk about
+life instead.
+
+"Paula took me there once. Oh, they were engaged--the day before, and
+he had called on me and all that. I had known 'Lucky' Richard Forrest,
+and I knew all about his son. From a worldly standpoint, Paula
+couldn't have made a finer marriage. It was quite a romance. Paula had
+seen him captain the University of California eleven to victory over
+Stanford. And the next time she saw him was in the studio she shared
+with the two girls. She didn't know whether Dick was worth millions or
+whether he was running a cabaret because he was hard up, and she cared
+less. She always followed her heart. Fancy the situation: Dick the
+uncatchable, and Paula who never flirted. They must have sprung
+forthright into each other's arms, for inside the week it was all
+arranged, and Dick made his call on me, as if my decision meant
+anything one way or the other.
+
+"But Dick's cabaret. It was the Cabaret of the Philosophers--a small
+pokey place, down in a cellar, in the heart of the Quarter, and it had
+only one table. Fancy that for a cabaret! But such a table! A big
+round one, of plain boards, without even an oil-cloth, the wood
+stained with the countless drinks spilled by the table-pounding of the
+philosophers, and it could seat thirty. Women were not permitted. An
+exception was made for Paula and me.
+
+"You've met Aaron Hancock here. He was one of the philosophers, and to
+this day he swaggers that he owed Dick a bigger bill that never was
+paid than any of his customers. And there they used to meet, all those
+wild young thinkers, and pound the table, and talk philosophy in all
+the tongues of Europe. Dick always had a penchant for philosophers.
+
+"But Paula spoiled that little adventure. No sooner were they married
+than Dick fitted out his schooner, the All Away, and away the blessed
+pair of them went, honeymooning from Bordeaux to Hongkong."
+
+"And the cabaret was closed, and the philosophers left homeless and
+discussionless," Graham remarked.
+
+Mrs. Tully laughed heartily and shook her head.
+
+"He endowed it for them," she gasped, her hand to her side. "Or
+partially endowed it, or something. I don't know what the arrangement
+was. And within the month it was raided by the police for an anarchist
+club."
+
+After having learned the wide scope of her interests and talents,
+Graham was nevertheless surprised one day at finding Paula all by
+herself in a corner of a window-seat, completely absorbed in her work
+on a piece of fine embroidery.
+
+"I love it," she explained. "All the costly needlework of the shops
+means nothing to me alongside of my own work on my own designs. Dick
+used to fret at my sewing. He's all for efficiency, you know,
+elimination of waste energy and such things. He thought sewing was a
+wasting of time. Peasants could be hired for a song to do what I was
+doing. But I succeeded in making my viewpoint clear to him.
+
+"It's like the music one makes oneself. Of course I can buy better
+music than I make; but to sit down at an instrument and evoke the
+music oneself, with one's own fingers and brain, is an entirely
+different and dearer satisfaction. Whether one tries to emulate
+another's performance, or infuses the performance with one's own
+personality and interpretation, it's all the same. It is soul-joy and
+fulfilment.
+
+"Take this little embroidered crust of lilies on the edge of this
+flounce--there is nothing like it in the world. Mine the idea, all
+mine, and mine the delight of giving form and being to the idea. There
+are better ideas and better workmanship in the shops; but this is
+different. It is mine. I visioned it, and I made it. And who is to say
+that embroidery is not art?"
+
+She ceased speaking and with her eyes laughed the insistence of her
+question.
+
+"And who is to say," Graham agreed, "that the adorning of beautiful
+womankind is not the worthiest of all the arts as well as the
+sweetest?"
+
+"I rather stand in awe of a good milliner or modiste," she nodded
+gravely. "They really are artists, and important ones, as Dick would
+phrase it, in the world's economy."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+Another time, seeking the library for Andean reference, Graham came
+upon Paula, sprawled gracefully over a sheet of paper on a big table
+and flanked by ponderous architectural portfolios, engaged in drawing
+plans of a log bungalow or camp for the sages of the madroño grove.
+
+"It's a problem," she sighed. "Dick says that if I build it I must
+build it for seven. We've got four sages now, and his heart is set on
+seven. He says never mind showers and such things, because what
+philosopher ever bathes? And he has suggested seriously seven stoves
+and seven kitchens, because it is just over such mundane things that
+philosophers always quarrel."
+
+"Wasn't it Voltaire who quarreled with a king over candle-ends?"
+Graham queried, pleasuring in the sight of her graceful abandon.
+Thirty-eight! It was impossible. She seemed almost a girl, petulant
+and flushed over some school task. Then he remembered Mrs. Tully's
+remark that Paula was the most mature child she had ever known.
+
+It made him wonder. Was she the one, who, under the oaks at the
+hitching rails, with two brief sentences had cut to the heart of an
+impending situation? "So I apprehend," she had said. What had she
+apprehended? Had she used the phrase glibly, without meaning? Yet she
+it was who had thrilled and fluttered to him and with him when they
+had sung the "Gypsy Trail." _That_ he knew. But again, had he not
+seen her warm and glow to the playing of Donald Ware? But here
+Graham's ego had its will of him, for he told himself that with Donald
+Ware it was different. And he smiled to himself and at himself at the
+thought.
+
+"What amuses you?" Paula was asking.
+
+"Heaven knows I am no architect. And I challenge you to house seven
+philosophers according to all the absurd stipulations laid down by
+Dick."
+
+Back in his tower room with his Andean books unopened before him,
+Graham gnawed his lip and meditated. The woman was no woman. She was
+the veriest child. Or--and he hesitated at the thought--was this
+naturalness that was overdone? Did she in truth apprehend? It must be.
+It had to be. She was of the world. She knew the world. She was very
+wise. No remembered look of her gray eyes but gave the impression of
+poise and power. That was it--strength! He recalled her that first
+night when she had seemed at times to glint an impression of steel, of
+thin and jewel-like steel. In his fancy, at the time, he remembered
+likening her strength to ivory, to carven pearl shell, to sennit
+twisted of maidens' hair.
+
+And he knew, now, ever since the brief words at the hitching rails and
+the singing of the "Gypsy Trail," that whenever their eyes looked into
+each other's it was with a mutual knowledge of unsaid things.
+
+In vain he turned the pages of the books for the information he
+sought. He tried to continue his chapter without the information, but
+no words flowed from his pen. A maddening restlessness was upon him.
+He seized a time table and pondered the departure of trains, changed
+his mind, switched the room telephone to the house barn, and asked to
+have Altadena saddled.
+
+It was a perfect morning of California early summer. No breath of wind
+stirred over the drowsing fields, from which arose the calls of quail
+and the notes of meadowlarks. The air was heavy with lilac fragrance,
+and from the distance, as he rode between the lilac hedges, Graham
+heard the throaty nicker of Mountain Lad and the silvery answering
+whinney of the Fotherington Princess.
+
+Why was he here astride Dick Forrest's horse? Graham asked himself.
+Why was he not even then on the way to the station to catch that first
+train he had noted on the time table? This unaccustomed weakness of
+decision and action was a new rôle for him, he considered bitterly.
+But--and he was on fire with the thought of it--this was his one life,
+and this was the one woman in the world.
+
+He reined aside to let a herd of Angora goats go by. Each was a doe,
+and there were several hundred of them; and they were moved slowly by
+the Basque herdsmen, with frequent pauses, for each doe was
+accompanied by a young kid. In the paddock were many mares with new-
+born colts; and once, receiving warning in time, Graham raced into a
+crossroad to escape a drove of thirty yearling stallions being moved
+somewhere across the ranch. Their excitement was communicated to that
+entire portion of the ranch, so that the air was filled with shrill
+nickerings and squealings and answering whinneys, while Mountain Lad,
+beside himself at sight and sound of so many rivals, raged up and down
+his paddock, and again and again trumpeted his challenging conviction
+that he was the most amazing and mightiest thing that had ever
+occurred on earth in the way of horse flesh.
+
+Dick Forrest pranced and sidled into the cross road on the Outlaw, his
+face beaming with delight at the little tempest among his many
+creatures.
+
+"Fecundity! Fecundity!"--he chanted in greeting, as he reined in to a
+halt, if halt it might be called, with his tan-golden sorrel mare a-fret
+and a-froth, wickedly reaching with her teeth now for his leg and next
+for Graham's, one moment pawing the roadway, the next moment, in sheer
+impotence of resentfulness, kicking the empty air with one hind leg and
+kicking the air repeatedly, a dozen times.
+
+"Those youngsters certainly put Mountain Lad on his mettle," Dick
+laughed. "Listen to his song:
+
+"'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys.
+The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me.
+The land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is
+the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the
+spring. The mares remember my voice. They knew me aforetime through
+their mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills,
+and the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my
+approach.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+
+After Mrs. Tully's departure, Paula, true to her threat, filled the
+house with guests. She seemed to have remembered all who had been
+waiting an invitation, and the limousine that met the trains eight
+miles away was rarely empty coming or going. There were more singers
+and musicians and artist folk, and bevies of young girls with their
+inevitable followings of young men, while mammas and aunts and
+chaperons seemed to clutter all the ways of the Big House and to fill
+a couple of motor cars when picnics took place.
+
+And Graham wondered if this surrounding of herself by many people was
+not deliberate on Paula's part. As for himself, he definitely
+abandoned work on his book, and joined in the before-breakfast swims
+of the hardier younger folk, in the morning rides over the ranch, and
+in whatever fun was afoot indoors and out.
+
+Late hours and early were kept; and one night, Dick, who adhered to
+his routine and never appeared to his guests before midday, made a
+night of it at poker in the stag-room. Graham had sat in, and felt
+well repaid when, at dawn, the players received an unexpected visit
+from Paula--herself past one of her white nights, she said, although
+no sign of it showed on her fresh skin and color. Graham had to
+struggle to keep his eyes from straying too frequently to her as she
+mixed golden fizzes to rejuvenate the wan-eyed, jaded players. Then
+she made them start the round of "jacks" that closed the game, and
+sent them off for a cold swim before breakfast and the day's work or
+frolic.
+
+Never was Paula alone. Graham could only join in the groups that were
+always about her. Although the young people ragged and tangoed
+incessantly, she rarely danced, and then it was with the young men.
+Once, however, she favored him with an old-fashioned waltz. "Your
+ancestors in an antediluvian dance," she mocked the young people, as
+she stepped out; for she and Graham had the floor to themselves.
+
+Once down the length of the room, the two were in full accord. Paula,
+with the sympathy Graham recognized that made her the exceptional
+accompanist or rider, subdued herself to the masterful art of the man,
+until the two were as parts of a sentient machine that operated
+without jar or friction. After several minutes, finding their perfect
+mutual step and pace, and Graham feeling the absolute giving of Paula
+to the dance, they essayed rhythmical pauses and dips, their feet
+never leaving the floor, yet affecting the onlookers in the way Dick
+voiced it when he cried out: "They float! They float!" The music was
+the "Waltz of Salomé," and with its slow-fading end they postured
+slower and slower to a perfect close.
+
+There was no need to speak. In silence, without a glance at each
+other, they returned to the company where Dick was proclaiming:
+
+"Well, younglings, codlings, and other fry, that's the way we old
+folks used to dance. I'm not saying anything against the new dances,
+mind you. They're all right and dandy fine. But just the same it
+wouldn't injure you much to learn to waltz properly. The way you
+waltz, when you do attempt it, is a scream. We old folks do know a
+thing or two that is worth while."
+
+"For instance?" queried one of the girls.
+
+"I'll tell you. I don't mind the young generation smelling of gasoline
+the way it does--"
+
+Cries and protests drowned Dick out for a moment.
+
+"I know I smell of it myself," he went on. "But you've all failed to
+learn the good old modes of locomotion. There isn't a girl of you that
+Paula can't walk into the ground. There isn't a fellow of you that
+Graham and I can't walk into a receiving hospital.--Oh, I know you can
+all crank engines and shift gears to the queen's taste. But there
+isn't one of you that can properly ride a horse--a real horse, in the
+only way, I mean. As for driving a smart pair of roadsters, it's a
+screech. And how many of you husky lads, hell-scooting on the bay in
+your speed-boats, can take the wheel of an old-time sloop or schooner,
+without an auxiliary, and get out of your own way in her?"
+
+"But we get there just the same," the same girl retorted.
+
+"And I don't deny it," Dick answered. "But you are not always pretty.
+I'll tell you a pretty sight that no one of you can ever present--
+Paula, there, with the reins of four slashing horses in her hands, her
+foot on the brake, swinging tally-ho along a mountain road."
+
+ On a warm morning, in the cool arcade of the great patio, a chance
+group of four or five, among whom was Paula, formed about Graham, who
+had been reading alone. After a time he returned to his magazine with
+such absorption that he forgot those about him until an awareness of
+silence penetrated to his consciousness. He looked up. All the others
+save Paula had strayed off. He could hear their distant laughter from
+across the patio. But Paula! He surprised the look on her face, in her
+eyes. It was a look bent on him, concerning him. Doubt, speculation,
+almost fear, were in her eyes; and yet, in that swift instant, he had
+time to note that it was a look deep and searching--almost, his quick
+fancy prompted, the look of one peering into the just-opened book of
+fate. Her eyes fluttered and fell, and the color increased in her
+cheeks in an unmistakable blush. Twice her lips moved to the verge of
+speech; yet, caught so arrantly in the act, she was unable to phrase
+any passing thought. Graham saved the painful situation by saying
+casually:
+
+"Do you know, I've just been reading De Vries' eulogy of Luther
+Burbank's work, and it seems to me that Dick is to the domestic animal
+world what Burbank is to the domestic vegetable world. You are life-
+makers here--thumbing the stuff into new forms of utility and beauty."
+
+Paula, by this time herself again, laughed and accepted the
+compliment.
+
+"I fear me," Graham continued with easy seriousness, "as I watch your
+achievements, that I can only look back on a misspent life. Why didn't
+I get in and _make_ things? I'm horribly envious of both of you."
+
+"We _are_ responsible for a dreadful lot of creatures being
+born," she said. "It makes one breathless to think of the
+responsibility."
+
+"The ranch certainly spells fecundity," Graham smiled. "I never before
+was so impressed with the flowering and fruiting of life. Everything
+here prospers and multiplies--"
+
+"Oh!" Paula cried, breaking in with a sudden thought. "Some day I'll
+show you my goldfish. I breed them, too--yea, and commercially. I
+supply the San Francisco dealers with their rarest strains, and I even
+ship to New York. And, best of all, I actually make money--profits, I
+mean. Dick's books show it, and he is the most rigid of bookkeepers.
+There isn't a tack-hammer on the place that isn't inventoried; nor a
+horse-shoe nail unaccounted for. That's why he has such a staff of
+bookkeepers. Why, do you know, calculating every last least item of
+expense, including average loss of time for colic and lameness, out of
+fearfully endless columns of figures he has worked the cost of an
+hour's labor for a draught horse to the third decimal place."
+
+"But your goldfish," Graham suggested, irritated by her constant
+dwelling on her husband.
+
+"Well, Dick makes his bookkeepers keep track of my goldfish in the
+same way. I'm charged every hour of any of the ranch or house labor I
+use on the fish--postage stamps and stationery, too, if you please. I
+have to pay interest on the plant. He even charges me for the water,
+just as if he were a city water company and I a householder. And still
+I net ten per cent., and have netted as high as thirty. But Dick
+laughs and says when I've deducted the wages of superintendence--my
+superintendence, he means--that I'll find I am poorly paid or else am
+operating at a loss; that with my net I couldn't hire so capable a
+superintendent.
+
+"Just the same, that's why Dick succeeds in his undertakings. Unless
+it's sheer experiment, he never does anything without knowing
+precisely, to the last microscopic detail, what it is he is doing."
+
+"He is very sure," Graham observed.
+
+"I never knew a man to be so sure of himself," Paula replied warmly;
+"and I never knew a man with half the warrant. I know him. He is a
+genius--but only in the most paradoxical sense. He is a genius because
+he is so balanced and normal that he hasn't the slightest particle of
+genius in him. Such men are rarer and greater than geniuses. I like to
+think of Abraham Lincoln as such a type."
+
+"I must admit I don't quite get you," Graham said.
+
+"Oh, I don't dare to say that Dick is as good, as cosmically good, as
+Lincoln," she hurried on. "Dick _is_ good, but it is not that. It
+is in their excessive balance, normality, lack of flare, that they are
+of the same type. Now I am a genius. For, see, I do things without
+knowing how I do them. I just do them. I get effects in my music that
+way. Take my diving. To save my life I couldn't tell how I swan-dive,
+or jump, or do the turn and a half.
+
+"Dick, on the other hand, can't do anything unless he clearly knows in
+advance _how_ he is going to do it. He does everything with
+balance and foresight. He's a general, all-around wonder, without ever
+having been a particular wonder at any one thing.--Oh, I know him.
+He's never been a champion or a record-breaker in any line of
+athletics. Nor has he been mediocre in any line. And so with
+everything else, mentally, intellectually. He is an evenly forged
+chain. He has no massive links, no weak links."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm like you," Graham said, "that commoner and lesser
+creature, a genius. For I, too, on occasion, flare and do the most
+unintentional things. And I am not above falling on my knees before
+mystery."
+
+"And Dick hates mystery--or it would seem he does. Not content with
+knowing _how_--he is eternally seeking the _why_ of the
+_how_. Mystery is a challenge to him. It excites him like a red
+rag does a bull. At once he is for ripping the husks and the heart
+from mystery, so that he will know the _how_ and the _why_,
+when it will be no longer mystery but a generalization and a
+scientifically demonstrable fact."
+
+ Much of the growing situation was veiled to the three figures of it.
+Graham did not know of Paula's desperate efforts to cling close to her
+husband, who, himself desperately busy with his thousand plans and
+projects, was seeing less and less of his company. He always appeared
+at lunch, but it was a rare afternoon when he could go out with his
+guests. Paula did know, from the multiplicity of long, code telegrams
+from Mexico, that things were in a parlous state with the Harvest
+Group. Also, she saw the agents and emissaries of foreign investors in
+Mexico, always in haste and often inopportune, arriving at the ranch
+to confer with Dick. Beyond his complaint that they ate the heart out
+of his time, he gave her no clew to the matters discussed.
+
+"My! I wish you weren't so busy," she sighed in his arms, on his
+knees, one fortunate morning, when, at eleven o'clock, she had caught
+him alone.
+
+It was true, she had interrupted the dictation of a letter into the
+phonograph; and the sigh had been evoked by the warning cough of
+Bonbright, whom she saw entering with more telegrams in his hand.
+
+"Won't you let me drive you this afternoon, behind Duddy and Fuddy,
+just you and me, and cut the crowd?" she begged.
+
+He shook his head and smiled.
+
+"You'll meet at lunch a weird combination," he explained. "Nobody else
+needs to know, but I'll tell you." He lowered his voice, while
+Bonbright discreetly occupied himself at the filing cabinets. "They're
+Tampico oil folk. Samuels himself, President of the Nacisco; and
+Wishaar, the big inside man of the Pearson-Brooks crowd--the chap that
+engineered the purchase of the East Coast railroad and the Tiuana
+Central when they tried to put the Nacisco out of business; and
+Matthewson--he's the _hi-yu-skookum_ big chief this side the
+Atlantic of the Palmerston interests--you know, the English crowd that
+fought the Nacisco and the Pearson-Brooks bunch so hard; and, oh,
+there'll be several others. It shows you that things are rickety down
+Mexico way when such a bunch stops scrapping and gets together.
+
+"You see, they are oil, and I'm important in my way down there, and
+they want me to swing the mining interests in with the oil. Truly, big
+things are in the air, and we've got to hang together and do something
+or get out of Mexico. And I'll admit, after they gave me the turn-down
+in the trouble three years ago, that I've sulked in my tent and made
+them come to see me."
+
+He caressed her and called her his armful of dearest woman, although
+she detected his eye roving impatiently to the phonograph with its
+unfinished letter.
+
+"And so," he concluded, with a pressure of his arms about her that
+seemed to hint that her moment with him was over and she must go,
+"that means the afternoon. None will stop over. And they'll be off and
+away before dinner."
+
+She slipped off his knees and out of his arms with unusual abruptness,
+and stood straight up before him, her eyes flashing, her cheeks white,
+her face set with determination, as if about to say something of grave
+importance. But a bell tinkled softly, and he reached for the desk
+telephone.
+
+Paula drooped, and sighed inaudibly, and, as she went down the room
+and out the door, and as Bonbright stepped eagerly forward with the
+telegrams, she could hear the beginning of her husband's conversation:
+
+"No. It is impossible. He's got to come through, or I'll put him out
+of business. That gentleman's agreement is all poppycock. If it were
+only that, of course he could break it. But I've got some mighty
+interesting correspondence that he's forgotten about.... Yes, yes; it
+will clinch it in any court of law. I'll have the file in your office
+by five this afternoon. And tell him, for me, that if he tries to put
+through this trick, I'll break him. I'll put a competing line on, and
+his steamboats will be in the receiver's hands inside a year.... And...
+hello, are you there?... And just look up that point I suggested. I
+am rather convinced you'll find the Interstate Commerce has got him on
+two counts...."
+
+Nor did Graham, nor even Paula, imagine that Dick--the keen one, the
+deep one, who could see and sense things yet to occur and out of
+intangible nuances and glimmerings build shrewd speculations and
+hypotheses that subsequent events often proved correct--was already
+sensing what had not happened but what might happen. He had not heard
+Paula's brief significant words at the hitching post; nor had he seen
+Graham catch her in that deep scrutiny of him under the arcade. Dick
+had heard nothing, seen little, but sensed much; and, even in advance
+of Paula, had he apprehended in vague ways what she afterward had come
+to apprehend.
+
+The most tangible thing he had to build on was the night, immersed in
+bridge, when he had not been unaware of the abrupt leaving of the
+piano after the singing of the "Gypsy Trail"; nor when, in careless
+smiling greeting of them when they came down the room to devil him
+over his losing, had he failed to receive a hint or feeling of
+something unusual in Paula's roguish teasing face. On the moment,
+laughing retorts, giving as good as she sent, Dick's own laughing eyes
+had swept over Graham beside her and likewise detected the unusual.
+The man was overstrung, had been Dick's mental note at the time. But
+why should he be overstrung? Was there any connection between his
+overstrungness and the sudden desertion by Paula of the piano? And all
+the while these questions were slipping through his thoughts, he had
+laughed at their sallies, dealt, sorted his hand, and won the bid on
+no trumps.
+
+Yet to himself he had continued to discount as absurd and preposterous
+the possibility of his vague apprehension ever being realized. It was
+a chance guess, a silly speculation, based upon the most trivial data,
+he sagely concluded. It merely connoted the attractiveness of his wife
+and of his friend. But--and on occasional moments he could not will
+the thought from coming uppermost in his mind--why had they broken off
+from singing that evening? Why had he received the feeling that there
+was something unusual about it? Why had Graham been overstrung?
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+Nor did Bonbright, one morning, taking dictation of a telegram in the
+last hour before noon, know that Dick's casual sauntering to the
+window, still dictating, had been caused by the faint sound of hoofs
+on the driveway. It was not the first of recent mornings that Dick had
+so sauntered to the window, to glance out with apparent absentness at
+the rush of the morning riding party in the last dash home to the
+hitching rails. But he knew, on this morning, before the first figures
+came in sight whose those figures would be.
+
+"Braxton is safe," he went on with the dictation without change of
+tone, his eyes on the road where the riders must first come into view.
+"If things break he can get out across the mountains into Arizona. See
+Connors immediately. Braxton left Connors complete instructions.
+Connors to-morrow in Washington. Give me fullest details any move--
+signed."
+
+Up the driveway the Fawn and Altadena clattered neck and neck. Dick
+had not been disappointed in the figures he expected to see. From the
+rear, cries and laughter and the sound of many hoofs tokened that the
+rest of the party was close behind.
+
+"And the next one, Mr. Bonbright, please put in the Harvest code,"
+Dick went on steadily, while to himself he was commenting that Graham
+was a passable rider but not an excellent one, and that it would have
+to be seen to that he was given a heavier horse than Altadena. "It is
+to Jeremy Braxton. Send it both ways. There is a chance one or the
+other may get through..."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+
+Once again the tide of guests ebbed from the Big House, and more than
+one lunch and dinner found only the two men and Paula at the table. On
+such evenings, while Graham and Dick yarned for their hour before bed,
+Paula no longer played soft things to herself at the piano, but sat
+with them doing fine embroidery and listening to the talk.
+
+Both men had much in common, had lived life in somewhat similar ways,
+and regarded life from the same angles. Their philosophy was harsh
+rather than sentimental, and both were realists. Paula made a practice
+of calling them the pair of "Brass Tacks."
+
+"Oh, yes," she laughed to them, "I understand your attitude. You are
+successes, the pair of you--physical successes, I mean. You have
+health. You are resistant. You can stand things. You have survived
+where men less resistant have gone down. You pull through African
+fevers and bury the other fellows. This poor chap gets pneumonia in
+Cripple Creek and cashes in before you can get him to sea level. Now
+why didn't you get pneumonia? Because you were more deserving? Because
+you had lived more virtuously? Because you were more careful of risks
+and took more precautions?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No. Because you were luckier--I mean by birth, by possession of
+constitution and stamina. Why, Dick buried his three mates and two
+engineers at Guayaquil. Yellow fever. Why didn't the yellow fever
+germ, or whatever it is, kill Dick? And the same with you, Mr. Broad-
+shouldered Deep-chested Graham. In this last trip of yours, why didn't
+you die in the swamps instead of your photographer? Come. Confess. How
+heavy was he? How broad were his shoulders? How deep his chest?--wide
+his nostrils?--tough his resistance?"
+
+"He weighed a hundred and thirty-five," Graham admitted ruefully. "But
+he looked all right and fit at the start. I think I was more surprised
+than he when he turned up his toes." Graham shook his head. "It wasn't
+because he was a light weight and small. The small men are usually the
+toughest, other things being equal. But you've put your finger on the
+reason just the same. He didn't have the physical stamina, the
+resistance,--You know what I mean, Dick?"
+
+"In a way it's like the quality of muscle and heart that enables some
+prizefighters to go the distance--twenty, thirty, forty rounds, say,"
+Dick concurred. "Right now, in San Francisco, there are several
+hundred youngsters dreaming of success in the ring. I've watched them
+trying out. All look good, fine-bodied, healthy, fit as fiddles, and
+young. And their spirits are most willing. And not one in ten of them
+can last ten rounds. I don't mean they get knocked out. I mean they
+blow up. Their muscles and their hearts are not made out of first-
+grade fiber. They simply are not made to move at high speed and
+tension for ten rounds. And some of them blow up in four or five
+rounds. And not one in forty can go the twenty-round route, give and
+take, hammer and tongs, one minute of rest to three of fight, for a
+full hour of fighting. And the lad who can last forty rounds is one
+in ten thousand--lads like Nelson, Gans, and Wolgast.
+
+"You understand the point I am making," Paula took up. "Here are the
+pair of you. Neither will see forty again. You're a pair of hard-
+bitten sinners. You've gone through hardship and exposure that dropped
+others all along the way. You've had your fun and folly. You've
+roughed and rowdied over the world--"
+
+"Played the wild ass," Graham laughed in.
+
+"And drunk deep," Paula added. "Why, even alcohol hasn't burned you.
+You were too tough. You put the other fellows under the table, or into
+the hospital or the grave, and went your gorgeous way, a song on your
+lips, with tissues uncorroded, and without even the morning-after
+headache. And the point is that you are successes. Your muscles are
+blond-beast muscles, your vital organs are blond-beast organs. And
+from all this emanates your blond-beast philosophy. That's why you are
+brass tacks, and preach realism, and practice realism, shouldering and
+shoving and walking over lesser and unluckier creatures, who don't
+dare talk back, who, like Dick's prizefighting boys, would blow up in
+the first round if they resorted to the arbitrament of force."
+
+Dick whistled a long note of mock dismay.
+
+"And that's why you preach the gospel of the strong," Paula went on.
+"If you had been weaklings, you'd have preached the gospel of the weak
+and turned the other cheek. But you--you pair of big-muscled giants--
+when you are struck, being what you are, you don't turn the other
+cheek--"
+
+"No," Dick interrupted quietly. "We immediately roar, 'Knock his block
+off!' and then do it.--She's got us, Evan, hip and thigh. Philosophy,
+like religion, is what the man is, and is by him made in his own
+image."
+
+And while the talk led over the world, Paula sewed on, her eyes filled
+with the picture of the two big men, admiring, wondering, pondering,
+without the surety of self that was theirs, aware of a slipping and
+giving of convictions so long accepted that they had seemed part of
+her.
+
+Later in the evening she gave voice to her trouble.
+
+"The strangest part of it," she said, taking up a remark Dick had just
+made, "is that too much philosophizing about life gets one worse than
+nowhere. A philosophic atmosphere is confusing--at least to a woman.
+One hears so much about everything, and against everything, that
+nothing is sure. For instance, Mendenhall's wife is a Lutheran. She
+hasn't a doubt about anything. All is fixed, ordained, immovable.
+Star-drifts and ice-ages she knows nothing about, and if she did they
+would not alter in the least her rules of conduct for men and women in
+this world and in relation to the next.
+
+"But here, with us, you two pound your brass tacks, Terrence does a
+Greek dance of epicurean anarchism, Hancock waves the glittering veils
+of Bergsonian metaphysics, Leo makes solemn obeisance at the altar of
+Beauty, and Dar Hyal juggles his sophistic blastism to no end save all
+your applause for his cleverness. Don't you see? The effect is that
+there is nothing solid in any human judgment. Nothing is right.
+Nothing is wrong. One is left compassless, rudderless, chartless on a
+sea of ideas. Shall I do this? Must I refrain from that? Will it be
+wrong? Is there any virtue in it? Mrs. Mendenhall has her instant
+answer for every such question. But do the philosophers?"
+
+Paula shook her head.
+
+"No. All they have is ideas. They immediately proceed to talk about
+it, and talk and talk and talk, and with all their erudition reach no
+conclusion whatever. And I am just as bad. I listen and listen, and
+talk and talk, as I am talking now, and remain convictionless. There
+is no test--"
+
+"But there is," Dick said. "The old, eternal test of truth--_Will it
+work?_"
+
+"Ah, now you are pounding your favorite brass tack," Paula smiled.
+"And Dar Hyal, with a few arm-wavings and word-whirrings, will show
+that all brass tacks are illusions; and Terrence, that brass tacks are
+sordid, irrelevant and non-essential things at best; and Hancock, that
+the overhanging heaven of Bergson is paved with brass tacks, only that
+they are a much superior article to yours; and Leo, that there is only
+one brass tack in the universe, and that it is Beauty, and that it
+isn't brass at all but gold."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+"Come on, Red Cloud, go riding this afternoon," Paula asked her
+husband. "Get the cobwebs out of your brain, and let lawyers and mines
+and livestock go hang."
+
+"I'd like to, Paul," he answered. "But I can't. I've got to rush in a
+machine all the way to the Buckeye. Word came in just before lunch.
+They're in trouble at the dam. There must have been a fault in the
+under-strata, and too-heavy dynamiting has opened it. In short, what's
+the good of a good dam when the bottom of the reservoir won't hold
+water?"
+
+Three hours later, returning from the Buckeye, Dick noted that for the
+first time Paula and Graham had gone riding together alone.
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+The Wainwrights and the Coghlans, in two machines, out for a week's
+trip to the Russian River, rested over for a day at the Big House, and
+were the cause of Paula's taking out the tally-ho for a picnic into
+the Los Baños Hills. Starting in the morning, it was impossible for
+Dick to accompany them, although he left Blake in the thick of
+dictation to go out and see them off. He assured himself that no
+detail was amiss in the harnessing and hitching, and reseated the
+party, insisting on Graham coming forward into the box-seat beside
+Paula.
+
+"Just must have a reserve of man's strength alongside of Paula in case
+of need," Dick explained. "I've known a brake-rod to carry away on a
+down grade somewhat to the inconvenience of the passengers. Some of
+them broke their necks. And now, to reassure you, with Paula at the
+helm, I'll sing you a song:
+
+  "What can little Paula do?
+    Why, drive a phaeton and two.
+    Can little Paula do no more?
+    Yes, drive a tally-ho and four."
+
+All were in laughter as Paula nodded to the grooms to release the
+horses' heads, took the feel of the four mouths on her hands, and
+shortened and slipped the reins to adjustment of four horses into the
+collars and taut on the traces.
+
+In the babel of parting gibes to Dick, none of the guests was aware of
+aught else than a bright morning, the promise of a happy day, and a
+genial host bidding them a merry going. But Paula, despite the keen
+exhilaration that should have arisen with the handling of four such
+horses, was oppressed by a vague sadness in which, somehow, Dick's
+being left behind figured. Through Graham's mind Dick's merry face had
+flashed a regret of conscience that, instead of being seated there
+beside this one woman, he should be on train and steamer fleeing to
+the other side of the world.
+
+But the merriness died on Dick's face the moment he turned on his heel
+to enter the house. It was a few minutes later than ten when he
+finished his dictation and Mr. Blake rose to go. He hesitated, then
+said a trifle apologetically:
+
+"You told me, Mr. Forrest, to remind you of the proofs of your
+Shorthorn book. They wired their second hurry-up yesterday."
+
+"I won't be able to tackle it myself," Dick replied. "Will you please
+correct the typographical, submit the proofs to Mr. Manson for
+correction of fact--tell him be sure to verify that pedigree of King
+of Devon--and ship them off."
+
+Until eleven Dick received his managers and foremen. But not for a
+quarter of an hour after that did he get rid of his show manager, Mr.
+Pitts, with the tentative make-up of the catalogue for the first
+annual stock-sale on the ranch. By that time Mr. Bonbright was on hand
+with his sheaf of telegrams, and the lunch-hour was at hand ere they
+were cleaned up.
+
+For the first time alone since he had seen the tally-ho off, Dick
+stepped out on his sleeping porch to the row of barometers and
+thermometers on the wall. But he had come to consult, not them, but
+the girl's face that laughed from the round wooden frame beneath them.
+
+"Paula, Paula," he said aloud, "are you surprising yourself and me
+after all these years? Are you turning madcap at sober middle age?"
+
+He put on leggings and spurs to be ready for riding after lunch, and
+what his thoughts had been while buckling on the gear he epitomized to
+the girl in the frame.
+
+"Play the game," he muttered. And then, after a pause, as he turned to
+go: "A free field and no favor ... and no favor."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+"Really, if I don't go soon, I'll have to become a pensioner and join
+the philosophers of the madroño grove," Graham said laughingly to
+Dick.
+
+It was the time of cocktail assembling, and Paula, in addition to
+Graham, was the only one of the driving party as yet to put in an
+appearance.
+
+"If all the philosophers together would just make one book!" Dick
+demurred. "Good Lord, man, you've just got to complete your book here.
+I got you started and I've got to see you through with it."
+
+Paula's encouragement to Graham to stay on--mere stereotyped,
+uninterested phrases--was music to Dick. His heart leapt. After all,
+might he not be entirely mistaken? For two such mature, wise, middle-
+aged individuals as Paula and Graham any such foolishness was
+preposterous and unthinkable. They were not young things with their
+hearts on their sleeves.
+
+"To the book!" he toasted. He turned to Paula. "A good cocktail," he
+praised. "Paul, you excel yourself, and you fail to teach Oh Joy the
+art. His never quite touch yours.--Yes, another, please."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+
+Graham, riding solitary through the redwood canyons among the hills
+that overlooked the ranch center, was getting acquainted with Selim,
+the eleven-hundred-pound, coal-black gelding which Dick had furnished
+him in place of the lighter Altadena. As he rode along, learning the
+good nature, the roguishness and the dependableness of the animal,
+Graham hummed the words of the "Gypsy Trail" and allowed them to lead
+his thoughts. Quite carelessly, foolishly, thinking of bucolic lovers
+carving their initials on forest trees, he broke a spray of laurel and
+another of redwood. He had to stand in the stirrups to pluck a long-
+stemmed, five-fingered fern with which to bind the sprays into a
+cross. When the patteran was fashioned, he tossed it on the trail
+before him and noted that Selim passed over without treading upon it.
+Glancing back, Graham watched it to the next turn of the trail. A good
+omen, was his thought, that it had not been trampled.
+
+More five-fingered ferns to be had for the reaching, more branches of
+redwood and laurel brushing his face as he rode, invited him to
+continue the manufacture of patterans, which he dropped as he
+fashioned them. An hour later, at the head of the canyon, where he
+knew the trail over the divide was difficult and stiff, he debated his
+course and turned back.
+
+Selim warned him by nickering. Came an answering nicker from close at
+hand. The trail was wide and easy, and Graham put his mount into a fox
+trot, swung a wide bend, and overtook Paula on the Fawn.
+
+"Hello!" he called. "Hello! Hello!"
+
+She reined in till he was alongside.
+
+"I was just turning back," she said. "Why did you turn back? I thought
+you were going over the divide to Little Grizzly."
+
+"You knew I was ahead of you?" he asked, admiring the frank, boyish
+way of her eyes straight-gazing into his.
+
+"Why shouldn't I? I had no doubt at the second patteran."
+
+"Oh, I'd forgotten about them," he laughed guiltily. "Why did
+_you_ turn back?"
+
+She waited until the Fawn and Selim had stepped over a fallen alder
+across the trail, so that she could look into Graham's eyes when she
+answered:
+
+"Because I did not care to follow your trail.--To follow anybody's
+trail," she quickly amended. "I turned back at the second one."
+
+He failed of a ready answer, and an awkward silence was between them.
+Both were aware of this awkwardness, due to the known but unspoken
+things.
+
+"Do you make a practice of dropping patterans?" Paula asked.
+
+"The first I ever left," he replied, with a shake of the head. "But
+there was such a generous supply of materials it seemed a pity, and,
+besides, the song was haunting me."
+
+"It was haunting me this morning when I woke up," she said, this time
+her face straight ahead so that she might avoid a rope of wild
+grapevine that hung close to her side of the trail.
+
+And Graham, gazing at her face in profile, at her crown of gold-brown
+hair, at her singing throat, felt the old ache at the heart, the
+hunger and the yearning. The nearness of her was a provocation. The
+sight of her, in her fawn-colored silk corduroy, tormented him with a
+rush of visions of that form of hers--swimming Mountain Lad, swan-
+diving through forty feet of air, moving down the long room in the
+dull-blue dress of medieval fashion with the maddening knee-lift of
+the clinging draperies.
+
+"A penny for them," she interrupted his visioning. His answer was
+prompt.
+
+"Praise to the Lord for one thing: you haven't once mentioned Dick."
+
+"Do you so dislike him?"
+
+"Be fair," he commanded, almost sternly. "It is because I like him.
+Otherwise..."
+
+"What?" she queried.
+
+Her voice was brave, although she looked straight before her at the
+Fawn's pricking ears.
+
+"I can't understand why I remain. I should have been gone long ago."
+
+"Why?" she asked, her gaze still on the pricking ears.
+
+"Be fair, be fair," he warned. "You and I scarcely need speech for
+understanding."
+
+She turned full upon him, her cheeks warming with color, and, without
+speech, looked at him. Her whip-hand rose quickly, half way, as if to
+press her breast, and half way paused irresolutely, then dropped down
+to her side. But her eyes, he saw, were glad and startled. There was
+no mistake. The startle lay in them, and also the gladness. And he,
+knowing as it is given some men to know, changed the bridle rein to
+his other hand, reined close to her, put his arm around her, drew her
+till the horses rocked, and, knee to knee and lips on lips, kissed his
+desire to hers. There was no mistake--pressure to pressure, warmth to
+warmth, and with an elate thrill he felt her breathe against him.
+
+The next moment she had torn herself loose. The blood had left her
+face. Her eyes were blazing. Her riding-whip rose as if to strike him,
+then fell on the startled Fawn. Simultaneously she drove in both spurs
+with such suddenness and force as to fetch a groan and a leap from the
+mare.
+
+He listened to the soft thuds of hoofs die away along the forest path,
+himself dizzy in the saddle from the pounding of his blood. When the
+last hoof-beat had ceased, he half-slipped, half-sank from his saddle
+to the ground, and sat on a mossy boulder. He was hard hit--harder
+than he had deemed possible until that one great moment when he had
+held her in his arms. Well, the die was cast.
+
+He straightened up so abruptly as to alarm Selim, who sprang back the
+length of his bridle rein and snorted.
+
+What had just occurred had been unpremeditated. It was one of those
+inevitable things. It had to happen. He had not planned it, although
+he knew, now, that had he not procrastinated his going, had he not
+drifted, he could have foreseen it. And now, going could not mend
+matters. The madness of it, the hell of it and the joy of it, was that
+no longer was there any doubt. Speech beyond speech, his lips still
+tingling with the memory of hers, she had told him. He dwelt over that
+kiss returned, his senses swimming deliciously in the sea of
+remembrance.
+
+He laid his hand caressingly on the knee that had touched hers, and
+was grateful with the humility of the true lover. Wonderful it was
+that so wonderful a woman should love him. This was no girl. This was
+a woman, knowing her own will and wisdom. And she had breathed quickly
+in his arms, and her lips had been live to his. He had evoked what he
+had given, and he had not dreamed, after the years, that he had had so
+much to give.
+
+He stood up, made as if to mount Selim, who nozzled his shoulder, then
+paused to debate.
+
+It was no longer a question of going. That was definitely settled.
+Dick had certain rights, true. But Paula had her rights, and did he
+have the right to go, after what had happened, unless ... unless she
+went with him? To go now was to kiss and ride away. Surely, since the
+world of sex decreed that often the same men should love the one
+woman, and therefore that perfidy should immediately enter into such a
+triangle--surely, it was the lesser evil to be perfidious to the man
+than to the woman.
+
+It was a real world, he pondered as he rode slowly along; and Paula,
+and Dick, and he were real persons in it, were themselves conscious
+realists who looked the facts of life squarely in the face. This was
+no affair of priest and code, of other wisdoms and decisions. Of
+themselves must it be settled. Some one would be hurt. But life was
+hurt. Success in living was the minimizing of pain. Dick believed that
+himself, thanks be. The three of them believed it. And it was nothing
+new under the sun. The countless triangles of the countless
+generations had all been somehow solved. This, then, would be solved.
+All human affairs reached some solution.
+
+He shook sober thought from his brain and returned to the bliss of
+memory, reaching his hand to another caress of his knee, his lips
+breathing again to the breathing of hers against them. He even reined
+Selim to a halt in order to gaze at the hollow resting place of his
+bent arm which she had filled.
+
+Not until dinner did Graham see Paula again, and he found her the very
+usual Paula. Not even his eye, keen with knowledge, could detect any
+sign of the day's great happening, nor of the anger that had whitened
+her face and blazed in her eyes when she half-lifted her whip to
+strike him. In everything she was the same Little Lady of the Big
+House. Even when it chanced that her eyes met his, they were serene,
+untroubled, with no hint of any secret in them. What made the
+situation easier was the presence of several new guests, women,
+friends of Dick and her, come for a couple of days.
+
+Next morning, in the music room, he encountered them and Paula at the
+piano.
+
+"Don't you sing, Mr. Graham?" a Miss Hoffman asked.
+
+She was the editor of a woman's magazine published in San Francisco,
+Graham had learned.
+
+"Oh, adorably," he assured her. "Don't I, Mrs. Forrest?" he appealed.
+
+"It is quite true," Paula smiled, "if for no other reason that he is
+kind enough not to drown me quite."
+
+"And nothing remains but to prove our words," he volunteered. "There's
+a duet we sang the other evening--" He glanced at Paula for a sign.
+"--Which is particularly good for my kind of singing." Again he gave her
+a passing glance and received no cue to her will or wish. "The music
+is in the living room. I'll go and get it."
+
+"It's the 'Gypsy Trail,' a bright, catchy thing," he heard her saying
+to the others as he passed out.
+
+They did not sing it so recklessly as on that first occasion, and much
+of the thrill and some of the fire they kept out of their voices; but
+they sang it more richly, more as the composer had intended it and
+with less of their own particular interpretation. But Graham was
+thinking as he sang, and he knew, too, that Paula was thinking, that
+in their hearts another duet was pulsing all unguessed by the several
+women who applauded the song's close.
+
+"You never sang it better, I'll wager," he told Paula.
+
+For he had heard a new note in her voice. It had been fuller, rounder,
+with a generousness of volume that had vindicated that singing throat.
+
+"And now, because I know you don't know, I'll tell you what a patteran
+is," she was saying....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+
+"Dick, boy, your position is distinctly Carlylean," Terrence McFane
+said in fatherly tones.
+
+The sages of the madrono grove were at table, and, with Paula, Dick
+and Graham, made up the dinner party of seven.
+
+"Mere naming of one's position does not settle it, Terrence," Dick
+replied. "I know my point is Carlylean, but that does not invalidate
+it. Hero-worship is a very good thing. I am talking, not as a mere
+scholastic, but as a practical breeder with whom the application of
+Mendelian methods is an every-day commonplace."
+
+"And I am to conclude," Hancock broke in, "that a Hottentot is as good
+as a white man?"
+
+"Now the South speaks, Aaron," Dick retorted with a smile. "Prejudice,
+not of birth, but of early environment, is too strong for all your
+philosophy to shake. It is as bad as Herbert Spencer's handicap of the
+early influence of the Manchester School."
+
+"And Spencer is on a par with the Hottentot?" Dar Hyal challenged.
+
+Dick shook his head.
+
+"Let me say this, Hyal. I think I can make it clear. The average
+Hottentot, or the average Melanesian, is pretty close to being on a
+par with the average white man. The difference lies in that there are
+proportionately so many more Hottentots and negroes who are merely
+average, while there is such a heavy percentage of white men who are
+not average, who are above average. These are what I called the pace-
+makers that bring up the speed of their own race average-men. Note
+that they do not change the nature or develop the intelligence of the
+average-men. But they give them better equipment, better facilities,
+enable them to travel a faster collective pace.
+
+"Give an Indian a modern rifle in place of his bow and arrows and he
+will become a vastly more efficient game-getter. The Indian hunter
+himself has not changed in the slightest. But his entire Indian race
+sported so few of the above-average men, that all of them, in ten
+thousand generations, were unable to equip him with a rifle."
+
+"Go on, Dick, develop the idea," Terrence encouraged. "I begin to
+glimpse your drive, and you'll soon have Aaron on the run with his
+race prejudices and silly vanities of superiority."
+
+"These above-average men," Dick continued, "these pace-makers, are the
+inventors, the discoverers, the constructionists, the sporting
+dominants. A race that sports few such dominants is classified as a
+lower race, as an inferior race. It still hunts with bows and arrows.
+It is not equipped. Now the average white man, per se, is just as
+bestial, just as stupid, just as inelastic, just as stagnative, just
+as retrogressive, as the average savage. But the average white man has
+a faster pace. The large number of sporting dominants in his society
+give him the equipment, the organization, and impose the law.
+
+"What great man, what hero--and by that I mean what sporting dominant--
+has the Hottentot race produced? The Hawaiian race produced only one--
+Kamehameha. The negro race in America, at the outside only two, Booker
+T. Washington and Du Bois--and both with white blood in them...."
+
+Paula feigned a cheerful interest while the exposition went on. She
+did not appear bored, but to Graham's sympathetic eyes she seemed
+inwardly to droop. And in an interval of tilt between Terrence and
+Hancock, she said in a low voice to Graham:
+
+"Words, words, words, so much and so many of them! I suppose Dick is
+right--he so nearly always is; but I confess to my old weakness of
+inability to apply all these floods of words to life--to my life, I
+mean, to my living, to what I should do, to what I must do." Her eyes
+were unfalteringly fixed on his while she spoke, leaving no doubt in
+his mind to what she referred. "I don't know what bearing sporting
+dominants and race-paces have on my life. They show me no right or
+wrong or way for my particular feet. And now that they've started they
+are liable to talk the rest of the evening....
+
+"Oh, I do understand what they say," she hastily assured him; "but it
+doesn't mean anything to me. Words, words, words--and I want to know
+what to do, what to do with myself, what to do with you, what to do
+with Dick."
+
+But the devil of speech was in Dick Forrest's tongue, and before
+Graham could murmur a reply to Paula, Dick was challenging him for
+data on the subject from the South American tribes among which he had
+traveled. To look at Dick's face it would have been unguessed that he
+was aught but a carefree, happy arguer. Nor did Graham, nor did Paula,
+Dick's dozen years' wife, dream that his casual careless glances were
+missing no movement of a hand, no change of position on a chair, no
+shade of expression on their faces.
+
+What's up? was Dick's secret interrogation. Paula's not herself. She's
+positively nervous, and all the discussion is responsible. And
+Graham's off color. His brain isn't working up to mark. He's thinking
+about something else, rather than about what he is saying. What is
+that something else?
+
+And the devil of speech behind which Dick hid his secret thoughts
+impelled him to urge the talk wider and wilder.
+
+"For once I could almost hate the four sages," Paula broke out in an
+undertone to Graham, who had finished furnishing the required data.
+
+Dick, himself talking, in cool sentences amplifying his thesis,
+apparently engrossed in his subject, saw Paula make the aside,
+although no word of it reached his ears, saw her increasing
+nervousness, saw the silent sympathy of Graham, and wondered what had
+been the few words she uttered, while to the listening table he was
+saying:
+
+"Fischer and Speiser are both agreed on the paucity of unit-characters
+that circulate in the heredity of the lesser races as compared with
+the immense variety of unit-characters in say the French, or German,
+or English...."
+
+No one at the table suspected that Dick deliberately dangled the bait
+of a new trend to the conversation, nor did Leo dream afterward that
+it was the master-craft and deviltry of Dick rather than his own
+question that changed the subject when he demanded to know what part
+the female sporting dominants played in the race.
+
+"Females don't sport, Leo, my lad," Terrence, with a wink to the
+others, answered him. "Females are conservative. They keep the type
+true. They fix it and hold it, and are the everlasting clog on the
+chariot of progress. If it wasn't for the females every blessed
+mother's son of us would be a sporting dominant. I refer to our
+distinguished breeder and practical Mendelian whom we have with us
+this evening to verify my random statements."
+
+"Let us get down first of all to bedrock and find out what we are
+talking about," Dick was prompt on the uptake. "What is woman?" he
+demanded with an air of earnestness.
+
+"The ancient Greeks said woman was nature's failure to make a man,"
+Dar Hyal answered, the while the imp of mockery laughed in the corners
+of his mouth and curled his thin cynical lips derisively.
+
+Leo was shocked. His face flushed. There was pain in his eyes and his
+lips were trembling as he looked wistful appeal to Dick.
+
+"The half-sex," Hancock gibed. "As if the hand of God had been
+withdrawn midway in the making, leaving her but a half-soul, a groping
+soul at best."
+
+"No I no!" the boy cried out. "You must not say such things!--Dick,
+you know. Tell them, tell them."
+
+"I wish I could," Dick replied. "But this soul discussion is vague as
+souls themselves. We all know, of our selves, that we often grope, are
+often lost, and are never so much lost as when we think we know where
+we are and all about ourselves. What is the personality of a lunatic
+but a personality a little less, or very much less, coherent than
+ours? What is the personality of a moron? Of an idiot? Of a feeble-
+minded child? Of a horse? A dog? A mosquito? A bullfrog? A woodtick? A
+garden snail? And, Leo, what is your own personality when you sleep
+and dream? When you are seasick? When you are in love? When you have
+colic? When you have a cramp in the leg? When you are smitten abruptly
+with the fear of death? When you are angry? When you are exalted with
+the sense of the beauty of the world and think you think all
+inexpressible unutterable thoughts?
+
+"I say _think you think_ intentionally. Did you really think,
+then your sense of the beauty of the world would not be inexpressible,
+unutterable. It would be clear, sharp, definite. You could put it into
+words. Your personality would be clear, sharp, and definite as your
+thoughts and words. Ergo, Leo, when you deem, in exalted moods, that
+you are at the summit of existence, in truth you are thrilling,
+vibrating, dancing a mad orgy of the senses and not knowing a step of
+the dance or the meaning of the orgy. You don't know yourself. Your
+soul, your personality, at that moment, is a vague and groping thing.
+Possibly the bullfrog, inflating himself on the edge of a pond and
+uttering hoarse croaks through the darkness to a warty mate, possesses
+also, at that moment, a vague and groping personality.
+
+"No, Leo, personality is too vague for any of our vague personalities
+to grasp. There are seeming men with the personalities of women. There
+are plural personalities. There are two-legged human creatures that
+are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. We, as personalities, float like
+fog-wisps through glooms and darknesses and light-flashings. It is all
+fog and mist, and we are all foggy and misty in the thick of the
+mystery."
+
+"Maybe it's mystification instead of mystery--man-made mystification,"
+Paula said.
+
+"There talks the true woman that Leo thinks is not a half-soul," Dick
+retorted. "The point is, Leo, sex and soul are all interwoven and
+tangled together, and we know little of one and less of the other."
+
+"But women are beautiful," the boy stammered.
+
+"Oh, ho!" Hancock broke in, his black eyes gleaming wickedly. "So,
+Leo, you identify woman with beauty?"
+
+The young poet's lips moved, but he could only nod.
+
+"Very well, then, let us take the testimony of painting, during the
+last thousand years, as a reflex of economic conditions and political
+institutions, and by it see how man has molded and daubed woman into
+the image of his desire, and how she has permitted him--"
+
+"You must stop baiting Leo," Paula interfered, "and be truthful, all
+of you, and say what you do know or do believe."
+
+"Woman is a very sacred subject," Dar Hyal enunciated solemnly.
+
+"There is the Madonna," Graham suggested, stepping into the breach to
+Paula's aid.
+
+"And the cérébrale," Terrence added, winning a nod of approval from
+Dar Hyal.
+
+"One at a time," Hancock said. "Let us consider the Madonna-worship,
+which was a particular woman-worship in relation to the general woman-
+worship of all women to-day and to which Leo subscribes. Man is a
+lazy, loafing savage. He dislikes to be pestered. He likes
+tranquillity, repose. And he finds himself, ever since man began,
+saddled to a restless, nervous, irritable, hysterical traveling
+companion, and her name is woman. She has moods, tears, vanities,
+angers, and moral irresponsibilities. He couldn't destroy her. He had
+to have her, although she was always spoiling his peace. What was he
+to do?"
+
+"Trust him to find a way--the cunning rascal," Terrence interjected.
+
+"He made a heavenly image of her," Hancock kept on. "He idealized her
+good qualities, and put her so far away that her bad qualities
+couldn't get on his nerves and prevent him from smoking his quiet lazy
+pipe of peace and meditating upon the stars. And when the ordinary
+every-day woman tried to pester, he brushed her aside from his
+thoughts and remembered his heaven-woman, the perfect woman, the
+bearer of life and custodian of immortality.
+
+"Then came the Reformation. Down went the worship of the Mother. And
+there was man still saddled to his repose-destroyer. What did he do
+then?"
+
+"Ah, the rascal," Terrence grinned.
+
+"He said: 'I will make of you a dream and an illusion.' And he did.
+The Madonna was his heavenly woman, his highest conception of woman.
+He transferred all his idealized qualities of her to the earthly
+woman, to every woman, and he has fooled himself into believing in
+them and in her ever since... like Leo does."
+
+"For an unmarried man you betray an amazing intimacy with the
+pestiferousness of woman," Dick commented. "Or is it all purely
+theoretical?" Terrence began to laugh.
+
+"Dick, boy, it's Laura Marholm Aaron's been just reading. He can spout
+her chapter and verse."
+
+"And with all this talk about woman we have not yet touched the hem of
+her garment," Graham said, winning a grateful look from Paula and Leo.
+
+"There is love," Leo breathed. "No one has said one word about love."
+
+"And marriage laws, and divorces, and polygamy, and monogamy, and free
+love," Hancock rattled off.
+
+"And why, Leo," Dar Hyal queried, "is woman, in the game of love,
+always the pursuer, the huntress?"
+
+"Oh, but she isn't," the boy answered quietly, with an air of superior
+knowledge. "That is just some of your Shaw nonsense."
+
+"Bravo, Leo," Paula applauded.
+
+"Then Wilde was wrong when he said woman attacks by sudden and strange
+surrenders?" Dar Hyal asked.
+
+"But don't you see," protested Leo, "all such talk makes woman a
+monster, a creature of prey." As he turned to Dick, he stole a side
+glance at Paula and love welled in his eyes. "Is she a creature of
+prey, Dick?"
+
+"No," Dick answered slowly, with a shake of head, and gentleness was
+in his voice for sake of what he had just seen in the boy's eyes. "I
+cannot say that woman is a creature of prey. Nor can I say she is a
+creature preyed upon. Nor will I say she is a creature of unfaltering
+joy to man. But I will say that she is a creature of much joy to man--
+"
+
+"And of much foolishness," Hancock added.
+
+"Of much fine foolishness," Dick gravely amended.
+
+"Let me ask Leo something," Dar Hyal said. "Leo, why is it that a
+woman loves the man who beats her?"
+
+"And doesn't love the man who doesn't beat her?" Leo countered.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"Well, Dar, you are partly right and mostly wrong.--Oh, I have learned
+about definitions from you fellows. You've cunningly left them out of
+your two propositions. Now I'll put them in for you. A man who beats a
+woman he loves is a low type man. A woman who loves the man who beats
+her is a low type woman. No high type man beats the woman he loves. No
+high type woman," and all unconsciously Leo's eyes roved to Paula,
+"could love a man who beats her."
+
+"No, Leo," Dick said, "I assure you I have never, never beaten Paula."
+
+"So you see, Dar," Leo went on with flushing cheeks, "you are wrong.
+Paula loves Dick without being beaten."
+
+With what seemed pleased amusement beaming on his face, Dick turned to
+Paula as if to ask her silent approval of the lad's words; but what
+Dick sought was the effect of the impact of such words under the
+circumstances he apprehended. In Paula's eyes he thought he detected a
+flicker of something he knew not what. Graham's face he found
+expressionless insofar as there was no apparent change of the
+expression of interest that had been there.
+
+"Woman has certainly found her St. George tonight," Graham
+complimented. "Leo, you shame me. Here I sit quietly by while you
+fight three dragons."
+
+"And such dragons," Paula joined in. "If they drove O'Hay to drink,
+what will they do to you, Leo?"
+
+"No knight of love can ever be discomfited by all the dragons in the
+world," Dick said. "And the best of it, Leo, is in this case the
+dragons are more right than you think, and you are more right than
+they just the same."
+
+"Here's a dragon that's a good dragon, Leo, lad," Terrence spoke up.
+"This dragon is going to desert his disreputable companions and come
+over on your side and be a Saint Terrence. And this Saint Terrence has
+a lovely question to ask you."
+
+"Let this dragon roar first," Hancock interposed. "Leo, by all in love
+that is sweet and lovely, I ask you: why do lovers, out of jealousy,
+so often kill the woman they love?"
+
+"Because they are hurt, because they are insane," came the answer,
+"and because they have been unfortunate enough to love a woman so low
+in type that she could be guilty of making them jealous."
+
+"But, Leo, love will stray," Dick prompted. "You must give a more
+sufficient answer."
+
+"True for Dick," Terrence supplemented. "And it's helping you I am to
+the full stroke of your sword. Love will stray among the highest
+types, and when it does in steps the green-eyed monster. Suppose the
+most perfect woman you can imagine should cease to love the man who
+does not beat her and come to love another man who loves her and will
+not beat her--what then? All highest types, mind you. Now up with your
+sword and slash into the dragons."
+
+"The first man will not kill her nor injure her in any way," Leo
+asserted stoutly. "Because if he did he would not be the man you
+describe. He would not be high type, but low type."
+
+"You mean, he would get out of the way?" Dick asked, at the same time
+busying himself with a cigarette so that he might glance at no one's
+face.
+
+Leo nodded gravely.
+
+"He would get out of the way, and he would make the way easy for her,
+and he would be very gentle with her."
+
+"Let us bring the argument right home," Hancock said. "We'll suppose
+you're in love with Mrs. Forrest, and Mrs. Forrest is in love with
+you, and you run away together in the big limousine--"
+
+"Oh, but I wouldn't," the boy blurted out, his cheeks burning.
+
+"Leo, you are not complimentary," Paula encouraged.
+
+"It's just supposing, Leo," Hancock urged.
+
+The boy's embarrassment was pitiful, and his voice quivered, but he
+turned bravely to Dick and said:
+
+"That is for Dick to answer."
+
+"And I'll answer," Dick said. "I wouldn't kill Paula. Nor would I kill
+you, Leo. That wouldn't be playing the game. No matter what I felt at
+heart, I'd say, 'Bless you, my children.' But just the same--" He
+paused, and the laughter signals in the corners of his eyes advertised
+a whimsey--"I'd say to myself that Leo was making a sad mistake. You
+see, he doesn't know Paula."
+
+"She would be for interrupting his meditations on the stars," Terrence
+smiled.
+
+"Never, never, Leo, I promise you," Paula exclaimed.
+
+"There do you belie yourself, Mrs. Forrest," Terrence assured her. "In
+the first place, you couldn't help doing it. Besides, it'd be your
+bounden duty to do it. And, finally, if I may say so, as somewhat of
+an authority, when I was a mad young lover of a man, with my heart
+full of a woman and my eyes full of the stars, 'twas ever the dearest
+delight to be loved away from them by the woman out of my heart."
+
+"Terrence, if you keep on saying such lovely things," cried Paula,"
+I'll run away with both you and Leo in the limousine."
+
+"Hurry the day," said Terrence gallantly. "But leave space among your
+fripperies for a few books on the stars that Leo and I may be studying
+in odd moments."
+
+The combat ebbed away from Leo, and Dar Hyal and Hancock beset Dick.
+
+"What do you mean by 'playing the game'?" Dar Hyal asked.
+
+"Just what I said, just what Leo said," Dick answered; and he knew
+that Paula's boredom and nervousness had been banished for some time
+and that she was listening with an interest almost eager. "In my way
+of thinking, and in accord with my temperament, the most horrible
+spiritual suffering I can imagine would be to kiss a woman who endured
+my kiss."
+
+"Suppose she fooled you, say for old sake's sake, or through desire
+not to hurt you, or pity for you?" Hancock propounded.
+
+"It would be, to me, the unforgivable sin," came Dick's reply. "It
+would not be playing the game--for her. I cannot conceive the
+fairness, nor the satisfaction, of holding the woman one loves a
+moment longer than she loves to be held. Leo is very right. The
+drunken artisan, with his fists, may arouse and keep love alive in the
+breast of his stupid mate. But the higher human males, the males with
+some shadow of rationality, some glimmer of spirituality, cannot lay
+rough hands on love. With Leo, I would make the way easy for the
+woman, and I would be very gentle with her."
+
+"Then what becomes of your boasted monogamic marriage institution of
+Western civilization?" Dar Hyal asked.
+
+And Hancock: "You argue for free love, then?"
+
+"I can only answer with a hackneyed truism," Dick said. "There can be
+no love that is not free. Always, please, remember the point of view
+is that of the higher types. And the point of view answers you, Dar.
+The vast majority of individuals must be held to law and labor by the
+monogamic institution, or by a stern, rigid marriage institution of
+some sort. They are unfit for marriage freedom or love freedom.
+Freedom of love, for them, would be merely license of promiscuity.
+Only such nations have risen and endured where God and the State have
+kept the people's instincts in discipline and order."
+
+"Then you don't believe in the marriage laws for say yourself," Dar
+Hyal inquired, "while you do believe in them for other men?"
+
+"I believe in them for all men. Children, family, career, society, the
+State--all these things make marriage, legal marriage, imperative. And
+by the same token that is why I believe in divorce. Men, all men, and
+women, all women, are capable of loving more than once, of having the
+old love die and of finding a new love born. The State cannot control
+love any more than can a man or a woman. When one falls in love one
+falls in love, and that's all he knows about it. There it is--
+throbbing, sighing, singing, thrilling love. But the State can control
+license."
+
+"It is a complicated free love that you stand for," Hancock
+criticised. "True, and for the reason that man, living in society, is
+a most complicated animal."
+
+"But there are men, lovers, who would die at the loss of their loved
+one," Leo surprised the table by his initiative. "They would die if
+she died, they would die--oh so more quickly--if she lived and loved
+another."
+
+"Well, they'll have to keep on dying as they have always died in the
+past," Dick answered grimly. "And no blame attaches anywhere for their
+deaths. We are so made that our hearts sometimes stray."
+
+"My heart would never stray," Leo asserted proudly, unaware that all
+at the table knew his secret. "I could never love twice, I know."
+
+"True for you, lad," Terrence approved. "The voice of all true lovers
+is in your throat. 'Tis the absoluteness of love that is its joy--how
+did Shelley put it?--or was it Keats?--'All a wonder and a wild
+delight.' Sure, a miserable skinflint of a half-baked lover would it
+be that could dream there was aught in woman form one-thousandth part
+as sweet, as ravishing and enticing, as glorious and wonderful as his
+own woman that he could ever love again."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+And as they passed out from the dining room, Dick, continuing the
+conversation with Dar Hyal, was wondering whether Paula would kiss him
+good night or slip off to bed from the piano. And Paula, talking to
+Leo about his latest sonnet which he had shown her, was wondering if
+she could kiss Dick, and was suddenly greatly desirous to kiss him,
+she knew not why.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+
+There was little talk that same evening after dinner. Paula, singing
+at the piano, disconcerted Terrence in the midst of an apostrophe on
+love. He quit a phrase midmost to listen to the something new he heard
+in her voice, then slid noiselessly across the room to join Leo at
+full length on the bearskin. Dar Hyal and Hancock likewise abandoned
+the discussion, each isolating himself in a capacious chair. Graham,
+seeming least attracted, browsed in a current magazine, but Dick
+observed that he quickly ceased turning the pages. Nor did Dick fail
+to catch the new note in Paula's voice and to endeavor to sense its
+meaning.
+
+When she finished the song the three sages strove to tell her all at
+the same time that for once she had forgotten herself and sung out as
+they had always claimed she could. Leo lay without movement or speech,
+his chin on his two hands, his face transfigured.
+
+"It's all this talk on love," Paula laughed, "and all the lovely
+thoughts Leo and Terrence ... and Dick have put into my head."
+
+Terrence shook his long mop of iron-gray hair.
+
+"Into your heart you'd be meaning," he corrected. "'Tis the very heart
+and throat of love that are yours this night. And for the first time,
+dear lady, have I heard the full fair volume that is yours. Never
+again plaint that your voice is thin. Thick it is, and round it is, as
+a great rope, a great golden rope for the mooring of argosies in the
+harbors of the Happy Isles."
+
+"And for that I shall sing you the _Gloria,"_ she answered, "to
+celebrate the slaying of the dragons by Saint Leo, by Saint Terrence
+... and, of course, by Saint Richard."
+
+Dick, missing nothing of the talk, saved himself from speech by
+crossing to the concealed sideboard and mixing for himself a Scotch
+and soda.
+
+While Paula sang the _Gloria,_ he sat on one of the couches,
+sipping his drink and remembering keenly. Once before he had heard her
+sing like that--in Paris, during their swift courtship, and directly
+afterward, during their honeymoon on the _All Away._
+
+A little later, using his empty glass in silent invitation to Graham,
+he mixed highballs for both of them, and, when Graham had finished
+his, suggested to Paula that she and Graham sing the "Gypsy Trail."
+
+She shook her head and began _Das Kraut Ver-gessenheit._
+
+"She was not a true woman, she was a terrible woman," the song's close
+wrung from Leo. "And he was a true lover. She broke his heart, but
+still he loved her. He cannot love again because he cannot forget his
+love for her."
+
+"And now, Red Cloud, the Song of the Acorn," Paula said, smiling over
+to her husband. "Put down your glass, and be good, and plant the
+acorns."
+
+Dick lazily hauled himself off the couch and stood up, shaking his
+head mutinously, as if tossing a mane, and stamping ponderously with
+his feet in simulation of Mountain Lad.
+
+"I'll have Leo know that he is not the only poet and love-knight on
+the ranch. Listen to Mountain Lad's song, all wonder and wild delight,
+Terrence, and more. Mountain Lad doesn't moon about the loved one. He
+doesn't moon at all. He incarnates love, and rears right up in meeting
+and tells them so. Listen to him!"
+
+Dick filled the room and shook the air with wild, glad, stallion
+nickering; and then, with mane-tossing and foot-pawing, chanted:
+
+"Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys.
+The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me.
+The land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is
+the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the
+spring. The mares remember my voice. They knew me aforetimes through
+their mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills,
+and the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my
+approach."
+
+It was the first time the sages of the madrono grove had heard Dick's
+song, and they were loud in applause. Hancock took it for a fresh
+start in the discussion, and was beginning to elaborate a biologic
+Bergsonian definition of love, when he was stopped by Terrence, who
+had noticed the pain that swept across Leo's face.
+
+"Go on, please, dear lady," Terrence begged. "And sing of love, only
+of love; for it is my experience that I meditate best upon the stars
+to the accompaniment of a woman's voice."
+
+A little later, Oh Joy, entering the room, waited till Paula finished
+a song, then moved noiselessly to Graham and handed him a telegram.
+Dick scowled at the interruption.
+
+"Very important--I think," the Chinese explained to him.
+
+"Who took it?" Dick demanded.
+
+"Me--I took it," was the answer. "Night clerk at Eldorado call on
+telephone. He say important. I take it."
+
+"It is, fairly so," Graham spoke up, having finished reading the
+message. "Can I get a train out to-night for San Francisco, Dick?"
+
+"Oh Joy, come back a moment," Dick called, looking at his watch. "What
+train for San Francisco stops at Eldorado?"
+
+"Eleven-ten," came the instant information. "Plenty time. Not too
+much. I call chauffeur?"
+
+Dick nodded.
+
+"You really must jump out to-night?" he asked Graham.
+
+"Really. It is quite important. Will I have time to pack?"
+
+Dick gave a confirmatory nod to Oh Joy, and said to Graham:
+
+"Just time to throw the needful into a grip." He turned to Oh Joy. "Is
+Oh My up yet?"
+
+"Yessr."
+
+"Send him to Mr. Graham's room to help, and let me know as soon as the
+machine is ready. No limousine. Tell Saunders to take the racer."
+
+"One fine big strapping man, that," Terrence commented, after Graham
+had left the room.
+
+They had gathered about Dick, with the exception of Paula, who
+remained at the piano, listening.
+
+"One of the few men I'd care to go along with, hell for leather, on a
+forlorn hope or anything of that sort," Dick said. "He was on the
+_Nethermere_ when she went ashore at Pango in the '97 hurricane.
+Pango is just a strip of sand, twelve feet above high water mark, a
+lot of cocoanuts, and uninhabited. Forty women among the passengers,
+English officers' wives and such. Graham had a bad arm, big as a leg--
+snake bite.
+
+"It was a thundering sea. Boats couldn't live. They smashed two and
+lost both crews. Four sailors volunteered in succession to carry a
+light line ashore. And each man, in turn, dead at the end of it, was
+hauled back on board. While they were untying the last one, Graham,
+with an arm like a leg, stripped for it and went to it. And he did it,
+although the pounding he got on the sand broke his bad arm and staved
+in three ribs. But he made the line fast before he quit. In order to
+haul the hawser ashore, six more volunteered to go in on Evan's line
+to the beach. Four of them arrived. And only one woman of the forty
+was lost--she died of heart disease and fright.
+
+"I asked him about it once. He was as bad as an Englishman. All I
+could get out of the beggar was that the recovery was uneventful.
+Thought that the salt water, the exercise, and the breaking of the
+bone had served as counter-irritants and done the arm good."
+
+Oh Joy and Graham entered the room from opposite ends. Dick saw that
+Graham's first questing glance was for Paula.
+
+"All ready, sir," Oh Joy announced.
+
+Dick prepared to accompany his guest outside to the car; but Paula
+evidenced her intention of remaining in the house. Graham started over
+to her to murmur perfunctory regrets and good-by.
+
+And she, warm with what Dick had just told of him, pleasured at the
+goodly sight of him, dwelling with her eyes on the light, high poise
+of head, the careless, sun-sanded hair, and the lightness, almost
+debonaireness, of his carriage despite his weight of body and breadth
+of shoulders. As he drew near to her, she centered her gaze on the
+long gray eyes whose hint of drooping lids hinted of boyish
+sullenness. She waited for the expression of sullenness to vanish as
+the eyes lighted with the smile she had come to know so well.
+
+What he said was ordinary enough, as were her regrets; but in his
+eyes, as he held her hand a moment, was the significance which she had
+unconsciously expected and to which she replied with her own eyes. The
+same significance was in the pressure of the momentary handclasp. All
+unpremeditated, she responded to that quick pressure. As he had said,
+there was little need for speech between them.
+
+As their hands fell apart, she glanced swiftly at Dick; for she had
+learned much, in their dozen years together, of his flashes of
+observance, and had come to stand in awe of his almost uncanny powers
+of guessing facts from nuances, and of linking nuances into
+conclusions often startling in their thoroughness and correctness. But
+Dick, his shoulder toward her, laughing over some quip of Hancock, was
+just turning his laughter-crinkled eyes toward her as he started to
+accompany Graham.
+
+No, was her thought; surely Dick had seen nothing of the secret little
+that had been exchanged between them. It had been very little, very
+quick--a light in the eyes, a muscular quiver of the fingers, and no
+lingering. How could Dick have seen or sensed? Their eyes had
+certainly been hidden from Dick, likewise their clasped hands, for
+Graham's back had been toward him.
+
+Just the same, she wished she had not made that swift glance at Dick.
+She was conscious of a feeling of guilt, and the thought of it hurt
+her as she watched the two big men, of a size and blondness, go down
+the room side by side. Of what had she been guilty? she asked herself.
+Why should she have anything to hide? Yet she was honest enough to
+face the fact and accept, without quibble, that she had something to
+hide. And her cheeks burned at the thought that she was being drifted
+into deception.
+
+"I won't be but a couple of days," Graham was saying as he shook hands
+with Dick at the car.
+
+Dick saw the square, straight look of his eyes, and recognized the
+firmness and heartiness of his gripping hand. Graham half began to say
+something, then did not; and Dick knew he had changed his mind when he
+said:
+
+"I think, when I get back, that I'll have to pack."
+
+"But the book," Dick protested, inwardly cursing himself for the leap
+of joy which had been his at the other's words.
+
+"That's just why," Graham answered. "I've got to get it finished. It
+doesn't seem I can work like you do. The ranch is too alluring. I
+can't get down to the book. I sit over it, and sit over it, but the
+confounded meadowlarks keep echoing in my ears, and I begin to see the
+fields, and the redwood canyons, and Selim. And after I waste an hour,
+I give up and ring for Selim. And if it isn't that, it's any one of a
+thousand other enchantments."
+
+He put his foot on the running-board of the pulsing car and said,
+"Well, so long, old man."
+
+"Come back and make a stab at it," urged Dick. "If necessary, we'll
+frame up a respectable daily grind, and I'll lock you in every morning
+until you've done it. And if you don't do your work all day, all day
+you'll stay locked in. I'll make you work.--Got cigarettes?--matches?"
+
+"Right O."
+
+"Let her go, Saunders," Dick ordered the chauffeur; and the car seemed
+to leap out into the darkness from the brilliantly lighted porte
+cochére.
+
+Back in the house, Dick found Paula playing to the madrono sages, and
+ensconced himself on the couch to wait and wonder if she would kiss
+him good night when bedtime came. It was not, he recognized, as if
+they made a regular schedule of kissing. It had never been like that.
+Often and often he did not see her until midday, and then in the
+presence of guests. And often and often, she slipped away to bed
+early, disturbing no one with a good night kiss to her husband which
+might well hint to them that their bedtime had come.
+
+No, Dick concluded, whether or not she kissed him on this particular
+night it would be equally without significance. But still he wondered.
+
+She played on and sang on interminably, until at last he fell asleep.
+When he awoke he was alone in the room. Paula and the sages had gone
+out quietly. He looked at his watch. It marked one o'clock. She had
+played unusually late, he knew; for he knew she had just gone. It was
+the cessation of music and movement that had awakened him.
+
+And still he wondered. Often he napped there to her playing, and
+always, when she had finished, she kissed him awake and sent him to
+bed. But this night she had not. Perhaps, after all, she was coming
+back. He lay and drowsed and waited. The next time he looked at his
+watch, it was two o'clock. She had not come back.
+
+He turned off the lights, and as he crossed the house, pressed off the
+hall lights as he went, while the many unimportant little nothings,
+almost of themselves, ranged themselves into an ordered text of doubt
+and conjecture that he could not refrain from reading.
+
+On his sleeping porch, glancing at his barometers and thermometers,
+her laughing face in the round frame caught his eyes, and, standing
+before it, even bending closer to it, he studied her long.
+
+"Oh, well," he muttered, as he drew up the bedcovers, propped the
+pillows behind him and reached for a stack of proofsheets, "whatever
+it is I'll have to play it."
+
+He looked sidewise at her picture.
+
+"But, oh, Little Woman, I wish you wouldn't," was the sighed good
+night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+
+As luck would have it, beyond chance guests for lunch or dinner, the
+Big House was empty. In vain, on the first and second days, did Dick
+lay out his work, or defer it, so as to be ready for any suggestion
+from Paula to go for an afternoon swim or drive.
+
+He noted that she managed always to avoid the possibility of being
+kissed. From her sleeping porch she called good night to him across
+the wide patio. In the morning he prepared himself for her eleven
+o'clock greeting. Mr. Agar and Mr. Pitts, with important matters
+concerning the forthcoming ranch sale of stock still unsettled, Dick
+promptly cleared out at the stroke of eleven. Up she was, he knew, for
+he had heard her singing. As he waited, seated at his desk, for once
+he was idle. A tray of letters before him continued to need his
+signature. He remembered this morning pilgrimage of hers had been
+originated by her, and by her, somewhat persistently, had been kept
+up. And an adorable thing it was, he decided--that soft call of "Good
+morning, merry gentleman," and the folding of her kimono-clad figure
+in his arms.
+
+He remembered, further, that he had often cut that little visit short,
+conveying the impression to her, even while he clasped her, of how
+busy he was. And he remembered, more than once, the certain little
+wistful shadow on her face as she slipped away.
+
+Quarter past eleven, and she had not come. He took down the receiver
+to telephone the dairy, and in the swift rush of women's conversation,
+ere he hung up, he caught Paula's voice:
+
+"--Bother Mr. Wade. Bring all the little Wades and come, if only for a
+couple of days--"
+
+Which was very strange of Paula. She had invariably welcomed the
+intervals of no guests, when she and he were left alone with each
+other for a day or for several days. And now she was trying to
+persuade Mrs. Wade to come down from Sacramento. It would seem that
+Paula did not wish to be alone with him, and was seeking to protect
+herself with company.
+
+He smiled as he realized that that morning embrace, now that it was
+not tendered him, had become suddenly desirable. The thought came to
+him of taking her away with him on one of their travel-jaunts. That
+would solve the problem, perhaps. And he would hold her very close to
+him and draw her closer. Why not an Alaskan hunting trip? She had
+always wanted to go. Or back to their old sailing grounds in the days
+of the _All Away_--the South Seas. Steamers ran direct between
+San Francisco and Tahiti. In twelve days they could be ashore in
+Papeete. He wondered if Lavaina still ran her boarding house, and his
+quick vision caught a picture of Paula and himself at breakfast on
+Lavaina's porch in the shade of the mango trees.
+
+He brought his fist down on the desk. No, by God, he was no coward to
+run away with his wife for fear of any man. And would it be fair to
+her to take her away possibly from where her desire lay? True, he did
+not know where her desire lay, nor how far it had gone between her and
+Graham. Might it not be a spring madness with her that would vanish
+with the spring? Unfortunately, he decided, in the dozen years of
+their marriage she had never evidenced any predisposition toward
+spring madness. She had never given his heart a moment's doubt.
+Herself tremendously attractive to men, seeing much of them, receiving
+their admiration and even court, she had remained always her equable
+and serene self, Dick Forrest's wife--
+
+"Good morning, merry gentleman."
+
+She was peeping in on him, quite naturally from the hall, her eyes and
+lips smiling to him, blowing him a kiss from her finger tips.
+
+"And good morning, my little haughty moon," he called back, himself
+equally his natural self.
+
+And now she would come in, he thought; and he would fold her in his
+arms, and put her to the test of the kiss.
+
+He opened his arms in invitation. But she did not enter. Instead, she
+startled, with one hand gathered her kimono at her breast, with the
+other picked up the trailing skirt as if for flight, at the same time
+looking apprehensively down the hall. Yet his keen ears had caught no
+sound. She smiled back at him, blew him another kiss, and was gone.
+
+Ten minutes later he had no ears for Bonbright, who, telegrams in
+hand, startled him as he sat motionless at his desk, as he had sat,
+without movement, for ten minutes.
+
+And yet she was happy. Dick knew her too long in all the expressions
+of her moods not to realize the significance of her singing over the
+house, in the arcades, and out in the patio. He did not leave his
+workroom till the stroke of lunch; nor did she, as she sometimes did,
+come to gather him up on the way. At the lunch gong, from across the
+patio, he heard her trilling die away into the house in the direction
+of the dining room.
+
+A Colonel Harrison Stoddard--colonel from younger service in the
+National Guard, himself a retired merchant prince whose hobby was
+industrial relations and social unrest--held the table most of the
+meal upon the extension of the Employers' Liability Act so as to
+include agricultural laborers. But Paula found a space in which
+casually to give the news to Dick that she was running away for the
+afternoon on a jaunt up to Wickenberg to the Masons.
+
+"Of course I don't know when I'll be back--you know what the Masons
+are. And I don't dare ask you to come, though I'd like you along."
+
+Dick shook his head.
+
+"And so," she continued, "if you're not using Saunders--"
+
+Dick nodded acquiescence.
+
+"I'm using Callahan this afternoon," he explained, on the instant
+planning his own time now that Paula was out of the question. "I never
+can make out, Paul, why you prefer Saunders. Callahan is the better
+driver, and of course the safest."
+
+"Perhaps that's why," she said with a smile. "Safety first means
+slowest most."
+
+"Just the same I'd back Callahan against Saunders on a speed-track,"
+Dick championed.
+
+"Where are you bound?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, to show Colonel Stoddard my one-man and no-horse farm--you know,
+the automatically cultivated ten-acre stunt I've been frivoling with.
+A lot of changes have been made that have been waiting a week for me
+to see tried out. I've been too busy. And after that, I'm going to
+take him over the colony--what do you think?--five additions the last
+week."
+
+"I thought the membership was full," Paula said.
+
+"It was, and still is," Dick beamed. "But these are babies. And the
+least hopeful of the families had the rashness to have twins."
+
+"A lot of wiseacres are shaking their heads over that experiment of
+yours, and I make free to say that I am merely holding my judgment--
+you've got to show me by bookkeeping," Colonel Stoddard was saying,
+immensely pleased at the invitation to be shown over in person.
+
+Dick scarcely heard him, such was the rush of other thoughts. Paula
+had not mentioned whether Mrs. Wade and the little Wades were coming,
+much less mentioned that she had invited them. Yet this Dick tried to
+consider no lapse on her part, for often and often, like himself, she
+had guests whose arrival was the first he knew of their coming.
+
+It was, however, evident that Mrs. Wade was not coming that day, else
+Paula would not be running away thirty miles up the valley. That was
+it, and there was no blinking it. She was running away, and from him.
+She could not face being alone with him with the consequent perils of
+intimacy--and perilous, in such circumstances, could have but the
+significance he feared. And further, she was making the evening sure.
+She would not be back for dinner, or till long after dinner, it was a
+safe wager, unless she brought the whole Wickenberg crowd with her.
+She would be back late enough to expect him to be in bed. Well, he
+would not disappoint her, he decided grimly, as he replied to Colonel
+Stoddard:
+
+"The experiment works out splendidly on paper, with decently wide
+margins for human nature. And there I admit is the doubt and the
+danger--the human nature. But the only way to test it is to test it,
+which is what I am doing."
+
+"It won't be the first Dick has charged to profit and loss," Paula
+said.
+
+"But five thousand acres, all the working capital for two hundred and
+fifty farmers, and a cash salary of a thousand dollars each a year!"
+Colonel Stoddard protested. "A few such failures--if it fails--would
+put a heavy drain on the Harvest."
+
+"That's what the Harvest needs," Dick answered lightly.
+
+Colonel Stoddard looked blank.
+
+"Precisely," Dick confirmed. "Drainage, you know. The mines are
+flooded--the Mexican situation."
+
+It was during the morning of the second day--the day of Graham's
+expected return--that Dick, who, by being on horseback at eleven, had
+avoided a repetition of the hurt of the previous day's "Good morning,
+merry gentleman" across the distance of his workroom, encountered Ah
+Ha in a hall with an armful of fresh-cut lilacs. The house-boy's way
+led toward the tower room, but Dick made sure.
+
+"Where are you taking them, Ah Ha?" he asked.
+
+"Mr. Graham's room--he come to-day."
+
+Now whose thought was that? Dick pondered. Ah Ha's?--Oh Joy's--or
+Paula's? He remembered having heard Graham more than once express his
+fancy for their lilacs.
+
+He deflected his course from the library and strolled out through the
+flowers near the tower room. Through the open windows of it came
+Paula's happy humming. Dick pressed his lower lip with tight quickness
+between his teeth and strolled on.
+
+Some great, as well as many admirable, men and women had occupied that
+room, and for them Paula had never supervised the flower arrangement,
+Dick meditated. Oh Joy, himself a master of flowers, usually attended
+to that, or had his house-staff ably drilled to do it.
+
+Among the telegrams Bonbright handed him, was one from Graham, which
+Dick read twice, although it was simple and unmomentous, being merely
+a postponement of his return.
+
+Contrary to custom, Dick did not wait for the second lunch-gong. At
+the sound of the first he started, for he felt the desire for one of
+Oh Joy's cocktails--the need of a prod of courage, after the lilacs,
+to meet Paula. But she was ahead of him. He found her--who rarely
+drank, and never alone--just placing an empty cocktail glass back on
+the tray.
+
+So she, too, had needed courage for the meal, was his deduction, as he
+nodded to Oh Joy and held up one finger.
+
+"Caught you at it!" he reproved gaily. "Secret tippling. The gravest
+of symptoms. Little I thought, the day I stood up with you, that the
+wife I was marrying was doomed to fill an alcoholic's grave."
+
+Before she could retort, a young man strolled in whom she and Dick
+greeted as Mr. Winters, and who also must have a cocktail. Dick tried
+to believe that it was not relief he sensed in Paula's manner as she
+greeted the newcomer. He had never seen her quite so cordial to him
+before, although often enough she had met him. At any rate, there
+would be three at lunch.
+
+Mr. Winters, an agricultural college graduate and special writer for
+the _Pacific Rural Press,_ as well as a sort of protégé of Dick,
+had come for data for an article on California fish-ponds, and Dick
+mentally arranged his afternoon's program for him.
+
+"Got a telegram from Evan," he told Paula. "Won't be back till the
+four o'clock day after to-morrow."
+
+"And after all my trouble!" she exclaimed. "Now the lilacs will be
+wilted and spoiled."
+
+Dick felt a warm glow of pleasure. There spoke his frank,
+straightforward Paula. No matter what the game was, or its outcome, at
+least she would play it without the petty deceptions. She had always
+been that way--too transparent to make a success of deceit.
+
+Nevertheless, he played his own part by a glance of scarcely
+interested interrogation.
+
+"Why, in Graham's room," she explained. "I had the boys bring a big
+armful and I arranged them all myself. He's so fond of them, you
+know."
+
+Up to the end of lunch, she had made no mention of Mrs. Wade's coming,
+and Dick knew definitely she was not coming when Paula queried
+casually:
+
+"Expecting anybody?"
+
+He shook his head, and asked, "Are you doing anything this afternoon?"
+
+"Haven't thought about anything," she answered. "And now I suppose I
+can't plan upon you with Mr. Winters to be told all about fish."
+
+"But you can," Dick assured her. "I'm turning him over to Mr. Hanley,
+who's got the trout counted down to the last egg hatched and who knows
+all the grandfather bass by name. I'll tell you what--" He paused and
+considered. Then his face lighted as with a sudden idea. "It's a
+loafing afternoon. Let's take the rifles and go potting squirrels. I
+noticed the other day they've become populous on that hill above the
+Little Meadow."
+
+But he had not failed to observe the flutter of alarm that shadowed
+her eyes so swiftly, and that so swiftly was gone as she clapped her
+hands and was herself.
+
+"But don't take a rifle for me," she said.
+
+"If you'd rather not--" he began gently.
+
+"Oh, I want to go, but I don't feel up to shooting. I'll take Le
+Gallienne's last book along--it just came in--and read to you in
+betweenwhiles. Remember, the last time I did that when we went
+squirreling it was his 'Quest of the Golden Girl' I read to you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+
+Paula on the Fawn, and Dick on the Outlaw, rode out from the Big House
+as nearly side by side as the Outlaw's wicked perversity permitted.
+The conversation she permitted was fragmentary. With tiny ears laid
+back and teeth exposed, she would attempt to evade Dick's restraint of
+rein and spur and win to a bite of Paula's leg or the Fawn's sleek
+flank, and with every defeat the pink flushed and faded in the whites
+of her eyes. Her restless head-tossing and pitching attempts to rear
+(thwarted by the martingale) never ceased, save when she pranced and
+sidled and tried to whirl.
+
+"This is the last year of her," Dick announced. "She's indomitable.
+I've worked two years on her without the slightest improvement. She
+knows me, knows my ways, knows I am her master, knows when she has to
+give in, but is never satisfied. She nourishes the perennial hope that
+some time she'll catch me napping, and for fear she'll miss that time
+she never lets any time go by."
+
+"And some time she may catch you," Paula said.
+
+"That's why I'm giving her up. It isn't exactly a strain on me, but
+soon or late she's bound to get me if there's anything in the law of
+probability. It may be a million-to-one shot, but heaven alone knows
+where in the series of the million that fatal one is going to pop up."
+
+"You're a wonder, Red Cloud," Paula smiled.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You think in statistics and percentages, averages and exceptions. I
+wonder, when we first met, what particular formula you measured me up
+by."
+
+"I'll be darned if I did," he laughed back. "There was where all signs
+failed. I didn't have a statistic that applied to you. I merely
+acknowledged to myself that here was the most wonderful female woman
+ever born with two good legs, and I knew that I wanted her more than I
+had ever wanted anything. I just had to have her--"
+
+"And got her," Paula completed for him. "But since, Red Cloud, since.
+Surely you've accumulated enough statistics on me."
+
+"A few, quite a few," he admitted. "But I hope never to get the last
+one--"
+
+He broke off at sound of the unmistakable nicker of Mountain Lad. The
+stallion appeared, the cowboy on his back, and Dick gazed for a moment
+at the perfect action of the beast's great swinging trot.
+
+"We've got to get out of this," he warned, as Mountain Lad, at sight
+of them, broke into a gallop.
+
+Together they pricked their mares, whirled them about, and fled, while
+from behind they heard the soothing "Whoas" of the rider, the thuds of
+the heavy hoofs on the roadway, and a wild imperative neigh. The
+Outlaw answered, and the Fawn was but a moment behind her. From the
+commotion they knew Mountain Lad was getting tempestuous.
+
+Leaning to the curve, they swept into a cross-road and in fifty paces
+pulled up, where they waited till the danger was past.
+
+"He's never really injured anybody yet," Paula said, as they started
+back.
+
+"Except when he casually stepped on Cowley's toes. You remember he was
+laid up in bed for a month," Dick reminded her, straightening out the
+Outlaw from a sidle and with a flicker of glance catching the strange
+look with which Paula was regarding him.
+
+There was question in it, he could see, and love in it, and fear--yes,
+almost fear, or at least apprehension that bordered on dismay; but,
+most of all, a seeking, a searching, a questioning. Not entirely
+ungermane to her mood, was his thought, had been that remark of his
+thinking in statistics.
+
+But he made that he had not seen, whipping out his pad, and, with an
+interested glance at a culvert they were passing, making a note.
+
+"They missed it," he said. "It should have been repaired a month ago."
+
+"What has become of all those Nevada mustangs?" Paula inquired.
+
+This was a flyer Dick had taken, when a bad season for Nevada pasture
+had caused mustangs to sell for a song with the alternative of
+starving to death. He had shipped a trainload down and ranged them in
+his wilder mountain pastures to the west.
+
+"It's time to break them," he answered. "And I'm thinking of a real
+old-fashioned rodeo next week. What do you say? Have a barbecue and
+all the rest, and invite the country side?"
+
+"And then you won't be there," Paula objected.
+
+"I'll take a day off. Is it a go?"
+
+They reined to one side of the road, as she agreed, to pass three farm
+tractors, all with their trailage of ganged discs and harrows.
+
+"Moving them across to the Rolling Meadows," he explained. "They pay
+over horses on the right ground."
+
+Rising from the home valley, passing through cultivated fields and
+wooded knolls, they took a road busy with many wagons hauling road-
+dressing from the rock-crusher they could hear growling and crunching
+higher up.
+
+"Needs more exercise than I've been giving her," Dick remarked,
+jerking the Outlaw's bared teeth away from dangerous proximity to the
+Fawn's flank.
+
+"And it's disgraceful the way I've neglected Duddy and Fuddy," Paula
+said. "I've kept their feed down like a miser, but they're a lively
+handful just the same."
+
+Dick heard her idly, but within forty-eight hours he was to remember
+with hurt what she had said.
+
+They continued on till the crunch of the rock-crusher died away,
+penetrated a belt of woodland, crossed a tiny divide where the
+afternoon sunshine was wine-colored by the manzanita and rose-colored
+by madronos, and dipped down through a young planting of eucalyptus to
+the Little Meadow. But before they reached it, they dismounted and
+tied their horses. Dick took the .22 automatic rifle from his saddle-
+holster, and with Paula advanced softly to a clump of redwoods on the
+edge of the meadow. They disposed themselves in the shade and gazed
+out across the meadow to the steep slope of hill that came down to it
+a hundred and fifty yards away.
+
+"There they are--three--four of them," Paula whispered, as her keen
+eyes picked the squirrels out amongst the young grain.
+
+These were the wary ones, the sports in the direction of infinite
+caution who had shunned the poisoned grain and steel traps of Dick's
+vermin catchers. They were the survivors, each of a score of their
+fellows not so cautious, themselves fit to repopulate the hillside.
+
+Dick filled the chamber and magazine with tiny cartridges, examined
+the silencer, and, lying at full length, leaning on his elbow, sighted
+across the meadow. There was no sound of explosion when he fired, only
+the click of the mechanism as the bullet was sped, the empty cartridge
+ejected, a fresh cartridge flipped into the chamber, and the trigger
+re-cocked. A big, dun-colored squirrel leaped in the air, fell over,
+and disappeared in the grain. Dick waited, his eye along the rifle and
+directed toward several holes around which the dry earth showed widely
+as evidence of the grain which had been destroyed. When the wounded
+squirrel appeared, scrambling across the exposed ground to safety, the
+rifle clicked again and he rolled over on his side and lay still.
+
+At the first click, every squirrel but the stricken one, had made into
+its burrow. Remained nothing to do but wait for their curiosity to
+master caution. This was the interval Dick had looked forward to. As
+he lay and scanned the hillside for curious heads to appear, he
+wondered if Paula would have something to say to him. In trouble she
+was, but would she keep this trouble to herself? It had never been her
+way. Always, soon or late, she brought her troubles to him. But, then,
+he reflected, she had never had a trouble of this nature before. It
+was just the one thing that she would be least prone to discuss with
+him. On the other hand, he reasoned, there was her everlasting
+frankness. He had marveled at it, and joyed in it, all their years
+together. Was it to fail her now?
+
+So he lay and pondered. She did not speak. She was not restless. He
+could hear no movement. When he glanced to the side at her he saw her
+lying on her back, eyes closed, arms outstretched, as if tired.
+
+A small head, the color of the dry soil of its home, peeped from a
+hole. Dick waited long minutes, until, assured that no danger lurked,
+the owner of the head stood full up on its hind legs to seek the cause
+of the previous click that had startled it. Again the rifle clicked.
+
+"Did you get him?" Paula queried, without opening her eyes.
+
+"Yea, and a fat one," Dick answered. "I stopped a line of generations
+right there."
+
+An hour passed. The afternoon sun beat down but was not uncomfortable
+in the shade. A gentle breeze fanned the young grain into lazy
+wavelets at times, and stirred the redwood boughs above them. Dick
+added a third squirrel to the score. Paula's book lay beside her, but
+she had not offered to read.
+
+"Anything the matter?" he finally nerved himself to ask.
+
+"No; headache--a beastly little neuralgic hurt across the eyes, that's
+all."
+
+"Too much embroidery," he teased.
+
+"Not guilty," was her reply.
+
+All was natural enough in all seeming; but Dick, as he permitted an
+unusually big squirrel to leave its burrow and crawl a score of feet
+across the bare earth toward the grain, thought to himself: No, there
+will be no talk between us this day. Nor will we nestle and kiss lying
+here in the grass.
+
+His victim was now at the edge of the grain. He pulled trigger. The
+creature fell over, lay still a moment, then ran in quick awkward
+fashion toward its hole. Click, click, click, went the mechanism.
+Puffs of dust leaped from the earth close about the fleeing squirrel,
+showing the closeness of the misses. Dick fired as rapidly as he could
+twitch his forefinger on the trigger, so that it was as if he played a
+stream of lead from a hose.
+
+He had nearly finished refilling the magazine when Paula spoke.
+
+"My! What a fusillade.--Get him?"
+
+"Yea, grandfather of all squirrels, a mighty graineater and destroyer
+of sustenance for young calves. But nine long smokeless cartridges on
+one squirrel doesn't pay. I'll have to do better."
+
+The sun dropped lower. The breeze died out. Dick managed another
+squirrel and sadly watched the hillside for more. He had arranged the
+time and made his bid for confidence. The situation was as grave as he
+had feared. Graver it might be, for all he knew, for his world was
+crumbling about him. Old landmarks were shifting their places. He was
+bewildered, shaken. Had it been any other woman than Paula! He had
+been so sure. There had been their dozen years to vindicate his
+surety....
+
+"Five o'clock, sun he get low," he announced, rising to his feet and
+preparing to help her up.
+
+"It did me so much good--just resting," she said, as they started for
+the horses. "My eyes feel much better. It's just as well I didn't try
+to read to you."
+
+"And don't be piggy," Dick warned, as lightly as if nothing were amiss
+with him. "Don't dare steal the tiniest peek into Le Gallienne. You've
+got to share him with me later on. Hold up your hand.--Now, honest to
+God, Paul."
+
+"Honest to God," she obeyed.
+
+"And may jackasses dance on your grandmother's grave--"
+
+"And may jackasses dance on my grandmother's grave," she solemnly
+repeated.
+
+The third morning of Graham's absence, Dick saw to it that he was
+occupied with his dairy manager when Paula made her eleven o'clock
+pilgrimage, peeped in upon him, and called her "Good morning, merry
+gentleman," from the door. The Masons, arriving in several machines
+with their boisterous crowd of young people, saved Paula for lunch and
+the afternoon; and, on her urging, Dick noted, she made the evening
+safe by holding them over for bridge and dancing.
+
+But the fourth morning, the day of Graham's expected return, Dick was
+alone in his workroom at eleven. Bending over his desk, signing
+letters, he heard Paula tiptoe into the room. He did not look up, but
+while he continued writing his signature he listened with all his soul
+to the faint, silken swish of her kimono. He knew when she was bending
+over him, and all but held his breath. But when she had softly kissed
+his hair and called her "Good morning, merry gentleman," she evaded
+the hungry sweep of his arm and laughed her way out. What affected him
+as strongly as the disappointment was the happiness he had seen in her
+face. She, who so poorly masked her moods, was bright-eyed and eager
+as a child. And it was on this afternoon that Graham was expected,
+Dick could not escape making the connection.
+
+He did not care to ascertain if she had replenished the lilacs in the
+tower room, and, at lunch, which was shared with three farm college
+students from Davis, he found himself forced to extemporize a busy
+afternoon for himself when Paula tentatively suggested that she would
+drive Graham up from Eldorado.
+
+"Drive?" Dick asked.
+
+"Duddy and Fuddy," she explained. "They're all on edge, and I just
+feel like exercising them and myself. Of course, if you'll share the
+exercise, we'll drive anywhere you say, and let him come up in the
+machine."
+
+Dick strove not to think there was anxiety in her manner while she
+waited for him to accept or decline her invitation.
+
+"Poor Duddy and Fuddy would be in the happy hunting grounds if they
+had to cover my ground this afternoon," he laughed, at the same time
+mapping his program. "Between now and dinner I've got to do a hundred
+and twenty miles. I'm taking the racer, and it's going to be some dust
+and bump and only an occasional low place. I haven't the heart to ask
+you along. You go on and take it out of Duddy and Fuddy."
+
+Paula sighed, but so poor an actress was she that in the sigh,
+intended for him as a customary reluctant yielding of his company, he
+could not fail to detect the relief at his decision.
+
+"Whither away?" she asked brightly, and again he noticed the color in
+her face, the happiness, and the brilliance of her eyes.
+
+"Oh, I'm shooting away down the river to the dredging work--Carlson
+insists I must advise him--and then up in to Sacramento, running over
+the Teal Slough land on the way, to see Wing Fo Wong."
+
+"And in heaven's name who is this Wing Fo Wong?" she laughingly
+queried, "that you must trot and see him?"
+
+"A very important personage, my dear. Worth all of two millions--made
+in potatoes and asparagus down in the Delta country. I'm leasing three
+hundred acres of the Teal Slough land to him." Dick addressed himself
+to the farm students. "That land lies just out of Sacramento on the
+west side of the river. It's a good example of the land famine that is
+surely coming. It was tule swamp when I bought it, and I was well
+laughed at by the old-timers. I even had to buy out a dozen hunting
+preserves. It averaged me eighteen dollars an acre, and not so many
+years ago either.
+
+"You know the tule swamps. Worthless, save for ducks and low-water
+pasturage. It cost over three hundred an acre to dredge and drain and
+to pay my quota of the river reclamation work. And on what basis of
+value do you think I am making a ten years' lease to old Wing Fo Wong?
+TWO thousand an acre. I couldn't net more than that if I truck-farmed
+it myself. Those Chinese are wizards with vegetables, and gluttons for
+work. No eight hours for them. It's eighteen hours. The last coolie is
+a partner with a microscopic share. That's the way Wing Fo Wong gets
+around the eight hour law."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+Twice warned and once arrested, was Dick through the long afternoon.
+He drove alone, and though he drove with speed he drove with safety.
+Accidents, for which he personally might be responsible, were things
+he did not tolerate. And they never occurred. That same sureness and
+definiteness of adjustment with which, without fumbling or
+approximating, he picked up a pencil or reached for a door-knob, was
+his in the more complicated adjustments, with which, as instance, he
+drove a high-powered machine at high speed over busy country roads.
+
+But drive as he would, transact business as he would, at high pressure
+with Carlson and Wing Fo Wong, continually, in the middle ground of
+his consciousness, persisted the thought that Paula had gone out of
+her way and done the most unusual in driving Graham the long eight
+miles from Eldorado to the ranch.
+
+"Phew!" he started to mutter a thought aloud, then suspended utterance
+and thought as he jumped the racer from forty-five to seventy miles an
+hour, swept past to the left of a horse and buggy going in the same
+direction, and slanted back to the right side of the road with margin
+to spare but seemingly under the nose of a run-about coming from the
+opposite direction. He reduced his speed to fifty and took up his
+thought:
+
+"Phew! Imagine little Paul's thoughts if I dared that drive with some
+charming girl!"
+
+He laughed at the fancy as he pictured it, for, most early in their
+marriage, he had gauged Paula's capacity for quiet jealousy. Never had
+she made a scene, or dropped a direct remark, or raised a question;
+but from the first, quietly but unmistakably, she had conveyed the
+impression of hurt that was hers if he at all unduly attended upon any
+woman.
+
+He grinned with remembrance of Mrs. Dehameny, the pretty little
+brunette widow--Paula's friend, not his--who had visited in the long
+ago in the Big House. Paula had announced that she was not riding that
+afternoon and, at lunch, had heard him and Mrs. Dehameny arrange to
+ride into the redwood canyons beyond the grove of the philosophers.
+And who but Paula, not long after their start, should overtake them
+and make the party three! He had smiled to himself at the time, and
+felt immensely tickled with Paula, for neither Mrs. Dehameny nor the
+ride with her had meant anything to him.
+
+So it was, from the beginning, that he had restricted his attentions
+to other women. Ever since he had been far more circumspect than
+Paula. He had even encouraged her, given her a free hand always, had
+been proud that his wife did attract fine fellows, had been glad that
+she was glad to be amused or entertained by them. And with reason, he
+mused. He had been so safe, so sure of her--more so, he acknowledged,
+than had she any right to be of him. And the dozen years had
+vindicated his attitude, so that he was as sure of her as he was of
+the diurnal rotation of the earth. And now, was the form his fancy
+took, the rotation of the earth was a shaky proposition and old Oom
+Paul's flat world might be worth considering.
+
+He lifted the gauntlet from his left wrist to snatch a glimpse at his
+watch, In five minutes Graham would be getting off the train at
+Eldorado. Dick, himself homeward bound west from Sacramento, was
+eating up the miles. In a quarter of an hour the train that he
+identified as having brought Graham, went by. Not until he was well
+past Eldorado did he overtake Duddy and Fuddy and the trap. Graham sat
+beside Paula, who was driving. Dick slowed down as he passed, waved a
+hello to Graham, and, as he jumped into speed again, called cheerily:
+
+"Sorry I've got to give you my dust. I'll beat you a game of billiards
+before dinner, Evan, if you ever get in."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+
+"This can't go on. We must do something--at once."
+
+They were in the music room, Paula at the piano, her face turned up to
+Graham who stood close to her, almost over her.
+
+"You must decide," Graham continued.
+
+Neither face showed happiness in the great thing that had come upon
+them, now that they considered what they must do.
+
+"But I don't want you to go," Paula urged. "I don't know what I want.
+You must bear with me. I am not considering myself. I am past
+considering myself. But I must consider Dick. I must consider you.
+I... I am so unused to such a situation," she concluded with a wan
+smile.
+
+"But it must be settled, dear love. Dick is not blind."
+
+"What has there been for him to see?" she demanded. "Nothing, except
+that one kiss in the canyon, and he couldn't have seen that. Do you
+think of anything else--I challenge you, sir."
+
+"Would that there were," he met the lighter touch in her mood, then
+immediately relapsed. "I am mad over you, mad for you. And there I
+stop. I do not know if you are equally mad. I do not know if you are
+mad at all."
+
+As he spoke, he dropped his hand to hers on the keys, and she gently
+withdrew it.
+
+"Don't you see?" he complained. "Yet you wanted me to come back?"
+
+"I wanted you to come back," she acknowledged, with her straight look
+into his eyes. "I wanted you to come back," she repeated, more softly,
+as if musing.
+
+"And I'm all at sea," he exclaimed impatiently. "You do love me?"
+
+"I do love you, Evan--you know that. But..." She paused and seemed to
+be weighing the matter judicially.
+
+"But what?" he commanded. "Go on."
+
+"But I love Dick, too. Isn't it ridiculous?"
+
+He did not respond to her smile, and her eyes delightedly warmed to
+the boyish sullenness that vexed his own eyes. A thought was hot on
+his tongue, but he restrained the utterance of it while she wondered
+what it was, disappointed not to have had it.
+
+"It will work out," she assured him gravely. "It will have to work out
+somehow. Dick says all things work out. All is change. What is static
+is dead, and we're not dead, any of us... are we?"
+
+"I don't blame you for loving Dick, for... for continuing to love
+Dick," he answered impatiently. "And for that matter, I don't see what
+you find in me compared with him. This is honest. He is a great man to
+me, and Great Heart is his name--" she rewarded him with a smile and
+nod of approval. "But if you continue to love Dick, how about me?"
+
+"But I love you, too."
+
+"It can't be," he cried, tearing himself from the piano to make a
+hasty march across the room and stand contemplating the Keith on the
+opposite wall as if he had never seen it before.
+
+She waited with a quiet smile, pleasuring in his unruly impetuousness.
+
+"You can't love two men at once," he flung at her.
+
+"Oh, but I do, Evan. That's what I am trying to work out. Only I don't
+know which I love more. Dick I have known a long time. You... you are
+a--"
+
+"Recent acquaintance," he broke in, returning to her with the same
+angry stride.
+
+"Not that, no, not that, Evan. You have made a revelation to me of
+myself. I love you as much as Dick. I love you more. I--I don't know."
+
+She broke down and buried her face in her hands, permitting his hand
+to rest tenderly on her shoulder.
+
+"You see it is not easy for me," she went on. "There is so much
+involved, so much that I cannot understand. You say you are all at
+sea. Then think of me all at sea and worse confounded. You--oh, why
+talk about it--you are a man with a man's experiences, with a man's
+nature. It is all very simple to you. 'She loves me, she loves me
+not.' But I am tangled, confused. I--and I wasn't born yesterday--have
+had no experience in loving variously. I have never had affairs. I
+loved only one man... and now you. You, and this love for you, have
+broken into a perfect marriage, Evan--"
+
+"I know--" he said.
+
+"--I don't know," she went on. "I must have time, either to work it
+out myself or to let it work itself out. If it only weren't for
+Dick..." her voice trailed off pathetically.
+
+Unconsciously, Graham's hand went farther about her shoulder.
+
+"No, no--not yet," she said softly, as softly she removed it, her own
+lingering caressingly on his a moment ere she released it. "When you
+touch me, I can't think," she begged. "I--I can't think."
+
+"Then I must go," he threatened, without any sense of threatening. She
+made a gesture of protest. "The present situation is impossible,
+unbearable. I feel like a cur, and all the time I know I am not a cur.
+I hate deception--oh, I can lie with the Pathan, to the Pathan--but I
+can't deceive a man like Great Heart. I'd prefer going right up to him
+and saying: 'Dick, I love your wife. She loves me. What are you going
+to do about it?'"
+
+"Do so," Paula said, fired for the moment.
+
+Graham straightened up with resolution.
+
+"I will. And now."
+
+"No, no," she cried in sudden panic. "You must go away." Again her
+voice trailed off, as she said, "But I can't let you go."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+If Dick had had any reason to doubt his suspicion of the state of
+Paula's heart, that reason vanished with the return of Graham. He need
+look nowhere for confirmation save to Paula. She was in a flushed
+awakening, burgeoning like the full spring all about them, a happier
+tone in her happy laugh, a richer song in her throat, a warmness of
+excitement and a continuous energy of action animating her. She was up
+early and to bed late. She did not conserve herself, but seemed to
+live on the champagne of her spirits, until Dick wondered if it was
+because she did not dare allow herself time to think.
+
+He watched her lose flesh, and acknowledged to himself that the one
+result was to make her look lovelier than ever, to take on an almost
+spiritual delicacy under her natural vividness of color and charm.
+
+And the Big House ran on in its frictionless, happy, and remorseless
+way. Dick sometimes speculated how long it would continue so to run
+on, and recoiled from contemplation of a future in which it might not
+so run on. As yet, he was confident, no one knew, no one guessed, but
+himself. But how long could that continue? Not long, he was certain.
+Paula was not sufficiently the actress. And were she a master at
+concealment of trivial, sordid detail, yet the new note and flush of
+her would be beyond the power of any woman to hide.
+
+He knew his Asiatic servants were marvels of discernment--and
+discretion, he had to add. But there were the women. Women were cats.
+To the best of them it would be great joy to catch the radiant,
+unimpeachable Paula as clay as any daughter of Eve. And any chance
+woman in the house, for a day, or an evening, might glimpse the
+situation--Paula's situation, at least, for he could not make out
+Graham's attitude yet. Trust a woman to catch a woman.
+
+But Paula, different in other ways, was different in this. He had
+never seen her display cattishness, never known her to be on the
+lookout for other women on the chance of catching them tripping--
+except in relation to him. And he grinned again at the deliciousness
+of the affair with Mrs. Dehameney which had been an affair only in
+Paula's apprehension.
+
+Among other things of wonderment, Dick speculated if Paula wondered if
+he knew.
+
+And Paula did wonder, and for a time without avail. She could detect
+no change in his customary ways and moods or treatment of her. He
+turned off his prodigious amount of work as usual, played as usual,
+chanted his songs, and was the happy good fellow. She tried to imagine
+an added sweetness toward her, but vexed herself with the fear that it
+was imagined.
+
+But it was not for long that she was in doubt. Sometimes in a crowd,
+at table, in the living room in the evening, or at cards, she would
+gaze at him through half-veiled lashes when he was unaware, until she
+was certain she saw the knowledge in his eyes and face. But no hint of
+this did she give to Graham. His knowing would not help matters. It
+might even send him away, which she frankly admitted to herself was
+the last thing she should want to happen.
+
+But when she came to a realization that she was almost certain Dick
+knew or guessed, she hardened, deliberately dared to play with the
+fire. If Dick knew--since he knew, she framed it to herself--why did
+he not speak? He was ever a straight talker. She both desired and
+feared that he might, until the fear faded and her earnest hope was
+that he would. He was the one who acted, did things, no matter what
+they were. She had always depended upon him as the doer. Graham had
+called the situation a triangle. Well, Dick could solve it. He could
+solve anything. Then why didn't he?
+
+In the meantime, she persisted in her ardent recklessness, trying not
+to feel the conscience-pricks of her divided allegiance, refusing to
+think too deeply, riding the top of the wave of her life--as she
+assured herself, living, living, living. At times she scarcely knew
+what she thought, save that she was very proud in having two such men
+at heel. Pride had always been one of her dominant key-notes--pride
+of accomplishment, achievement, mastery, as with her music, her
+appearance, her swimming. It was all one--to dance, as she well knew,
+beautifully; to dress with distinction and beauty; to swan-dive, all
+grace and courage, as few women dared; or, all fragility, to avalanche
+down the spill-way on the back of Mountain Lad and by the will and
+steel of her swim the huge beast across the tank.
+
+She was proud, a woman of their own race and type, to watch these two
+gray-eyed blond men together. She was excited, feverish, but not
+nervous. Quite coldly, sometimes, she compared the two when they were
+together, and puzzled to know for which of them she made herself more
+beautiful, more enticing. Graham she held, and she had held Dick and
+strove still to hold him.
+
+There was almost a touch of cruelty in the tingles of pride that were
+hers at thought of these two royal men suffering for her and because
+of her; for she did not hide from herself the conviction that if Dick
+knew, or, rather, since he did know, he, too, must be suffering. She
+assured herself that she was a woman of imagination and purpose in sex
+matters, and that no part of her attraction toward Graham lay merely
+in his freshness, newness, difference. And she denied to herself that
+passion played more than the most minor part. Deep down she was
+conscious of her own recklessness and madness, and of an end to it all
+that could not but be dreadful to some one of them or all of them.
+But she was content willfully to flutter far above such deeps and to
+refuse to consider their existence. Alone, looking at herself in her
+mirror, she would shake her head in mock reproof and cry out, "Oh, you
+huntress! You huntress!" And when she did permit herself to think a
+little gravely, it was to admit that Shaw and the sages of the madrono
+grove might be right in their diatribes on the hunting proclivities of
+women.
+
+She denied Dar Hyal's statement that woman was nature's failure to
+make a man; but again and again came to her Wilde's, "Woman attacks by
+sudden and strange surrenders." Had she so attacked Graham? she asked
+herself. Sudden and strange, to her, were the surrenders she had
+already made. Were there to be more? He wanted to go. With her, or
+without her, he wanted to go. But she held him--how? Was there a tacit
+promise of surrenders to come? And she would laugh away further
+consideration, confine herself to the fleeting present, and make her
+body more beautiful, and mood herself to be more fascinating, and glow
+with happiness in that she was living, thrilling, as she had never
+dreamed to live and thrill.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+
+But it is not the way for a man and a woman, in propinquity, to
+maintain a definite, unwavering distance asunder. Imperceptibly Paula
+and Graham drew closer. From lingering eye-gazings and hand-touchings
+the way led to permitted caresses, until there was a second clasping
+in the arms and a second kiss long on the lips. Nor this time did
+Paula flame in anger. Instead, she commanded:
+
+"You must not go."
+
+"I must not stay," Graham reiterated for the thousandth time. "Oh, I
+have kissed behind doors, and been guilty of all the rest of the silly
+rubbish," he complained. "But this is you, and this is Dick."
+
+"It will work out, I tell you, Evan."
+
+"Come with me then and of ourselves work it out. Come now."
+
+She recoiled.
+
+"Remember," Graham encouraged, "what Dick said at dinner the night Leo
+fought the dragons--that if it were you, Paula, his wife, who ran
+away, he would say 'Bless you, my children.'"
+
+"And that is just why it is so hard, Evan. He _is_ Great Heart.
+You named him well. Listen--you watch him now. He is as gentle as he
+said he would be that night--gentle toward me, I mean. And more. You
+watch him--"
+
+"He knows?--he has spoken?" Graham broke in.
+
+"He has not spoken, but I am sure he knows, or guesses. You watch him.
+He won't compete against you--"
+
+"Compete!"
+
+"Just that. He won't compete. Remember at the rodeo yesterday. He was
+breaking mustangs when our party arrived, but he never mounted again.
+Now he is a wonderful horse-breaker. You tried your hand. Frankly,
+while you did fairly well, you couldn't touch him. But he wouldn't
+show off against you. That alone would make me certain that he
+guesses.
+
+"Listen. Of late haven't you noticed that he never questions a
+statement you make, as he used to question, as he questions every one
+else. He continues to play billiards with you, because there you best
+him. He fences and singlesticks with you--there you are even. But he
+won't box or wrestle with you."
+
+"He _can_ out-box and out-wrestle me," Graham muttered ruefully.
+
+"You watch and you will see what I mean by not competing. He is
+treating me like a spirited colt, giving me my head to make a mess of
+things if I want to. Not for the world would he interfere. Oh, trust
+me, I know him. It is his own code that he is living up to. He could
+teach the philosophers what applied philosophy is.
+
+"No, no; listen," she rushed over Graham's attempt to interrupt. "I
+want to tell you more. There is a secret staircase that goes up from
+the library to Dick's work room. Only he and I use it, and his
+secretaries. When you arrive at the head of it, you are right in his
+room, surrounded by shelves of books. I have just come from there. I
+was going in to see him when I heard voices. Of course it was ranch
+business, I thought, and they would soon be gone. So I waited. It
+_was_ ranch business, but it was so interesting, so, what Hancock
+would call, illuminating, that I remained and eavesdropped. It was
+illuminating of Dick, I mean.
+
+"It was the wife of one of the workmen Dick had on the carpet. Such
+things do arise on a large place like this. I wouldn't know the woman
+if I saw her, and I didn't recognize her name. She was whimpering out
+her trouble when Dick stopped her. 'Never mind all that,' he said.
+'What I want to know is, did you give Smith any encouragement?'
+
+"Smith isn't his name, but he is one of our foremen and has worked
+eight years for Dick.
+
+"'Oh, no, sir,' I could hear her answer. 'He went out of his way from
+the first to bother me. I've tried to keep out of his way, always.
+Besides, my husband's a violent-tempered man, and I did so want him to
+hold his job here. He's worked nearly a year for you now, and there
+aren't any complaints, are there? Before that it was irregular work
+for a long time, and we had real hard times. It wasn't his fault. He
+ain't a drinking man. He always--'
+
+"'That's all right,' Dick stopped her. 'His work and habits have
+nothing to do with the matter. Now you are sure you have never
+encouraged Mr. Smith in any way?' And she was so sure that she talked
+for ten minutes, detailing the foreman's persedition of her. She had a
+pleasant voice--one of those sweet, timid, woman's voices, and
+undoubtedly is quite attractive. It was all I could do to resist
+peeping. I wanted to see what she looked like.
+
+"'Now this trouble, yesterday morning,' Dick said. 'Was it general? I
+mean, outside of your husband, and Mr. Smith, was the scene such that
+those who live around you knew of it?'
+
+"'Yes, sir. You see, he had no right to come into my kitchen. My
+husband doesn't work under him anyway. And he had his arm around me
+and was trying to kiss me when my husband came in. My husband has a
+temper, but he ain't overly strong. Mr. Smith would make two of him.
+So he pulled a knife, and Mr. Smith got him by the arms, and they
+fought all over the kitchen. I knew there was murder going to be done
+and I run out screaming for help. The folks in the other cottages'd
+heard the racket already. They'd smashed the window and the cook
+stove, and the place was filled with smoke and ashes when the
+neighbors dragged them away from each other. I'd done nothing to
+deserve all that disgrace. You know, sir, the way the women will
+talk--'
+
+"And Dick hushed her up there, and took all of five minutes more in
+getting rid of her. Her great fear was that her husband would lose his
+place. From what Dick told her, I waited. He had made no decision, and
+I knew the foreman was next on the carpet. In he came. I'd have given
+the world to see him. But I could only listen.
+
+"Dick jumped right into the thick of it. He described the scene and
+uproar, and Smith acknowledged that it had been riotous for a while.
+'She says she gave you no encouragement,' Dick said next.
+
+"'Then she lies,' said Smith. 'She has that way of looking with her
+eyes that's an invitation. She looked at me that way from the first.
+But it was by word-of-mouth invitation that I was in her kitchen
+yesterday morning. We didn't expect the husband. But she began to
+struggle when he hove in sight. When she says she gave me no
+encouragement--'
+
+"'Never mind all that,' Dick stopped him. 'It's not essential.' 'But
+it is, Mr. Forrest, if I am to clear myself,' Smith insisted.
+
+"'No; it is not essential to the thing you can't clear yourself of,'
+Dick answered, and I could hear that cold, hard, judicial note come
+into his voice. Smith could not understand. Dick told him. 'The thing
+you have been guilty of, Mr. Smith, is the scene, the disturbance, the
+scandal, the wagging of the women's tongues now going on forty to the
+minute, the impairment of the discipline and order of the ranch, all
+of which is boiled down to the one grave thing, the hurt to the ranch
+efficiency.'
+
+"And still Smith couldn't see. He thought the charge was of violating
+social morality by pursuing a married woman, and tried to mitigate the
+offense by showing the woman encouraged him and by pleading: 'And
+after all, Mr. Forrest, a man is only a man, and I admit she made a
+fool of me and I made a fool of myself.' "'Mr. Smith,' Dick said.
+'You've worked for me eight years. You've been a foreman six years of
+that time. I have no complaint against your work. You certainly do
+know how to handle labor. About your personal morality I don't care a
+damn. You can be a Mormon or a Turk for all it matters to me. Your
+private acts are your private acts, and are no concern of mine as long
+as they do not interfere with your work or my ranch. Any one of my
+drivers can drink his head off Saturday night, and every Saturday
+night. That's his business. But the minute he shows a hold-over on
+Monday morning that is taken out on my horses, that excites them, or
+injures them, or threatens to injure them, or that decreases in the
+slightest the work they should perform on Monday, that moment it is my
+business and the driver goes down the hill.'
+
+"'You, you mean, Mr. Forrest,' Smith stuttered, 'that, that I'm to go
+down the hill?' 'That is just what I mean, Mr. Smith. You are to go
+down the hill, not because you climbed over another man's fence--
+that's your business and his; but because you were guilty of causing a
+disturbance that is an impairment of ranch efficiency.'
+
+"Do you know, Evan," Paula broke in on her recital, "Dick can nose
+more human tragedy out of columns of ranch statistics than can the
+average fiction writer out of the whirl of a great city. Take the milk
+reports--the individual reports of the milkers--so many pounds of
+milk, morning and night, from cow so-and-so, so many pounds from cow
+so-and-so. He doesn't have to know the man. But there is a decrease in
+the weight of milk. 'Mr. Parkman,' he'll say to the head dairyman, 'is
+Barchi Peratta married?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Is he having trouble with his
+wife?' 'Yes, sir.'
+
+"Or it will be: 'Mr. Parkman, Simpkins has the best long-time record
+of any of our milkers. Now he's slumped. What's up?' Mr. Parkman
+doesn't know. 'Investigate,' says Dick. 'There's something on his
+chest. Talk to him like an uncle and find out. We've got to get it off
+his chest.' And Mr. Parkman finds out. Simpkins' boy; working his way
+through Stanford University, has elected the joy-ride path and is in
+jail waiting trial for forgery. Dick put his own lawyers on the case,
+smoothed it over, got the boy out on probation, and Simpkins' milk
+reports came back to par. And the best of it is, the boy made good,
+Dick kept an eye on him, saw him through the college of engineering,
+and he's now working for Dick on the dredging end, earning a hundred
+and fifty a month, married, with a future before him, and his father
+still milks."
+
+"You are right," Graham murmured sympathetically. "I well named him
+when I named him Great Heart."
+
+"I call him my Rock of Ages," Paula said gratefully. "He is so solid.
+He stands in any storm.--Oh, you don't really know him. He is so sure.
+He stands right up. He's never taken a cropper in his life. God smiles
+on him. God has always smiled on him. He's never been beaten down to
+his knees... yet. I... I should not care to see that sight. It would
+be heartbreaking. And, Evan--" Her hand went out to his in a pleading
+gesture that merged into a half-caress. "--I am afraid for him now.
+That is why I don't know what to do. It is not for myself that I back
+and fill and hesitate. If he were ignoble, if he were narrow, if he
+were weak or had one tiniest shred of meanness, if he had ever been
+beaten to his knees before, why, my dear, my dear, I should have been
+gone with you long ago."
+
+Her eyes filled with sudden moisture. She stilled him with a pressure
+of her hand, and, to regain herself, she went back to her recital:
+
+"'Your little finger, Mr. Smith, I consider worth more to me and to
+the world,' Dick, told him, 'than the whole body of this woman's
+husband. Here's the report on him: willing, eager to please, not
+bright, not strong, an indifferent workman at best. Yet you have to go
+down the hill, and I am very, very sorry.'
+
+"Oh, yes, there was more. But I've given you the main of it. You see
+Dick's code there. And he lives his code. He accords latitude to the
+individual. Whatever the individual may do, so long as it does not
+hurt the group of individuals in which he lives, is his own affair. He
+believed Smith had a perfect right to love the woman, and to be loved
+by her if it came to that. I have heard him always say that love could
+not be held nor enforced. Truly, did I go with you, he would say,
+'Bless you, my children.' Though it broke his heart he would say it.
+Past love, he believes, gives no hold over the present. And every hour
+of love, I have heard him say, pays for itself, on both sides,
+quittance in full. He claims there can be no such thing as a love-
+debt, laughs at the absurdity of love-claims."
+
+"And I agree with him," Graham said. "'You promised to love me
+always,' says the jilted one, and then strives to collect as if it
+were a promissory note for so many dollars. Dollars are dollars, but
+love lives or dies. When it is dead how can it be collected? We are
+all agreed, and the way is simple. We love. It is enough. Why delay
+another minute?"
+
+His fingers strayed along her fingers on the keyboard as he bent to
+her, first kissing her hair, then slowly turning her face up to his
+and kissing her willing lips.
+
+"Dick does not love me like you," she said; "not madly, I mean. He has
+had me so long, I think I have become a habit to him. And often and
+often, before I knew you, I used to puzzle whether he cared more for
+the ranch or more for me."
+
+"It is so simple," Graham urged. "All we have to do is to be
+straightforward. Let us go."
+
+He drew her to her feet and made as if to start.
+
+But she drew away from him suddenly, sat down, and buried her flushed
+face in her hands.
+
+"You do not understand, Evan. I love Dick. I shall always love him."
+
+"And me?" Graham demanded sharply.
+
+"Oh, without saying," she smiled. "You are the only man, besides Dick,
+that has ever kissed me this... way, and that I have kissed this way.
+But I can't make up my mind. The triangle, as you call it, must be
+solved for me. I can't solve it myself. I compare the two of you,
+weigh you, measure you. I remember Dick and all our past years. And I
+consult my heart for you. And I don't know. I don't know. You are a
+great man, my great lover. But Dick is a greater man than you. You--
+you are more clay, more--I grope to describe you--more human, I fancy.
+And that is why I love you more... or at least I think perhaps I do.
+
+"But wait," she resisted him, prisoning his eager hand in hers. "There
+is more I want to say. I remember Dick and all our past years. But I
+remember him to-day, as well, and to-morrow. I cannot bear the thought
+that any man should pity my husband, that you should pity him, and
+pity him you must when I confess that I love you more. That is why I
+am not sure. That is why I so quickly take it back and do not know.
+
+"I'd die of shame if through act of mine any man pitied Dick. Truly, I
+would. Of all things ghastly, I can think of none so ghastly as Dick
+being pitied. He has never been pitied in his life. He has always been
+top-dog--bright, light, strong, unassailable. And more, he doesn't
+deserve pity. And it's my fault... and yours, Evan."
+
+She abruptly thrust Evan's hand away.
+
+"And every act, every permitted touch of you, does make him pitiable.
+Don't you see how tangled it is for me? And then there is my own
+pride. That you should see me disloyal to him in little things, such
+as this--" (she caught his hand again and caressed it with soft
+finger-tips) "--hurts me in my love for you, diminishes me, must
+diminish me in your eyes. I shrink from the thought that my disloyalty
+to him in this I do--" (she laid his hand against her cheek) "--gives
+you reason to pity him and censure me."
+
+She soothed the impatience of the hand on her cheek, and, almost
+absently, musingly scrutinizing it without consciously seeing it,
+turned it over and slowly kissed the palm. The next moment she was
+drawn to her feet and into his arms.
+
+"There, you see," was her reproach as she disengaged herself.
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+"Why do you tell me all this about Dick?" Graham demanded another
+time, as they walked their horses side by side. "To keep me away? To
+protect yourself from me?"
+
+Paula nodded, then quickly added, "No, not quite that. Because you
+know I don't want to keep you away ... too far. I say it because Dick
+is so much in my mind. For twelve years, you realize, he filled my
+mind. I say it because ... because I think it, I suppose. Think! The
+situation! You are trespassing on a perfect marriage."
+
+"I know it," he answered. "And I do not like the role of trespasser.
+It is your insistence, instead of going away with me, that I should
+trespass. And I can't help it. I think away from you, try to force my
+thoughts elsewhere. I did half a chapter this morning, and I know it's
+rotten and will have to be rewritten. For I can't succeed in thinking
+away from you. What is South America and its ethnology compared to
+you? And when I come near you my arms go about you before I know what
+I am doing. And, by God, you want them there, you want them there, you
+know it."
+
+Paula gathered her reins in signal for a gallop, but first, with a
+roguish smile, she acknowledged.
+
+"I do want them there, dear trespasser."
+
+Paula yielded and fought at the same time.
+
+"I love my husband--never forget that," she would warn Graham, and
+within the minute be in his arms.
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+"There are only the three of us for once, thank goodness," Paula
+cried, seizing Dick and Graham by the hands and leading them toward
+Dick's favorite lounging couch in the big room. "Come, let us sit upon
+the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. Come, milords,
+and lordly perishers, and we will talk of Armageddon when the last sun
+goes down."
+
+She was in a merry mood, and with surprise Dick observed her light a
+cigarette. He could count on his fingers the cigarettes she had smoked
+in a dozen years, and then, only under a hostess's provocation to give
+countenance to some smoking woman guest. Later, when he mixed a
+highball for himself and Graham, she again surprised him by asking him
+to mix her a "wee" one.
+
+"This is Scotch," he warned.
+
+"Oh, a very wee one," she insisted, "and then we'll be three good
+fellows together, winding up the world. And when you've got it all
+wound up and ready, I'll sing you the song of the Valkyries."
+
+She took more part in the talk than usual, and strove to draw her
+husband out. Nor was Dick unaware of this, although he yielded and
+permitted himself to let go full tilt on the theme of the blond sun-
+perishers.
+
+She is trying to make him compete--was Graham's thought. But Paula
+scarcely thought of that phase of it, her pleasure consisting in the
+spectacle of two such splendid men who were hers. They talk of big
+game hunting, she mused once to herself; but did ever one small woman
+capture bigger game than this?
+
+She sat cross-legged on the couch, where, by a turn of the head, she
+could view Graham lounging comfortably in the big chair, or Dick, on
+his elbow, sprawled among the cushions. And ever, as they talked, her
+eyes roved from one to the other; and, as they spoke of struggle and
+battle, always in the cold iron terms of realists, her own thoughts
+became so colored, until she could look coolly at Dick with no further
+urge of the pity that had intermittently ached her heart for days.
+
+She was proud of him--a goodly, eye-filling figure of a man to any
+woman; but she no longer felt sorry for him. They were right. It was a
+game. The race was to the swift, the battle to the strong. They had
+run such races, fought such battles. Then why not she? And as she
+continued to look, that self-query became reiterant.
+
+They were not anchorites, these two men. Liberal-lived they must have
+been in that past out of which, like mysteries, they had come to her.
+They had had the days and nights that women were denied--women such as
+she. As for Dick, beyond all doubt--even had she heard whispers--there
+had been other women in that wild career of his over the world. Men
+were men, and they were two such men. She felt a burn of jealousy
+against those unknown women who must have been, and her heart
+hardened. They had taken their fun where they found it--Kipling's line
+ran through her head.
+
+Pity? Why should she pity, any more than she should be pitied? The
+whole thing was too big, too natural, for pity. They were taking a
+hand in a big game, and all could not be winners. Playing with the
+fancy, she wandered on to a consideration of the outcome. Always she
+had avoided such consideration, but the tiny highball had given her
+daring. It came to her that she saw doom ahead, doom vague and
+formless but terrible.
+
+She was brought back to herself by Dick's hand before her eyes and
+apparently plucking from the empty air the something upon which she
+steadfastly stared.
+
+"Seeing things?" he teased, as her eyes turned to meet his.
+
+His were laughing, but she glimpsed in them what, despite herself,
+made her veil her own with her long lashes. He knew. Beyond all
+possibility of error she knew now that he knew. That was what she had
+seen in his eyes and what had made her veil her own.
+
+"'Cynthia, Cynthia, I've been a-thinking,'" she gayly hummed to him;
+and, as he resumed his talk, she reached and took a sip from his part-
+empty glass.
+
+Let come what would, she asserted to herself, she would play it out.
+It was all a madness, but it was life, it was living. She had never so
+lived before, and it was worth it, no matter what inevitable payment
+must be made in the end. Love?--had she ever really loved Dick as she
+now felt herself capable of loving? Had she mistaken the fondness of
+affection for love all these years? Her eyes warmed as they rested on
+Graham, and she admitted that he had swept her as Dick never had.
+
+Unused to alcohol in such strength, her heart was accelerated; and
+Dick, with casual glances, noted and knew the cause of the added
+brilliance, the flushed vividness of cheeks and lips.
+
+He talked less and less, and the discussion of the sun-perishers died
+of mutual agreement as to its facts. Finally, glancing at his watch,
+he straightened up, yawned, stretched his arms and announced:
+
+"Bed-time he stop. Head belong this fellow white man too much sleepy
+along him.--Nightcap, Evan?"
+
+Graham nodded, for both felt the need of a stiffener.
+
+"Mrs. Toper--nightcap?" Dick queried of Paula.
+
+But she shook her head and busied herself at the piano putting away
+the music, while the men had their drink.
+
+Graham closed down the piano for her, while Dick waited in the
+doorway, so that when they left he led them by a dozen feet. As they
+came along, Graham, under her instructions, turned off the lights in
+the halls. Dick waited where the ways diverged and where Graham would
+have to say good night on his way to the tower room.
+
+The one remaining light was turned off.
+
+"Oh, not that one, silly," Dick heard Paula cry out. "We keep it on
+all night."
+
+Dick heard nothing, but the dark was fervent to him. He cursed himself
+for his own past embraces in the dark, for so the wisdom was given him
+to know the quick embrace that had occurred, ere, the next moment, the
+light flashed on again.
+
+He found himself lacking the courage to look at their faces as they
+came toward him. He did not want to see Paula's frank eyes veiled by
+her lashes, and he fumbled to light a cigarette while he cudgeled his
+wits for the wording of an ordinary good night.
+
+"How goes the book?--what chapter?" he called after Graham down his
+hall, as Paula put her hand in his.
+
+Her hand in his, swinging his, hopping and skipping and all a-chatter
+in simulation of a little girl with a grown-up, Paula went on with
+Dick; while he sadly pondered what ruse she had in mind by which to
+avoid the long-avoided, good night kiss.
+
+Evidently she had not found it when they reached the dividing of the
+ways that led to her quarters and to his. Still swinging his hand,
+still buoyantly chattering fun, she continued with him into his
+workroom. Here he surrendered. He had neither heart nor energy to wait
+for her to develop whatever she contemplated.
+
+He feigned sudden recollection, deflected her by the hand to his desk,
+and picked up a letter.
+
+"I'd promised myself to get a reply off on the first machine in the
+morning," he explained, as he pressed on the phonograph and began
+dictating.
+
+For a paragraph she still held his hand. Then he felt the parting
+pressure of her fingers and her whispered good night.
+
+"Good night, little woman," he answered mechanically, and continued
+dictating as if oblivious to her going.
+
+Nor did he cease until he knew she was well out of hearing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+
+A dozen times that morning, dictating to Blake or indicating answers,
+Dick had been on the verge of saying to let the rest of the
+correspondence go.
+
+"Call up Hennessy and Mendenhall," he told Blake, when, at ten, the
+latter gathered up his notes and rose to go. "You ought to catch them
+at the stallion barn. Tell them not to come this morning but to-morrow
+morning."
+
+Bonbright entered, prepared to shorthand Dick's conversations with his
+managers for the next hour.
+
+"And--oh, Mr. Blake," Dick called. "Ask Hennessy about Alden Bessie.--
+The old mare was pretty bad last night," he explained to Bonbright.
+
+"Mr. Hanley must see you right away, Mr. Forrest," Bonbright said, and
+added, at sight of the irritated drawing up of his employer's brows,
+"It's the piping from Buckeye Dam. Something's wrong with the plans--a
+serious mistake, he says."
+
+Dick surrendered, and for an hour discussed ranch business with his
+foremen and managers.
+
+Once, in the middle of a hot discussion over sheep-dips with Wardman,
+he left his desk and paced over to the window. The sound of voices and
+horses, and of Paula's laugh, had attracted him.
+
+"Take that Montana report--I'll send you a copy to-day," he continued,
+as he gazed out. "They found the formula didn't get down to it. It was
+more a sedative than a germicide. There wasn't enough kick in it..."
+
+Four horses, bunched, crossed his field of vision. Paula, teasing the
+pair of them, was between Martinez and Froelig, old friends of Dick, a
+painter and sculptor respectively, who had arrived on an early train.
+Graham, on Selim, made the fourth, and was slightly edged toward the
+rear. So the party went by, but Dick reflected that quickly enough it
+would resolve itself into two and two.
+
+Shortly after eleven, restless and moody, he wandered out with a
+cigarette into the big patio, where he smiled grim amusement at the
+various tell-tale signs of Paula's neglect of her goldfish. The sight
+of them suggested her secret patio in whose fountain pools she kept
+her selected and more gorgeous blooms of fish. Thither he went,
+through doors without knobs, by ways known only to Paula and the
+servants.
+
+This had been Dick's one great gift to Paula. It was love-lavish as
+only a king of fortune could make it. He had given her a free hand
+with it, and insisted on her wildest extravagance; and it had been his
+delight to tease his quondam guardians with the stubs of the checkbook
+she had used. It bore no relation to the scheme and architecture of
+the Big House, and, for that matter, so deeply hidden was it that it
+played no part in jar of line or color. A show-place of show-places,
+it was not often shown. Outside Paula's sisters and intimates, on rare
+occasions some artist was permitted to enter and catch his breath.
+Graham had heard of its existence, but not even him had she invited to
+see.
+
+It was round, and small enough to escape giving any cold hint of
+spaciousness. The Big House was of sturdy concrete, but here was
+marble in exquisite delicacy. The arches of the encircling arcade were
+of fretted white marble that had taken on just enough tender green to
+prevent any glare of reflected light. Palest of pink roses bloomed up
+the pillars and over the low flat roof they upheld, where Puck-like,
+humorous, and happy faces took the place of grinning gargoyles. Dick
+strolled the rosy marble pavement of the arcade and let the beauty of
+the place slowly steal in upon him and gentle his mood.
+
+The heart and key of the fairy patio was the fountain, consisting of
+three related shallow basins at different levels, of white marble and
+delicate as shell. Over these basins rollicked and frolicked life-
+sized babies wrought from pink marble by no mean hand. Some peered
+over the edges into lower basins, one reached arms covetously toward
+the goldfish; one, on his back, laughed at the sky, another stood with
+dimpled legs apart stretching himself, others waded, others were on
+the ground amongst the roses white and blush, but all were of the
+fountain and touched it at some point. So good was the color of the
+marble, so true had been the sculptor, that the illusion was of life.
+No cherubs these, but live warm human babies.
+
+Dick regarded the rosy fellowship pleasantly and long, finishing his
+cigarette and retaining it dead in his hand. That was what she had
+needed, he mused--babies, children. It had been her passion. Had she
+realized it... He sighed, and, struck by a fresh thought, looked to
+her favorite seat with certitude that he would not see the customary
+sewing lying on it in a pretty heap. She did not sew these days.
+
+He did not enter the tiny gallery behind the arcade, which contained
+her chosen paintings and etchings, and copies in marble and bronze of
+her favorites of the European galleries. Instead he went up the
+stairway, past the glorious Winged Victory on the landing where the
+staircase divided, and on and up into her quarters that occupied the
+entire upper wing. But first, pausing by the Victory, he turned and
+gazed down into the fairy patio. The thing was a cut jewel in its
+perfectness and color, and he acknowledged, although he had made it
+possible for her, that it was entirely her own creation--her one
+masterpiece. It had long been her dream, and he had realized it for
+her. And yet now, he meditated, it meant nothing to her. She was not
+mercenary, that he knew; and if he could not hold her, mere baubles
+such as that would weigh nothing in the balance against her heart.
+
+He wandered idly through her rooms, scarcely noting at what he gazed,
+but gazing with fondness at it all. Like everything else of hers, it
+was distinctive, different, eloquent of her. But when he glanced into
+the bathroom with its sunken Roman bath, for the life of him he was
+unable to avoid seeing a tiny drip and making a mental note for the
+ranch plumber.
+
+As a matter of course, he looked to her easel with the expectation of
+finding no new work, but was disappointed; for a portrait of himself
+confronted him. He knew her trick of copying the pose and lines from a
+photograph and filling in from memory. The particular photograph she
+was using had been a fortunate snapshop of him on horseback. The
+Outlaw, for once and for a moment, had been at peace, and Dick, hat in
+hand, hair just nicely rumpled, face in repose, unaware of the
+impending snap, had at the instant looked squarely into the camera. No
+portrait photographer could have caught a better likeness. The head
+and shoulders Paula had had enlarged, and it was from this that she
+was working. But the portrait had already gone beyond the photograph,
+for Dick could see her own touches.
+
+With a start he looked more closely. Was that expression of the eyes,
+of the whole face, his? He glanced at the photograph. It was not
+there. He walked over to one of the mirrors, relaxed his face, and led
+his thoughts to Paula and Graham. Slowly the expression came into his
+eyes and face. Not content, he returned to the easel and verified it.
+Paula knew. Paula knew that he knew. She had learned it from him,
+stolen it from him some time when it was unwittingly on his face, and
+carried it in her memory to the canvas.
+
+Paula's Chinese maid, Oh Dear, entered from the wardrobe room, and
+Dick watched her unobserved as she came down the room toward him. Her
+eyes were down, and she seemed deep in thought. Dick remarked the
+sadness of her face, and that the little, solicitous contraction of
+the brows that had led to her naming was gone. She was not solicitous,
+that was patent. But cast down, she was, in heavy depression.
+
+It would seem that all our faces are beginning to say things, he
+commented to himself.
+
+"Good morning, Oh Dear," he startled her.
+
+And as she returned the greeting, he saw compassion in her eyes as
+they dwelt on him. She knew. The first outside themselves. Trust her,
+a woman, so much in Paula's company when Paula was alone, to divine
+Paula's secret.
+
+Oh Dear's lips trembled, and she wrung her trembling hands, nerving
+herself, as he could see, to speech.
+
+"Mister Forrest," she began haltingly, "maybe you think me fool, but I
+like say something. You very kind man. You very kind my old mother.
+You very kind me long long time..."
+
+She hesitated, moistening her frightened lips with her tongue, then
+braved her eyes to his and proceeded.
+
+"Mrs. Forrest, she, I think..."
+
+But so forbidding did Dick's face become that she broke off in
+confusion and blushed, as Dick surmised, with shame at the thoughts
+she had been about to utter.
+
+"Very nice picture Mrs. Forrest make," he put her at her ease.
+
+The Chinese girl sighed, and the same compassion returned into her
+eyes as she looked long at Dick's portrait.
+
+She sighed again, but the coldness in her voice was not lost on Dick
+as she answered: "Yes, very nice picture Mrs. Forrest make."
+
+She looked at him with sudden sharp scrutiny, studying his face, then
+turned to the canvas and pointed at the eyes.
+
+"No good," she condemned.
+
+Her voice was harsh, touched with anger.
+
+"No good," she flung over her shoulder, more loudly, still more
+harshly, as she continued down the room and out of sight on Paula's
+sleeping porch.
+
+Dick stiffened his shoulders, unconsciously bracing himself to face
+what was now soon to happen. Well, it was the beginning of the end. Oh
+Dear knew. Soon more would know, all would know. And in a way he was
+glad of it, glad that the torment of suspense would endure but little
+longer.
+
+But when he started to leave he whistled a merry jingle to advertise
+to Oh Dear that the world wagged very well with him so far as he knew
+anything about it.
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+The same afternoon, while Dick was out and away with Froelig and
+Martinez and Graham, Paula stole a pilgrimage to Dick's quarters. Out
+on his sleeping porch she looked over his rows of press buttons, his
+switchboard that from his bed connected him with every part of the
+ranch and most of the rest of California, his phonograph on the hinged
+and swinging bracket, the orderly array of books and magazines and
+agricultural bulletins waiting to be read, the ash tray, cigarettes,
+scribble pads, and thermos bottle.
+
+Her photograph, the only picture on the porch, held her attention. It
+hung under his barometers and thermometers, which, she knew, was where
+he looked oftenest. A fancy came to her, and she turned the laughing
+face to the wall and glanced from the blankness of the back of the
+frame to the bed and back again. With a quick panic movement, she
+turned the laughing face out. It belonged, was her thought; it did
+belong.
+
+The big automatic pistol in the holster on the wall, handy to one's
+hand from the bed, caught her eye. She reached to it and lifted gently
+at the butt. It was as she had expected--loose--Dick's way. Trust him,
+no matter how long unused, never to let a pistol freeze in its
+holster.
+
+Back in the work room she wandered solemnly about, glancing now at the
+prodigious filing system, at the chart and blue-print cabinets, at the
+revolving shelves of reference books, and at the long rows of stoutly
+bound herd registers. At last she came to his books--a goodly row of
+pamphlets, bound magazine articles, and an even dozen ambitious tomes.
+She read the titles painstakingly: "Corn in California," "Silage
+Practice," "Farm Organization," "Farm Book-keeping," "The Shire in
+America," "Humus Destruction," "Soilage," "Alfalfa in California,"
+"Cover Crops for California," "The Shorthorn in America"--at this last
+she smiled affectionately with memory of the great controversy he had
+waged for the beef cow and the milch cow as against the dual purpose
+cow.
+
+She caressed, the backs of the books with her palm, pressed her cheek
+against them and leaned with closed eyes. Oh, Dick, Dick--a thought
+began that faded to a vagueness of sorrow and died because she did not
+dare to think it.
+
+The desk was so typically Dick. There was no litter. Clean it was of
+all work save the wire tray with typed letters waiting his signature
+and an unusual pile of the flat yellow sheets on which his secretaries
+typed the telegrams relayed by telephone from Eldorado. Carelessly she
+ran her eyes over the opening lines of the uppermost sheet and chanced
+upon a reference that puzzled and interested her. She read closely,
+with in-drawn brows, then went deeper into the heap till she found
+confirmation. Jeremy Braxton was dead--big, genial, kindly Jeremy
+Braxton. A Mexican mob of pulque-crazed peons had killed him in the
+mountains through which he had been trying to escape from the Harvest
+into Arizona. The date of the telegram was two days old. Dick had
+known it for two days and never worried her with it. And it meant
+more. It meant money. It meant that the affairs of the Harvest Group
+were going from bad to worse. And it was Dick's way.
+
+And Jeremy was dead. The room seemed suddenly to have grown cold. She
+shivered. It was the way of life--death always at the end of the road.
+And her own nameless dread came back upon her. Doom lay ahead. Doom
+for whom? She did not attempt to guess. Sufficient that it was doom.
+Her mind was heavy with it, and the quiet room was heavy with it as
+she passed slowly out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+
+"'Tis a birdlike sensuousness that is all the Little Lady's own,"
+Terrence was saying, as he helped himself to a cocktail from the tray
+Ah Ha was passing around.
+
+It was the hour before dinner, and Graham, Leo and Terrence McFane had
+chanced together in the stag-room.
+
+"No, Leo," the Irishman warned the young poet. "Let the one suffice
+you. Your cheeks are warm with it. A second one and you'll
+conflagrate. 'Tis no right you have to be mixing beauty and strong
+drink in that lad's head of yours. Leave the drink to your elders.
+There is such a thing as consanguinity for drink. You have it not. As
+for me--"
+
+He emptied the glass and paused to turn the cocktail reminiscently on
+his tongue.
+
+"'Tis women's drink," he shook his head in condemnation. "It likes me
+not. It bites me not. And devil a bit of a taste is there to it.--Ah
+Ha, my boy," he called to the Chinese, "mix me a highball in a long,
+long glass--a stiff one."
+
+He held up four fingers horizontally to indicate the measure of liquor
+he would have in the glass, and, to Ah Ha's query as to what kind of
+whiskey, answered, "Scotch or Irish, bourbon or rye--whichever comes
+nearest to hand."
+
+Graham shook his head to the Chinese, and laughed to the Irishman.
+"You'll never drink me down, Terrence. I've not forgotten what you did
+to O'Hay."
+
+"'Twas an accident I would have you think," was the reply. "They say
+when a man's not feeling any too fit a bit of drink will hit him like
+a club."
+
+"And you?" Graham questioned.
+
+"Have never been hit by a club. I am a man of singularly few
+experiences."
+
+"But, Terrence, you were saying... about Mrs. Forrest?" Leo begged.
+"It sounded as if it were going to be nice."
+
+"As if it could be otherwise," Terrence censured. "But as I was
+saying, 'tis a bird-like sensuousness--oh, not the little, hoppy,
+wagtail kind, nor yet the sleek and solemn dove, but a merry sort of
+bird, like the wild canaries you see bathing in the fountains, always
+twittering and singing, flinging the water in the sun, and glowing the
+golden hearts of them on their happy breasts. 'Tis like that the
+Little Lady is. I have observed her much.
+
+"Everything on the earth and under the earth and in the sky
+contributes to the passion of her days--the untoward purple of the
+ground myrtle when it has no right to aught more than pale lavender, a
+single red rose tossing in the bathing wind, one perfect Duchesse rose
+bursting from its bush into the sunshine, as she said to me, 'pink as
+the dawn, Terrence, and shaped like a kiss.'
+
+"'Tis all one with her--the Princess's silver neigh, the sheep bells
+of a frosty morn, the pretty Angora goats making silky pictures on the
+hillside all day long, the drifts of purple lupins along the fences,
+the long hot grass on slope and roadside, the summer-burnt hills tawny
+as crouching lions--and even have I seen the sheer sensuous pleasure
+of the Little Lady with bathing her arms and neck in the blessed sun."
+
+"She is the soul of beauty," Leo murmured. "One understands how men
+can die for women such as she."
+
+"And how men can live for them, and love them, the lovely things,"
+Terrence added. "Listen, Mr. Graham, and I'll tell you a secret. We
+philosophers of the madroño grove, we wrecks and wastages of life here
+in the quiet backwater and easement of Dick's munificence, are a
+brotherhood of lovers. And the lady of our hearts is all the one--the
+Little Lady. We, who merely talk and dream our days away, and who
+would lift never a hand for God, or country, or the devil, are pledged
+knights of the Little Lady."
+
+"We would die for her," Leo affirmed, slowly nodding his head.
+
+"Nay, lad, we would live for her and fight for her, dying is that
+easy."
+
+Graham missed nothing of it. The boy did not understand, but in the
+blue eyes of the Celt, peering from under the mop of iron-gray hair,
+there was no mistaking the knowledge of the situation.
+
+Voices of men were heard coming down the stairs, and, as Martinez and
+Dar Hyal entered, Terrence was saying:
+
+"'Tis fine weather they say they're having down at Catalina now, and I
+hear the tunny fish are biting splendid."
+
+Ah Ha served cocktails around, and was kept busy, for Hancock and
+Froelig followed along. Terrence impartially drank stiff highballs of
+whatever liquor the immobile-faced Chinese elected to serve him, and
+discoursed fatherly to Leo on the iniquities and abominations of the
+flowing bowl.
+
+Oh My entered, a folded note in his hand, and looked about in doubt as
+to whom to give it.
+
+"Hither, wing-heeled Celestial," Terrence waved him up.
+
+"'Tis a petition, couched in very proper terms," Terrence explained,
+after a glance at its contents. "And Ernestine and Lute have arrived,
+for 'tis they that petition. Listen." And he read: "'Oh, noble and
+glorious stags, two poor and lowly meek-eyed does, wandering lonely in
+the forest, do humbly entreat admission for the brief time before
+dinner to the stamping ground of the herd.'
+
+"The metaphor is mixed," said Terrence. "Yet have they acted well.
+'Tis the rule--Dick's rule--and a good rule it is: no petticoats in
+the stag-room save by the stags' unanimous consent.--Is the herd ready
+for the question? All those in favor will say 'Aye.'--Contrary
+minded?--The ayes have it.
+
+"Oh My, fleet with thy heels and bring in the ladies."
+
+"'With sandals beaten from the crowns of kings,'" Leo added, murmuring
+the words reverently, loving them with his lips as his lips formed
+them and uttered them.
+
+"'Shall he tread down the altars of their night,'" Terrence completed
+the passage. "The man who wrote that is a great man. He is Leo's
+friend, and Dick's friend, and proud am I that he is my friend."
+
+"And that other line," Leo said. "From the same sonnet," he explained
+to Graham. "Listen to the sound of it: 'To hear what song the star of
+morning sings'--oh, listen," the boy went on, his voice hushed low
+with beauty-love for the words: "'With perished beauty in his hands as
+clay, Shall he restore futurity its dream--'"
+
+He broke off as Paula's sisters entered, and rose shyly to greet them.
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+Dinner that night was as any dinner at which the madroño sages were
+present. Dick was as robustly controversial as usual, locking horns
+with Aaron Hancock on Bergson, attacking the latter's metaphysics in
+sharp realistic fashion.
+
+"Your Bergson is a charlatan philosopher, Aaron," Dick concluded. "He
+has the same old medicine-man's bag of metaphysical tricks, all decked
+out and frilled with the latest ascertained facts of science."
+
+"'Tis true," Terrence agreed. "Bergson is a charlatan thinker. 'Tis
+why he is so popular--"
+
+"I deny--" Hancock broke in.
+
+"Wait a wee, Aaron. 'Tis a thought I have glimmered. Let me catch it
+before it flutters away into the azure. Dick's caught Bergson with the
+goods on him, filched straight from the treasure-house of science. His
+very cocksureness is filched from Darwin's morality of strength based
+on the survival of the fittest. And what did Bergson do with it?
+Touched it up with a bit of James' pragmatism, rosied it over with the
+eternal hope in man's breast that he will live again, and made it all
+a-shine with Nietzsche's 'nothing succeeds like excess--'"
+
+"Wilde's, you mean," corrected Ernestine.
+
+"Heaven knows I should have filched it for myself had you not been
+present," Terrence sighed, with a bow to her. "Some day the
+antiquarians will decide the authorship. Personally I would say it
+smacked of Methuselah--But as I was saying, before I was delightfully
+interrupted..."
+
+"Who more cocksure than Dick?" Aaron was challenging a little later;
+while Paula glanced significantly to Graham.
+
+"I was looking at the herd of yearling stallions but yesterday,"
+Terrence replied, "and with the picture of the splendid beasties still
+in my eyes I'll ask: And who more delivers the goods?"
+
+"But Hancock's objection is solid," Martinez ventured. "It would be a
+mean and profitless world without mystery. Dick sees no mystery."
+
+"There you wrong him," Terrence defended. "I know him well. Dick
+recognizes mystery, but not of the nursery-child variety. No cock-and-
+bull stories for him, such as you romanticists luxuriate in."
+
+"Terrence gets me," Dick nodded. "The world will always be mystery. To
+me man's consciousness is no greater mystery than the reaction of the
+gases that make a simple drop of water. Grant that mystery, and all
+the more complicated phenomena cease to be mysteries. That simple
+chemical reaction is like one of the axioms on which the edifice of
+geometry is reared. Matter and force are the everlasting mysteries,
+manifesting themselves in the twin mysteries of space and time. The
+manifestations are not mysteries--only the stuff of the
+manifestations, matter and force; and the theater of the
+manifestations, space and time."
+
+Dick ceased and idly watched the expressionless Ah Ha and Ah Me who
+chanced at the moment to be serving opposite him. Their faces did not
+talk, was his thought; although ten to one was a fair bet that they
+were informed with the same knowledge that had perturbed Oh Dear.
+
+"And there you are," Terrence was triumphing. "'Tis the perfect joy of
+him--never up in the air with dizzy heels. Flat on the good ground he
+stands, four square to fact and law, set against all airy fancies and
+bubbly speculations...."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+And as at table, so afterward that evening no one could have guessed
+from Dick that all was not well with him. He seemed bent on
+celebrating Lute's and Ernestine's return, refused to tolerate the
+heavy talk of the philosophers, and bubbled over with pranks and
+tricks. Paula yielded to the contagion, and aided and abetted him in
+his practical jokes which none escaped.
+
+Choicest among these was the kiss of welcome. No man escaped it. To
+Graham was accorded the honor of receiving it first so that he might
+witness the discomfiture of the others, who, one by one, were ushered
+in by Dick from the patio.
+
+Hancock, Dick's arm guiding him, came down the room to confront Paula
+and her sisters standing in a row on three chairs in the middle of the
+floor. He scanned them suspiciously, and insisted upon walking around
+behind them. But there seemed nothing unusual about them save that
+each wore a man's felt hat.
+
+"Looks good to me," Hancock announced, as he stood on the floor before
+them and looked up at them.
+
+"And it is good," Dick assured him. "As representing the ranch in its
+fairest aspects, they are to administer the kiss of welcome. Make your
+choice, Aaron."
+
+Aaron, with a quick whirl to catch some possible lurking disaster at
+his back, demanded, "They are all three to kiss me?"
+
+"No, make your choice which is to give you the kiss."
+
+"The two I do not choose will not feel that I have discriminated
+against them?" Aaron insisted.
+
+"Whiskers no objection?" was his next query.
+
+"Not in the way at all," Lute told him. "I have always wondered what
+it would be like to kiss black whiskers."
+
+"Here's where all the philosophers get kissed tonight, so hurry up,"
+Ernestine said. "The others are waiting. I, too, have yet to be kissed
+by an alfalfa field."
+
+"Whom do you choose?" Dick urged.
+
+"As if, after that, there were any choice about it," Hancock returned
+jauntily. "I kiss my lady--the Little Lady."
+
+As he put up his lips, Paula bent her head forward, and, nicely
+directed, from the indented crown of her hat canted a glassful of
+water into his face.
+
+When Leo's turn came, he bravely made his choice of Paula and nearly
+spoiled the show by reverently bending and kissing the hem of her
+gown.
+
+"It will never do," Ernestine told him. "It must be a real kiss. Put
+up your lips to be kissed."
+
+"Let the last be first and kiss me, Leo," Lute begged, to save him
+from his embarrassment.
+
+He looked his gratitude, put up his lips, but without enough tilt of
+his head, so that he received the water from Lute's hat down the back
+of his neck.
+
+"All three shall kiss me and thus shall paradise be thrice
+multiplied," was Terrence's way out of the difficulty; and
+simultaneously he received three crowns of water for his gallantry.
+
+Dick's boisterousness waxed apace. His was the most care-free seeming
+in the world as he measured Froelig and Martinez against the door to
+settle the dispute that had arisen as to whether Froelig or Martinez
+was the taller.
+
+"Knees straight and together, heads back," Dick commanded.
+
+And as their heads touched the wood, from the other side came a
+rousing thump that jarred them. The door swung open, revealing
+Ernestine with a padded gong-stick in either hand.
+
+Dick, a high-heeled satin slipper in his hand, was under a sheet with
+Terrence, teaching him "Brother Bob I'm bobbed" to the uproarious joy
+of the others, when the Masons and Watsons and all their Wickenberg
+following entered upon the scene.
+
+Whereupon Dick insisted that the young men of their party receive the
+kiss of welcome. Nor did he miss, in the hubbub of a dozen persons
+meeting as many more, Lottie Mason's: "Oh, good evening, Mr. Graham. I
+thought you had gone."
+
+And Dick, in the midst of the confusion of settling such an influx of
+guests, still maintaining his exuberant jolly pose, waited for that
+sharp scrutiny that women have only for women. Not many moments later
+he saw Lottie Mason steal such a look, keen with speculation, at Paula
+as she chanced face to face with Graham, saying something to him.
+
+Not yet, was Dick's conclusion. Lottie did not know. But suspicion was
+rife, and nothing, he was certain, under the circumstances, would
+gladden her woman's heart more than to discover the unimpeachable
+Paula as womanly weak as herself.
+
+Lottie Mason was a tall, striking brunette of twenty-five, undeniably
+beautiful, and, as Dick had learned, undeniably daring. In the not
+remote past, attracted by her, and, it must be submitted, subtly
+invited by her, he had been guilty of a philandering that he had not
+allowed to go as far as her wishes. The thing had not been serious on
+his part. Nor had he permitted it to become serious on her side.
+Nevertheless, sufficient flirtatious passages had taken place to impel
+him this night to look to her, rather than to the other Wickenberg
+women, for the first signals of suspicion.
+
+"Oh, yes, he's a beautiful dancer," Dick, as he came up to them half
+an hour later, heard Lottie Mason telling little Miss Maxwell. "Isn't
+he, Dick?" she appealed to him, with innocent eyes of candor through
+which disguise he knew she was studying him.
+
+"Who?--Graham, you must mean," he answered with untroubled directness.
+"He certainly is. What do you say we start dancing and let Miss
+Maxwell see? Though there's only one woman here who can give him full
+swing to show his paces."
+
+"Paula, of course," said Lottie.
+
+"Paula, of course. Why, you young chits don't know how to waltz. You
+never had a chance to learn."--Lottie tossed her fine head. "Perhaps
+you learned a little before the new dancing came in," he amended.
+"Anyway, I'll get Evan and Paula started, you take me on, and I'll
+wager we'll be the only couples on the floor."
+
+Half through the waltz, he broke it off with: "Let them have the floor
+to themselves. It's worth seeing."
+
+And, glowing with appreciation, he stood and watched his wife and
+Graham finish the dance, while he knew that Lottie, beside him,
+stealing side glances at him, was having her suspicions allayed.
+
+The dancing became general, and, the evening being warm, the big doors
+to the patio were thrown open. Now one couple, and now another, danced
+out and down the long arcades where the moonlight streamed, until it
+became the general thing.
+
+"What a boy he is," Paula said to Graham, as they listened to Dick
+descanting to all and sundry on the virtues of his new night camera.
+"You heard Aaron complaining at table, and Terrence explaining, his
+sureness. Nothing terrible has ever happened to him in his life. He
+has never been overthrown. His sureness has always been vindicated. As
+Terrence said, it has always delivered the goods. He does know, he
+does know, and yet he is so sure of himself, so sure of me."
+
+Graham taken away to dance with Miss Maxwell, Paula continued her
+train of thought to herself. Dick was not suffering so much after all.
+And she might have expected it. He was the cool-head, the philosopher.
+He would take her loss with the same equanimity as he would take the
+loss of Mountain Lad, as he had taken the death of Jeremy Braxton and
+the flooding of the Harvest mines. It was difficult, she smiled to
+herself, aflame as she was toward Graham, to be married to a
+philosopher who would not lift a hand to hold her. And it came to her
+afresh that one phase of Graham's charm for her was his humanness, his
+flamingness. They met on common ground. At any rate, even in the
+heyday of their coming together in Paris, Dick had not so inflamed
+her. A wonderful lover he had been, too, with his gift of speech and
+lover's phrases, with his love-chants that had so delighted her; but
+somehow it was different from this what she felt for Graham and what
+Graham must feel for her. Besides, she had been most young in
+experience of love and lovers in that long ago when Dick had burst so
+magnificently upon her.
+
+And so thinking, she hardened toward him and recklessly permitted
+herself to flame toward Graham. The crowd, the gayety, the excitement,
+the closeness and tenderness of contact in the dancing, the summer-
+warm of the evening, the streaming moonlight, and the night-scents of
+flowers--all fanned her ardency, and she looked forward eagerly to the
+at least one more dance she might dare with Graham.
+
+"No flash light is necessary," Dick was explaining. "It's a German
+invention. Half a minute exposure under the ordinary lighting is
+sufficient. And the best of it is that the plate can be immediately
+developed just like an ordinary blue print. Of course, the drawback is
+one cannot print from the plate."
+
+"But if it's good, an ordinary plate can be copied from it from which
+prints can be made," Ernestine amplified.
+
+She knew the huge, twenty-foot, spring snake coiled inside the camera
+and ready to leap out like a jack-in-the-box when Dick squeezed the
+bulb. And there were others who knew and who urged Dick to get the
+camera and make an exposure.
+
+He was gone longer than he expected, for Bonbright had left on his
+desk several telegrams concerning the Mexican situation that needed
+immediate replies. Trick camera in hand, Dick returned by a short cut
+across the house and patio. The dancing couples were ebbing down the
+arcade and disappearing into the hall, and he leaned against a pillar
+and watched them go by. Last of all came Paula and Evan, passing so
+close that he could have reached out and touched them. But, though the
+moon shone full on him, they did not see him. They saw only each other
+in the tender sport of gazing.
+
+The last preceding couple was already inside when the music ceased.
+Graham and Paula paused, and he was for giving her his arm and leading
+her inside, but she clung to him in sudden impulse. Man-like,
+cautious, he slightly resisted for a moment, but with one arm around
+his neck she drew his head willingly down to the kiss. It was a flash
+of quick passion. The next instant, Paula on his arm, they were
+passing in and Paula's laugh was ringing merrily and naturally.
+
+Dick clutched at the pillar and eased himself down abruptly until he
+sat flat on the pavement. Accompanying violent suffocation, or causing
+it, his heart seemed rising in his chest. He panted for air. The
+cursed thing rose and choked and stifled him until, in the grim turn
+his fancy took, it seemed to him that he chewed it between his teeth
+and gulped it back and down his throat along with the reviving air. He
+felt chilled, and was aware that he was wet with sudden sweat.
+
+"And who ever heard of heart disease in the Forrests?" he muttered,
+as, still sitting, leaning against the pillar for support, he mopped
+his face dry. His hand was shaking, and he felt a slight nausea from
+an internal quivering that still persisted.
+
+It was not as if Graham had kissed her, he pondered. It was Paula who
+had kissed Graham. That was love, and passion. He had seen it, and as
+it burned again before his eyes, he felt his heart surge, and the
+premonitory sensation of suffocation seized him. With a sharp effort
+of will he controlled himself and got to his feet.
+
+"By God, it came up in my mouth and I chewed it," he muttered. "I
+chewed it."
+
+Returning across the patio by the round-about way, he entered the
+lighted room jauntily enough, camera in hand, and unprepared for the
+reception he received.
+
+"Seen a ghost?" Lute greeted.
+
+"Are you sick?"--"What's the matter?" were other questions.
+
+"What _is_ the matter?" he countered.
+
+"Your face--the look of it," Ernestine said. "Something has happened.
+What is it?"
+
+And while he oriented himself he did not fail to note Lottie Mason's
+quick glance at the faces of Graham and Paula, nor to note that
+Ernestine had observed Lottie's glance and followed it up for herself.
+
+"Yes," he lied. "Bad news. Just got the word. Jeremy Braxton is dead.
+Murdered. The Mexicans got him while he was trying to escape into
+Arizona."
+
+"Old Jeremy, God love him for the fine man he was," Terrence said,
+tucking his arm in Dick's. "Come on, old man, 'tis a stiffener you're
+wanting and I'm the lad to lead you to it."
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," Dick smiled, shaking his shoulders and squaring
+himself as if gathering himself together. "It did hit me hard for the
+moment. I hadn't a doubt in the world but Jeremy would make it out all
+right. But they got him, and two engineers with him. They put up a
+devil of a fight first. They got under a cliff and stood off a mob of
+half a thousand for a day and night. And then the Mexicans tossed
+dynamite down from above. Oh, well, all flesh is grass, and there is
+no grass of yesteryear. Terrence, your suggestion is a good one. Lead
+on."
+
+After a few steps he turned his head over his shoulder and called
+back: "Now this isn't to stop the fun. I'll be right back to take that
+photograph. You arrange the group, Ernestine, and be sure to have them
+under the strongest light."
+
+Terrence pressed open the concealed buffet at the far end of the room
+and set out the glasses, while Dick turned on a wall light and studied
+his face in the small mirror inside the buffet door.
+
+"It's all right now, quite natural," he announced.
+
+"'Twas only a passing shade," Terrence agreed, pouring the whiskey.
+"And man has well the right to take it hard the going of old friends."
+
+They toasted and drank silently.
+
+"Another one," Dick said, extending his glass.
+
+"Say 'when,'" said the Irishman, and with imperturbable eyes he
+watched the rising tide of liquor in the glass.
+
+Dick waited till it was half full.
+
+Again they toasted and drank silently, eyes to eyes, and Dick was
+grateful for the offer of all his heart that he read in Terrence's
+eyes.
+
+Back in the middle of the hall, Ernestine was gayly grouping the
+victims, and privily, from the faces of Lottie, Paula, and Graham,
+trying to learn more of the something untoward that she sensed. Why
+had Lottie looked so immediately and searchingly at Graham and Paula?
+--she asked herself. And something was wrong with Paula now. She was
+worried, disturbed, and not in the way to be expected from the
+announcement of Jeremy Braxton's death. From Graham, Ernestine could
+glean nothing. He was quite his ordinary self, his facetiousness the
+cause of much laughter to Miss Maxwell and Mrs. Watson.
+
+Paula was disturbed. What had happened? Why had Dick lied? He had
+known of Jeremy's death for two days. And she had never known
+anybody's death so to affect him. She wondered if he had been drinking
+unduly. In the course of their married life she had seen him several
+times in liquor. He carried it well, the only noticeable effects being
+a flush in his eyes and a loosening of his tongue to whimsical fancies
+and extemporized chants. Had he, in his trouble, been drinking with
+the iron-headed Terrence down in the stag room? She had found them all
+assembled there just before dinner. The real cause for Dick's
+strangeness never crossed her mind, if, for no other reason, than that
+he was not given to spying.
+
+He came back, laughing heartily at a joke of Terrence's, and beckoned
+Graham to join them while Terrence repeated it. And when the three had
+had their laugh, he prepared to take the picture. The burst of the
+huge snake from the camera and the genuine screams of the startled
+women served to dispel the gloom that threatened, and next Dick was
+arranging a tournament of peanut-carrying.
+
+From chair to chair, placed a dozen yards apart, the feat was with a
+table knife to carry the most peanuts in five minutes. After the
+preliminary try-out, Dick chose Paula for his partner, and challenged
+the world, Wickenberg and the madroño grove included. Many boxes of
+candy were wagered, and in the end he and Paula won out against Graham
+and Ernestine, who had proved the next best couple. Demands for a
+speech changed to clamor for a peanut song. Dick complied, beating the
+accent, Indian fashion, with stiff-legged hops and hand-slaps on
+thighs.
+
+"I am Dick Forrest, son of Richard the Lucky, Son of Jonathan the
+Puritan, son of John who was a sea-rover, as his father Albert before
+him, who was the son of Mortimer, a pirate who was hanged in chains
+and died without issue.
+
+"I am the last of the Forrests, but first of the peanut-carriers.
+Neither Nimrod nor Sandow has anything on me. I carry the peanuts on a
+knife, a silver knife. The peanuts are animated by the devil. I carry
+the peanuts with grace and celerity and in quantity. The peanut never
+sprouted that can best me.
+
+"The peanuts roll. The peanuts roll. Like Atlas who holds the world, I
+never let them fall. Not every one can carry peanuts. I am God-gifted.
+I am master of the art. It is a fine art. The peanuts roll, the
+peanuts roll, and I carry them on forever.
+
+"Aaron is a philosopher. He cannot carry peanuts. Ernestine is a
+blonde. She cannot carry peanuts. Evan is a sportsman. He drops
+peanuts. Paula is my partner. She fumbles peanuts. Only I, I, by the
+grace of God and my own cleverness, carry peanuts.
+
+"When anybody has had enough of my song, throw something at me. I am
+proud. I am tireless. I can sing on forever. I shall sing on forever.
+
+"Here beginneth the second canto. When I die, bury me in a peanut
+patch. While I live--"
+
+The expected avalanche of cushions quenched his song but not his
+ebullient spirits, for he was soon in a corner with Lottie Mason and
+Paula concocting a conspiracy against Terrence.
+
+And so the evening continued to be danced and joked and played away.
+At midnight supper was served, and not till two in the morning were
+the Wickenbergers ready to depart. While they were getting on their
+wraps, Paula was proposing for the following afternoon a trip down to
+the Sacramento River to look over Dick's experiment in rice-raising.
+
+"I had something else in view," he told her. "You know the mountain
+pasture above Sycamore Creek. Three yearlings have been killed there
+in the last ten days."
+
+"Mountain lions!" Paula cried.
+
+"Two at least.--Strayed in from the north," he explained to Graham.
+"They sometimes do that. We got three five years ago.--Moss and
+Hartley will be there with the dogs waiting. They've located two of
+the beasts. What do you say all of you join me. We can leave right
+after lunch."
+
+"Let me have Mollie?" Lute asked.
+
+"And you can ride Altadena," Paula told Ernestine.
+
+Quickly the mounts were decided upon, Froelig and Martinez agreeing to
+go, but promising neither to shoot well nor ride well.
+
+All went out to see the Wickenbergers off, and, after the machines
+were gone, lingered to make arrangements for the hunting.
+
+"Good night, everybody," Dick said, as they started to move inside.
+"I'm going to take a look at Alden Bessie before I turn in. Hennessy
+is sitting up with her. Remember, you girls, come to lunch in your
+riding togs, and curses on the head of whoever's late."
+
+The ancient dam of the Fotherington Princess was in a serious way, but
+Dick would not have made the visit at such an hour, save that he
+wanted to be by himself and that he could not nerve himself for a
+chance moment alone with Paula so soon after what he had overseen in
+the patio.
+
+Light steps in the gravel made him turn his head. Ernestine caught up
+with him and took his arm.
+
+"Poor old Alden Bessie," she explained. "I thought I'd go along."
+
+Dick, still acting up to his night's rôle, recalled to her various
+funny incidents of the evening, and laughed and chuckled with
+reminiscent glee.
+
+"Dick," she said in the first pause, "you are in trouble." She could
+feel him stiffen, and hurried on: "What can I do? You know you can
+depend on me. Tell me."
+
+"Yes, I'll tell you," he answered. "Just one thing." She pressed his
+arm gratefully. "I'll have a telegram sent you to-morrow. It will be
+urgent enough, though not too serious. You will just bundle up and
+depart with Lute."
+
+"Is that all?" she faltered.
+
+"It will be a great favor."
+
+"You won't talk with me?" she protested, quivering under the rebuff.
+
+"I'll have the telegram come so as to rout you out of bed. And now
+never mind Alden Bessie. You run a long in. Good night."
+
+He kissed her, gently thrust her toward the house, and went on his
+way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+
+On the way back from the sick mare, Dick paused once to listen to the
+restless stamp of Mountain Lad and his fellows in the stallion barn.
+In the quiet air, from somewhere up the hills, came the ringing of a
+single bell from some grazing animal. A cat's-paw of breeze fanned him
+with sudden balmy warmth. All the night was balmy with the faint and
+almost aromatic scent of ripening grain and drying grass. The stallion
+stamped again, and Dick, with a deep breath and realization that never
+had he more loved it all, looked up and circled the sky-line where the
+crests of the mountains blotted the field of stars.
+
+"No, Cato," he mused aloud. "One cannot agree with you. Man does not
+depart from life as from an inn. He departs as from a dwelling, the
+one dwelling he will ever know. He departs ... nowhere. It is good
+night. For him the Noiseless One ... and the dark."
+
+He made as if to start, but once again the stamp of the stallions held
+him, and the hillside bell rang out. He drew a deep inhalation through
+his nostrils of the air of balm, and loved it, and loved the fair land
+of his devising.
+
+"'I looked into time and saw none of me there,'" he quoted, then
+capped it, smiling, with a second quotation: "'She gat me nine great
+sons.... The other nine were daughters.'"
+
+Back at the house, he did not immediately go in, but stood a space
+gazing at the far flung lines of it. Nor, inside, did he immediately
+go to his own quarters. Instead, he wandered through the silent rooms,
+across the patios, and along the dim-lit halls. His frame of mind was
+as of one about to depart on a journey. He pressed on the lights in
+Paula's fairy patio, and, sitting in an austere Roman seat of marble,
+smoked a cigarette quite through while he made his plans.
+
+Oh, he would do it nicely enough. He could pull off a hunting accident
+that would fool the world. Trust him not to bungle it. Next day would
+be the day, in the woods above Sycamore Creek. Grandfather Jonathan
+Forrest, the straight-laced Puritan, had died of a hunting accident.
+For the first time Dick doubted that accident. Well, if it hadn't been
+an accident, the old fellow had done it well. It had never been hinted
+in the family that it was aught but an accident.
+
+His hand on the button to turn off the lights, Dick delayed a moment
+for a last look at the marble babies that played in the fountain and
+among the roses.
+
+"So long, younglings," he called softly to them. "You're the nearest I
+ever came to it."
+
+From his sleeping porch he looked across the big patio to Paula's
+porch. There was no light. The chance was she slept.
+
+On the edge of the bed, he found himself with one shoe unlaced, and,
+smiling at his absentness, relaced it. What need was there for him to
+sleep? It was already four in the morning. He would at least watch his
+last sunrise. Last things were coming fast. Already had he not dressed
+for the last time? And the bath of the previous morning would be his
+last. Mere water could not stay the corruption of death. He would have
+to shave, however--a last vanity, for the hair did continue to grow
+for a time on dead men's faces.
+
+He brought a copy of his will from the wall-safe to his desk and read
+it carefully. Several minor codicils suggested themselves, and he
+wrote them out in long-hand, pre-dating them six months as a
+precaution. The last was the endowment of the sages of the madroño
+grove with a fellowship of seven.
+
+He ran through his life insurance policies, verifying the permitted
+suicide clause in each one; signed the tray of letters that had waited
+his signature since the previous morning; and dictated a letter into
+the phonograph to the publisher of his books. His desk cleaned, he
+scrawled a quick summary of income and expense, with all earnings from
+the Harvest mines deducted. He transposed the summary into a second
+summary, increasing the expense margins, and cutting down the income
+items to an absurdest least possible. Still the result was
+satisfactory.
+
+He tore up the sheets of figures and wrote out a program for the
+future handling of the Harvest situation. He did it sketchily, with
+casual tentativeness, so that when it was found among the papers there
+would be no suspicions. In the same fashion he worked out a line-
+breeding program for the Shires, and an in-breeding table, up and
+down, for Mountain Lad and the Fotherington Princess and certain
+selected individuals of their progeny.
+
+When Oh My came in with coffee at six, Dick was on his last paragraph
+of his scheme for rice-growing.
+
+"Although the Italian rice may be worth experimenting with for quick
+maturity," he wrote, "I shall for a time confine the main plantings in
+equal proportions to Moti, Ioko, and the Wateribune. Thus, with
+different times of maturing, the same crews and the same machinery,
+with the same overhead, can work a larger acreage than if only one
+variety is planted."
+
+Oh My served the coffee at his desk, and made no sign even after a
+glance to the porch at the bed which had not been slept in--all of
+which control Dick permitted himself privily to admire.
+
+At six-thirty the telephone rang and he heard Hennessy's tired voice:
+"I knew you'd be up and glad to know Alden Bessie's pulled through. It
+was a squeak, though. And now it's me for the hay."
+
+When Dick had shaved, he looked at the shower, hesitated a moment,
+then his face set stubbornly. I'm darned if I will, was his thought; a
+sheer waste of time. He did, however, change his shoes to a pair of
+heavy, high-laced ones fit for the roughness of hunting. He was at
+his desk again, looking over the notes in his scribble pads for the
+morning's work, when Paula entered. She did not call her "Good
+morning, merry gentleman"; but came quite close to him before she
+greeted him softly with:
+
+"The Acorn-planter. Ever tireless, never weary Red Cloud."
+
+He noted the violet-blue shadows under her eyes, as he arose, without
+offering to touch her. Nor did she offer invitation.
+
+"A white night?" he asked, as he placed a chair.
+
+"A white night," she answered wearily. "Not a second's sleep, though I
+tried so hard."
+
+Both were reluctant of speech, and they labored under a mutual
+inability to draw their eyes away from each other.
+
+"You ... you don't look any too fit yourself," she said.
+
+"Yes, my face," he nodded. "I was looking at it while I shaved. The
+expression won't come off."
+
+"Something happened to you last night," she probed, and he could not
+fail to see the same compassion in her eyes that he had seen in Oh
+Dear's. "Everybody remarked your expression. What was it?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "It has been coming on for some time," he
+evaded, remembering that the first hint of it had been given him by
+Paula's portrait of him. "You've noticed it?" he inquired casually.
+
+She nodded, then was struck by a sudden thought. He saw the idea leap
+to life ere her words uttered it.
+
+"Dick, you haven't an affair?"
+
+It was a way out. It would straighten all the tangle. And hope was in
+her voice and in her face.
+
+He smiled, shook his head slowly, and watched her disappointment.
+
+"I take it back," he said. "I have an affair."
+
+"Of the heart?"
+
+She was eager, as he answered, "Of the heart."
+
+But she was not prepared for what came next. He abruptly drew his
+chair close, till his knees touched hers, and, leaning forward,
+quickly but gently prisoned her hands in his resting on her knees.
+
+"Don't be alarmed, little bird-woman," he quieted her. "I shall not
+kiss you. It is a long time since I have. I want to tell you about
+that affair. But first I want to tell you how proud I am--proud of
+myself. I am proud that I am a lover. At my age, a lover! It is
+unbelievable, and it is wonderful. And such a lover! Such a curious,
+unusual, and quite altogether remarkable lover. In fact, I have
+laughed all the books and all biology in the face. I am a monogamist.
+I love the woman, the one woman. After a dozen years of possession I
+love her quite madly, oh, so sweetly madly."
+
+Her hands communicated her disappointment to him, making a slight,
+impulsive flutter to escape; but he held them more firmly.
+
+"I know her every weakness, and, weakness and strength and all, I love
+her as madly as I loved her at the first, in those mad moments when I
+first held her in my arms."
+
+Her hands were mutinous of the restraint he put upon them, and
+unconsciously she was beginning to pull and tug to be away from him.
+Also, there was fear in her eyes. He knew her fastidiousness, and he
+guessed, with the other man's lips recent on hers, that she feared a
+more ardent expression on his part.
+
+"And please, please be not frightened, timid, sweet, beautiful, proud,
+little bird-woman. See. I release you. Know that I love you most
+dearly, and that I am considering you as well as myself, and before
+myself, all the while."
+
+He drew his chair away from her, leaned back, and saw confidence grow
+in her eyes.
+
+"I shall tell you all my heart," he continued, "and I shall want you
+to tell me all your heart."
+
+"This love for me is something new?" she asked. "A recrudescence?"
+
+"Yes, a recrudescence, and no."
+
+"I thought that for a long time I had been a habit to you," she said.
+
+"But I was loving you all the time."
+
+"Not madly."
+
+"No," he acknowledged. "But with certainty. I was so sure of you, of
+myself. It was, to me, all a permanent and forever established thing.
+I plead guilty. But when that permanency was shaken, all my love for
+you fired up. It was there all the time, a steady, long-married
+flame."
+
+"But about me?" she demanded.
+
+"That is what we are coming to. I know your worry right now, and of a
+minute ago. You are so intrinsically honest, so intrinsically true,
+that the thought of sharing two men is abhorrent to you. I have not
+misread you. It is a long time since you have permitted me any love-
+touch." He shrugged his shoulders "And an equally long time since I
+offered you a love-touch."
+
+"Then you _have_ known from the first?" she asked quickly.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Possibly," he added, with an air of judicious weighing, "I sensed it
+coming before even you knew it. But we will not go into that or other
+things."
+
+"You have seen..." she attempted to ask, stung almost to shame at
+thought of her husband having witnessed any caress of hers and
+Graham's.
+
+"We will not demean ourselves with details, Paula. Besides, there was
+and is nothing wrong about any of it. Also, it was not necessary for
+me to see anything. I have my memories of when I, too, kissed stolen
+kisses in the pause of the seconds between the frank, outspoken 'Good
+nights.' When all the signs of ripeness are visible--the love-shades
+and love-notes that cannot be hidden, the unconscious caress of the
+eyes in a fleeting glance, the involuntary softening of voices, the
+cuckoo-sob in the throat--why, the night-parting kiss does not need to
+be seen. It has to be. Still further, oh my woman, know that I justify
+you in everything."
+
+"It... it was not ever... much," she faltered.
+
+"I should have been surprised if it had been. It couldn't have been
+you. As it is, I have been surprised. After our dozen years it was
+unexpected--"
+
+"Dick," she interrupted him, leaning toward him and searching him. She
+paused to frame her thought, and then went on with directness. "In our
+dozen years, will you say it has never been any more with you?"
+
+"I have told you that I justify you in everything," he softened his
+reply.
+
+"But you have not answered my question," she insisted. "Oh, I do not
+mean mere flirtatious passages, bits of primrose philandering. I mean
+unfaithfulness and I mean it technically. In the past you have?"
+
+"In the past," he answered, "not much, and not for a long, long time."
+
+"I often wondered," she mused.
+
+"And I have told you I justify you in everything," he reiterated. "And
+now you know where lies the justification."
+
+"Then by the same token I had a similar right," she said. "Though I
+haven't, Dick, I haven't," she hastened to add. "Well, anyway, you
+always did preach the single standard."
+
+"Alas, not any longer," he smiled. "One's imagination will conjure,
+and in the past few weeks I've been forced to change my mind."
+
+"You mean that you demand I must be faithful?"
+
+He nodded and said, "So long as you live with me."
+
+"But where's the equity?"
+
+"There isn't any equity," he shook his head. "Oh, I know it seems a
+preposterous change of view. But at this late day I have made the
+discovery of the ancient truth that women are different from men. All
+I have learned of book and theory goes glimmering before the
+everlasting fact that the women are the mothers of our children. I...
+I still had my hopes of children with you, you see. But that's all
+over and done with. The question now is, what's in your heart? I have
+told you mine. And afterward we can determine what is to be done."
+
+"Oh, Dick," she breathed, after silence had grown painful, "I do love
+you, I shall always love you. You are my Red Cloud. Why, do you know,
+only yesterday, out on your sleeping porch, I turned my face to the
+wall. It was terrible. It didn't seem right. I turned it out again, oh
+so quickly."
+
+He lighted a cigarette and waited.
+
+"But you have not told me what is in your heart, all of it," he chided
+finally.
+
+"I do love you," she repeated.
+
+"And Evan?"
+
+"That is different. It is horrible to have to talk this way to you.
+Besides, I don't know. I can't make up my mind what is in my heart."
+
+"Love? Or amorous adventure? It must be one or the other."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Can't you understand?" she asked. "That I don't understand? You see,
+I am a woman. I have never sown any wild oats. And now that all this
+has happened, I don't know what to make of it. Shaw and the rest must
+be right. Women are hunting animals. You are both big game. I can't
+help it. It is a challenge to me. And I find I am a puzzle to myself.
+All my concepts have been toppled over by my conduct. I want you. I
+want Evan. I want both of you. It is not amorous adventure, oh believe
+me. And if by any chance it is, and I do not know it--no, it isn't, I
+know it isn't."
+
+"Then it is love."
+
+"But I do love you, Red Cloud."
+
+"And you say you love him. You can't love both of us."
+
+"But I can. I do. I do love both of you.--Oh, I am straight. I shall
+be straight. I must work this out. I thought you might help me. That
+is why I came to you this morning. There must be some solution."
+
+She looked at him appealingly as he answered, "It is one or the other,
+Evan or me. I cannot imagine any other solution."
+
+"That's what he says. But I can't bring myself to it. He was for
+coming straight to you. I would not permit him. He has wanted to go,
+but I held him here, hard as it was on both of you, in order to have
+you together, to compare you two, to weigh you in my heart. And I get
+nowhere. I want you both. I can't give either of you up."
+
+"Unfortunately, as you see," Dick began, a slight twinkle in his eyes,
+"while you may be polyandrously inclined, we stupid male men cannot
+reconcile ourselves to such a situation."
+
+"Don't be cruel, Dick," she protested.
+
+"Forgive me. It was not so meant. It was out of my own hurt--an effort
+to bear it with philosophical complacence."
+
+"I have told him that he was the only man I had ever met who is as
+great as my husband, and that my husband is greater."
+
+"That was loyalty to me, yes, and loyalty to yourself," Dick
+explained. "You were mine until I ceased being the greatest man in the
+world. He then became the greatest man in the world."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Let me try to solve it for you," he continued. "You don't know your
+mind, your desire. You can't decide between us because you equally
+want us both?"
+
+"Yes," she whispered. "Only, rather, differently want you both."
+
+"Then the thing is settled," he concluded shortly.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"This, Paula. I lose. Graham is the winner. Don't you see. Here am I,
+even with him, even and no more, while my advantage over him is our
+dozen years together--the dozen years of past love, the ties and bonds
+of heart and memory. Heavens! If all this weight were thrown in the
+balance on Evan's side, you wouldn't hesitate an instant in your
+decision. It is the first time you have ever been bowled over in your
+life, and the experience, coming so late, makes it hard for you to
+realize."
+
+"But, Dick, you bowled me over."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I have always liked to think so, and sometimes I have believed--but
+never really. I never took you off your feet, not even in the very
+beginning, whirlwind as the affair was. You may have been glamoured.
+You were never mad as I was mad, never swept as I was swept. I loved
+you first--"
+
+"And you were a royal lover."
+
+"I loved you first, Paula, and, though you did respond, it was not in
+the same way. I never took you off your feet. It seems pretty clear
+that Evan has."
+
+"I wish I could be sure," she mused. "I have a feeling of being bowled
+over, and yet I hesitate. The two are not compatible. Perhaps I never
+shall be bowled over by any man. And you don't seem to help me in the
+least."
+
+"You, and you alone, can solve it, Paula," he said gravely.
+
+"But if you would help, if you would try--oh, such a little, to hold
+me," she persisted.
+
+"But I am helpless. My hands are tied. I can't put an arm to hold you.
+You can't share two. You have been in his arms--" He put up his hand
+to hush her protest. "Please, please, dear, don't. You have been in
+his arms. You flutter like a frightened bird at thought of my
+caressing you. Don't you see? Your actions decide against me. You have
+decided, though you may not know it. Your very flesh has decided. You
+can bear his arms. The thought of mine you cannot bear."
+
+She shook her head with slow resoluteness.
+
+"And still I do not, cannot, make up my mind," she persisted.
+
+"But you must. The present situation is intolerable. You must decide
+quickly, for Evan must go. You realize that. Or you must go. You both
+cannot continue on here. Take all the time in the world. Send Evan
+away. Or, suppose you go and visit Aunt Martha for a while. Being away
+from both of us might aid you to get somewhere. Perhaps it will be
+better to call off the hunting. I'll go alone, and you stay and talk
+it over with Evan. Or come on along and talk it over with him as you
+ride. Whichever way, I won't be in till late. I may sleep out all
+night in one of the herder's cabins. When I come back, Evan must be
+gone. Whether or not you are gone with him will also have been
+decided."
+
+"And if I should go?" she queried.
+
+Dick shrugged his shoulders, and stood up, glancing at his wrist-
+watch.
+
+"I have sent word to Blake to come earlier this morning," he
+explained, taking a step toward the door in invitation for her to go.
+
+At the door she paused and leaned toward him.
+
+"Kiss me, Dick," she said, and, afterward: "This is not a... love-
+touch." Her voice had become suddenly husky. "It's just in case I do
+decide to... to go."
+
+The secretary approached along the hall, but Paula lingered.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Blake," Dick greeted him. "Sorry to rout you out so
+early. First of all, will you please telephone Mr. Agar and Mr. Pitts.
+I won't be able to see them this morning. Oh, and put the rest off
+till to-morrow, too. Make a point of getting Mr. Hanley. Tell him I
+approve of his plan for the Buckeye spillway, and to go right ahead. I
+will see Mr. Mendenhall, though, and Mr. Manson. Tell them nine-
+thirty."
+
+"One thing, Dick," Paula said. "Remember, I made him stay. It was not
+his fault or wish. I wouldn't let him go."
+
+"You've bowled _him_ over right enough," Dick smiled. "I could
+not reconcile his staying on, under the circumstances, with what I
+knew of him. But with you not permitting him to go, and he as mad as a
+man has a right to be where you are concerned, I can understand. He's
+a whole lot better than a good sort. They don't make many like him. He
+will make you happy--"
+
+She held up her hand.
+
+"I don't know that I shall ever be happy again, Red Cloud. When I see
+what I have brought into your face.... And I was so happy and
+contented all our dozen years. I can't forget it. That is why I have
+been unable to decide. But you are right. The time has come for me to
+solve the ..." She hesitated and could not utter the word "triangle"
+which he saw forming on her lips. "The situation," her voice trailed
+away. "We'll all go hunting. I'll talk with him as we ride, and I'll
+send him away, no matter what I do."
+
+"I shouldn't be precipitate, Paul," Dick advised. "You know I don't
+care a hang for morality except when it is useful. And in this case it
+is exceedingly useful. There may be children.--Please, please," he
+hushed her. "And in such case even old scandal is not exactly good for
+them. Desertion takes too long. I'll arrange to give you the real
+statutory grounds, which will save a year in the divorce."
+
+"If I so make up my mind," she smiled wanly.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"But I may not make up my mind that way. I don't know it myself.
+Perhaps it's all a dream, and soon I shall wake up, and Oh Dear will
+come in and tell me how soundly and long I have slept."
+
+She turned away reluctantly, and paused suddenly when she had made
+half a dozen steps.
+
+"Dick," she called. "You have told me your heart, but not what's in
+your mind. Don't do anything foolish. Remember Denny Holbrook--no
+hunting accident, mind."
+
+He shook his head, and twinkled his eyes in feigned amusement, and
+marveled to himself that her intuition should have so squarely hit the
+mark.
+
+"And leave all this?" he lied, with a gesture that embraced the ranch
+and all its projects. "And that book on in-and-in-breeding? And my
+first annual home sale of stock just ripe to come off?"
+
+"It would be preposterous," she agreed with brightening face. "But,
+Dick, in this difficulty of making up my mind, please, please know
+that--" She paused for the phrase, then made a gesture in mimicry of
+his, that included the Big House and its treasures, and said, "All
+this does not influence me a particle. Truly not."
+
+"As if I did not know it," he assured her. "Of all unmercenary women--
+"
+
+"Why, Dick," she interrupted him, fired by a new thought, "if I loved
+Evan as madly as you think, you would mean so little that I'd be
+content, if it were the only way out, for you to have a hunting
+accident. But you see, I don't. Anyway, there's a brass tack for you
+to ponder."
+
+She made another reluctant step away, then called back in a whisper,
+her face over her shoulder:
+
+"Red Cloud, I'm dreadfully sorry.... And through it all I'm so glad
+that you do still love me."
+
+Before Blake returned, Dick found time to study his face in the glass.
+Printed there was the expression that had startled his company the
+preceding evening. It had come to stay. Oh, well, was his thought, one
+cannot chew his heart between his teeth without leaving some sign of
+it.
+
+He strolled out on the sleeping porch and looked at Paula's picture
+under the barometers. He turned it to the wall, and sat on the bed and
+regarded the blankness for a space. Then he turned it back again.
+
+"Poor little kid," he murmured, "having a hard time of it just waking
+up at this late day."
+
+But as he continued to gaze, abruptly there leaped before his eyes the
+vision of her in the moonlight, clinging to Graham and drawing his
+lips down to hers.
+
+Dick got up quickly, with a shake of head to shake the vision from his
+eyes.
+
+By half past nine his correspondence was finished and his desk cleaned
+save for certain data to be used in his talks with his Shorthorn and
+Shire managers. He was over at the window and waving a smiling
+farewell to Lute and Ernestine in the limousine, as Mendenhall
+entered. And to him, and to Manson next, Dick managed, in casual talk,
+to impress much of his bigger breeding plans.
+
+"We've got to keep an eagle eye on the bull-get of King Polo," he told
+Manson. "There's all the promise in the world for a greater than he
+from Bleakhouse Fawn, or Alberta Maid, or Moravia's Nellie Signal. We
+missed it this year so far, but next year, or the year after, soon or
+late, King Polo is going to be responsible for a real humdinger of
+winner."
+
+And as with Manson, with much more talk, so with Mendenhall, Dick
+succeeded in emphasizing the far application of his breeding theories.
+
+With their departure, he got Oh Joy on the house 'phone and told him
+to take Graham to the gun room to choose a rifle and any needed gear.
+
+At eleven he did not know that Paula had come up the secret stairway
+from the library and was standing behind the shelves of books
+listening. She had intended coming in but had been deterred by the
+sound of his voice. She could hear him talking over the telephone to
+Hanley about the spillway of the Buckeye dam.
+
+"And by the way," Dick's voice went on, "you've been over the reports
+on the Big Miramar?... Very good. Discount them. I disagree with them
+flatly. The water is there. I haven't a doubt we'll find a fairly
+shallow artesian supply. Send up the boring outfit at once and start
+prospecting. The soil's ungodly rich, and if we don't make that dry
+hole ten times as valuable in the next five years ..."
+
+Paula sighed, and turned back down the spiral to the library.
+
+Red Cloud the incorrigible, always planting his acorns--was her
+thought. There he was, with his love-world crashing around him, calmly
+considering dams and well-borings so that he might, in the years to
+come, plant more acorns.
+
+Nor was Dick ever to know that Paula had come so near to him with her
+need and gone away. Again, not aimlessly, but to run through for the
+last time the notes of the scribble pad by his bed, he was out on his
+sleeping porch. His house was in order. There was nothing left but to
+sign up the morning's dictation, answer several telegrams, then would
+come lunch and the hunting in the Sycamore hills. Oh, he would do it
+well. The Outlaw would bear the blame. And he would have an eye-
+witness, either Froelig or Martinez. But not both of them. One pair of
+eyes would be enough to satisfy when the martingale parted and the
+mare reared and toppled backward upon him into the brush. And from
+that screen of brush, swiftly linking accident to catastrophe, the
+witness would hear the rifle go off.
+
+Martinez was more emotional than the sculptor and would therefore make
+a more satisfactory witness, Dick decided. Him would he maneuver to
+have with him in the narrow trail when the Outlaw should be made the
+scapegoat. Martinez was no horseman. All the better. It would be well,
+Dick judged, to make the Outlaw act up in real devilishness for a
+minute or two before the culmination. It would give verisimilitude.
+Also, it would excite Martinez's horse, and, therefore, excite
+Martinez so that he would not see occurrences too clearly.
+
+He clenched his hands with sudden hurt. The Little Lady was mad, she
+must be mad; on no other ground could he understand such arrant
+cruelty, listening to her voice and Graham's from the open windows of
+the music room as they sang together the "Gypsy Trail."
+
+Nor did he unclench his hands during all the time they sang. And they
+sang the mad, reckless song clear through to its mad reckless end. And
+he continued to stand, listening to her laugh herself merrily away
+from Graham and on across the house to her wing, from the porches of
+which she continued to laugh as she teased and chided Oh Dear for
+fancied derelictions.
+
+From far off came the dim but unmistakable trumpeting of Mountain Lad.
+King Polo asserted his lordly self, and the harems of mares and
+heifers sent back their answering calls. Dick listened to all the
+whinnying and nickering and bawling of sex, and sighed aloud: "Well,
+the land is better for my having been. It is a good thought to take to
+bed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+
+A ring of his bed 'phone made Dick sit on the bed to take up the
+receiver. As he listened, he looked out across the patio to Paula's
+porches. Bonbright was explaining that it was a call from Chauncey
+Bishop who was at Eldorado in a machine. Chauncey Bishop, editor and
+owner of the San Francisco _Dispatch_, was sufficiently important
+a person, in Bonbright's mind, as well as old friend of Dick's, to be
+connected directly to him.
+
+"You can get here for lunch," Dick told the newspaper owner. "And,
+say, suppose you put up for the night.... Never mind your special
+writers. We're going hunting mountain lions this afternoon, and
+there's sure to be a kill. Got them located.... Who? What's she
+write?... What of it? She can stick around the ranch and get half a
+dozen columns out of any of half a dozen subjects, while the writer
+chap can get the dope on lion-hunting.... Sure, sure. I'll put him on
+a horse a child can ride."
+
+The more the merrier, especially newspaper chaps, Dick grinned to
+himself--and grandfather Jonathan Forrest would have nothing on him
+when it came to pulling off a successful finish.
+
+But how could Paula have been so wantonly cruel as to sing the "Gypsy
+Trail" so immediately afterward? Dick asked himself, as, receiver near
+to ear, he could distantly hear Chauncey Bishop persuading his writer
+man to the hunting.
+
+"All right then, come a running," Dick told Bishop in conclusion. "I'm
+giving orders now for the horses, and you can have that bay you rode
+last time."
+
+Scarcely had he hung up, when the bell rang again. This time it was
+Paula.
+
+"Red Cloud, dear Red Cloud," she said, "your reasoning is all wrong. I
+think I love you best. I am just about making up my mind, and it's for
+you. And now, just to help me to be sure, tell me what you told me a
+little while ago--you know--' I love the woman, the one woman. After a
+dozen years of possession I love her quite madly, oh, so sweetly
+madly.' Say it to me, Red Cloud."
+
+"I do truly love the woman, the one woman," Dick repeated. "After a
+dozen years of possession I do love her quite madly, oh, so sweetly
+madly."
+
+There was a pause when he had finished, which, waiting, he did not
+dare to break.
+
+"There is one little thing I almost forgot to tell you," she said,
+very softly, very slowly, very clearly. "I do love you. I have never
+loved you so much as right now. After our dozen years you've bowled me
+over at last. And I was bowled over from the beginning, although I did
+not know it. I have made up my mind now, once and for all."
+
+She hung up abruptly.
+
+With the thought that he knew how a man felt receiving a reprieve at
+the eleventh hour, Dick sat on, thinking, forgetful that he had not
+hooked the receiver, until Bonbright came in from the secretaries'
+room to remind him.
+
+"It was from Mr. Bishop," Bonbright explained. "Sprung an axle. I took
+the liberty of sending one of our machines to bring them in."
+
+"And see what our men can do with repairing theirs," Dick nodded.
+
+Alone again, he got up and stretched, walked absently the length of
+the room and back.
+
+"Well, Martinez, old man," he addressed the empty air, "this afternoon
+you'll be defrauded out of as fine a histrionic stunt as you will
+never know you've missed."
+
+He pressed the switch for Paula's telephone and rang her up.
+
+Oh Dear answered, and quickly brought her mistress.
+
+"I've a little song I want to sing to you, Paul," he said, then
+chanted the old negro 'spiritual':
+
+  "'Fer itself, fer itself,
+     Fer itself, fer itself,
+     Every soul got ter confess
+     Fer itself.'
+
+"And I want you to tell me again, fer yourself, fer yourself, what you
+just told me."
+
+Her laughter came in a merry gurgle that delighted him.
+
+"Red Cloud, I do love you," she said. "My mind is made up. I shall
+never have any man but you in all this world. Now be good, and let me
+dress. I'll have to rush for lunch as it is."
+
+"May I come over?--for a moment?" he begged.
+
+"Not yet, eager one. In ten minutes. Let me finish with Oh Dear first.
+Then I'll be all ready for the hunt. I'm putting on my Robin Hood
+outfit--you know, the greens and russets and the long feather. And I'm
+taking my 30-30. It's heavy enough for mountain lions."
+
+"You've made me very happy," Dick continued.
+
+"And you're making me late. Ring off.--Red Cloud, I love you more this
+minute--"
+
+He heard her hang up, and was surprised, the next moment, that somehow
+he was reluctant to yield to the happiness that he had claimed was
+his. Rather, did it seem that he could still hear her voice and
+Graham's recklessly singing the "Gypsy Trail."
+
+Had she been playing with Graham? Or had she been playing with him?
+Such conduct, for her, was unprecedented and incomprehensible. As he
+groped for a solution, he saw her again in the moonlight, clinging to
+Graham with upturned lips, drawing Graham's lips down to hers.
+
+Dick shook his head in bafflement, and glanced at his watch. At any
+rate, in ten minutes, in less than ten minutes, he would hold her in
+his arms and know.
+
+So tedious was the brief space of time that he strolled slowly on the
+way, pausing to light a cigarette, throwing it away with the first
+inhalation, pausing again to listen to the busy click of typewriters
+from the secretaries' room. With still two minutes to spare, and
+knowing that one minute would take him to the door without a knob, he
+stopped in the patio and gazed at the wild canaries bathing in the
+fountain.
+
+When they startled into the air, a cloud of fluttering gold and
+crystal droppings in the sunshine, Dick startled. The report of the
+rifle had come from Paula's wing above, and he identified it as her
+30-30 as he dashed across the patio. _She beat me to it,_ was his
+next thought, and what had been incomprehensible the moment before was
+as sharply definite as the roar of her rifle.
+
+And across the patio, up the stairs, through the door left wide-flung
+behind him, continued to pulse in his brain: _She beat me to it. She
+beat me to it._
+
+She lay, crumpled and quivering, in hunting costume complete, save for
+the pair of tiny bronze spurs held over her in anguished impotence by
+the frightened maid.
+
+His examination was quick. Paula breathed, although she was
+unconscious. From front to back, on the left side, the bullet had torn
+through. His next spring was to the telephone, and as he waited the
+delay of connecting through the house central he prayed that Hennessy
+would be at the stallion barn. A stable boy answered, and, while he
+ran to fetch the veterinary, Dick ordered Oh Joy to stay by the
+switches, and to send Oh My to him at once.
+
+From the tail of his eye he saw Graham rush into the room and on to
+Paula.
+
+"Hennessy," Dick commanded. "Come on the jump. Bring the needful for
+first aid. It's a rifle shot through the lungs or heart or both. Come
+right to Mrs. Forrest's rooms. Now jump."
+
+"Don't touch her," he said sharply to Graham. "It might make it worse,
+start a worse hemorrhage."
+
+Next he was back at Oh Joy.
+
+"Start Callahan with the racing car for Eldorado. Tell him he'll meet
+Doctor Robinson on the way, and that he is to bring Doctor Robinson
+back with him on the jump. Tell him to jump like the devil was after
+him. Tell him Mrs. Forrest is hurt and that if he makes time he'll
+save her life."
+
+Receiver to ear, he turned to look at Paula. Graham, bending over her
+but not touching her, met his eyes.
+
+"Forrest," he began, "if you have done--"
+
+But Dick hushed him with a warning glance directed toward Oh Dear who
+still held the bronze spurs in speechless helplessness.
+
+"It can be discussed later," Dick said shortly, as he turned his mouth
+to the transmitter.
+
+"Doctor Robinson?... Good. Mrs. Forrest has a rifle-shot through lungs
+or heart or maybe both. Callahan is on his way to meet you in the
+racing car. Keep coming as fast as God'll let you till you meet
+Callahan. Good-by."
+
+Back to Paula, Graham stepped aside as Dick, on his knees, bent over
+her. His examination was brief. He looked up at Graham with a shake of
+the head and said:
+
+"It's too ticklish to fool with."
+
+He turned to Oh Dear.
+
+"Put down those spurs and bring pillows.--Evan, lend a hand on the
+other side, and lift gently and steadily.--Oh Dear, shove that pillow
+under--easy, easy."
+
+He looked up and saw Oh My standing silently, awaiting orders.
+
+"Get Mr. Bonbright to relieve Oh Joy at the switches," Dick commanded.
+"Tell Oh Joy to stand near to Mr. Bonbright to rush orders. Tell Oh
+Joy to have all the house boys around him to rush the orders. As soon
+as Saunders comes back with Mr. Bishop's crowd, tell Oh Joy to start
+him out on the jump to Eldorado to look for Callahan in case Callahan
+has a smash up. Tell Oh Joy to get hold of Mr. Manson, and Mr. Pitts
+or any two of the managers who have machines and have them, with their
+machines, waiting here at the house. Tell Oh Joy to take care of Mr.
+Bishop's crowd as usual. And you come back here where I can call you."
+
+Dick turned to Oh Dear.
+
+"Now tell me how it happened."
+
+Oh Dear shook her head and wrung her hands.
+
+"Where were you when the rifle went off?"
+
+The Chinese girl swallowed and pointed toward the wardrobe room.
+
+"Go on, talk," Dick commanded harshly.
+
+"Mrs. Forrest tell me to get spurs. I forget before. I go quick. I
+hear gun. I come back quick. I run."
+
+She pointed to Paula to show what she had found.
+
+"But the gun?" Dick asked.
+
+"Some trouble. Maybe gun no work. Maybe four minutes, maybe five
+minutes, Mrs. Forrest try make gun work."
+
+"Was she trying to make the gun work when you went for the spurs?"
+
+Oh Dear nodded.
+
+"Before that I say maybe Oh Joy can fix gun. Mrs. Forrest say never
+mind. She say you can fix. She put gun down. Then she try once more
+fix gun. Then she tell me get spurs. Then... gun go off."
+
+Hennessy's arrival shut off further interrogation. His examination was
+scarcely less brief than Dick's. He looked up with a shake of the
+head.
+
+"Nothing I can dare tackle, Mr. Forrest. The hemorrhage has eased of
+itself, though it must be gathering inside. You've sent for a doctor?"
+
+"Robinson. I caught him in his office.--He's young, a good surgeon,"
+Dick explained to Graham. "He's nervy and daring, and I'd trust him in
+this farther than some of the old ones with reputations.--What do you
+think, Mr. Hennessy? What chance has she?"
+
+"Looks pretty bad, though I'm no judge, being only a horse doctor.
+Robinson'll know. Nothing to do but wait."
+
+Dick nodded and walked out on Paula's sleeping porch to listen for the
+exhaust of the racing machine Callahan drove. He heard the ranch
+limousine arrive leisurely and swiftly depart. Graham came out on the
+porch to him.
+
+"I want to apologize, Forrest," he said. "I was rather off for the
+moment. I found you here, and I thought you were here when it
+happened. It must have been an accident.'"
+
+"Poor little kid," Dick agreed. "And she so prided herself on never
+being careless with guns."
+
+"I've looked at the rifle," Graham said, "but I couldn't find anything
+wrong with it."
+
+"And that's how it happened. Whatever was wrong got right. That's how
+it went off."
+
+And while Dick talked, building the fabric of the lie so that even
+Graham should be fooled, to himself he was understanding how well
+Paula had played the trick. That last singing of the "Gypsy Trail" had
+been her farewell to Graham and at the same time had provided against
+any suspicion on his part of what she had intended directly to do. It
+had been the same with him. She had had her farewell with him, and,
+the last thing, over the telephone, had assured him that she would
+never have any man but him in all the world.
+
+He walked away from Graham to the far end of the porch.
+
+"She had the grit, she had the grit," he muttered to himself with
+quivering lips. "Poor kid. She couldn't decide between the two, and so
+she solved it this way."
+
+The noise of the racing machine drew him and Graham together, and
+together they entered the room to wait for the doctor. Graham betrayed
+unrest, reluctant to go, yet feeling that he must.
+
+"Please stay on, Evan," Dick told him. "She liked you much, and if she
+does open her eyes she'll be glad to see you."
+
+Dick and Graham stood apart from Paula while Doctor Robinson made his
+examination. When he arose with an air of finality, Dick looked his
+question. Robinson shook his head.
+
+"Nothing to be done," he said. "It is a matter of hours, maybe of
+minutes." He hesitated, studying Dick's face for a moment. "I can ease
+her off if you say the word. She might possibly recover consciousness
+and suffer for a space."
+
+Dick took a turn down the room and back, and when he spoke it was to
+Graham.
+
+"Why not let her live again, brief as the time may be? The pain is
+immaterial. It will have its inevitable quick anodyne. It is what I
+would wish, what you would wish. She loved life, every moment of it.
+Why should we deny her any of the little left her?"
+
+Graham bent his head in agreement, and Dick turned to the doctor.
+
+"Perhaps you can stir her, stimulate her, to a return of
+consciousness. If you can, do so. And if the pain proves too severe,
+then you can ease her."
+
+       *       *        *       *        *
+
+When her eyes fluttered open, Dick nodded Graham up beside him. At
+first bewilderment was all she betrayed, then her eyes focused first
+on Dick's face, then on Graham's, and, with recognition, her lips
+parted in a pitiful smile.
+
+"I... I thought at first that I was dead," she said.
+
+But quickly another thought was in her mind, and Dick divined it in
+her eyes as they searched him. The question was if he knew it was no
+accident. He gave no sign. She had planned it so, and she must pass
+believing it so.
+
+"I... was... wrong," she said. She spoke slowly, faintly, in evident
+pain, with a pause for strength of utterance between each word. "I was
+always so cocksure I'd never have an accident, and look what I've gone
+and done."
+
+"It's a darn shame," Dick said, sympathetically. "What was it? A jam?"
+
+She nodded, and again her lips parted in the pitiful brave smile as
+she said whimsically: "Oh, Dick, go call the neighbors in and show
+them what little Paula's din.
+
+"How serious is it?" she asked. "Be honest, Red Cloud, you know
+_me,"_ she added, after the briefest of pauses in which Dick had
+not replied.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"How long?" she queried.
+
+"Not long," came his answer. "You can ease off any time."
+
+"You mean...?" She glanced aside curiously at the doctor and back to
+Dick, who nodded.
+
+"It's only what I should have expected from you, Red Cloud," she
+murmured gratefully. "But is Doctor Robinson game for it?"
+
+The doctor stepped around so that she could see him, and nodded.
+
+"Thank you, doctor. And remember, I am to say when."
+
+"Is there much pain?" Dick queried.
+
+Her eyes were wide and brave and dreadful, and her lips quivered for
+the moment ere she replied, "Not much, but dreadful, quite dreadful. I
+won't care to stand it very long. I'll say when."
+
+Once more the smile on her lips announced a whimsey.
+
+"Life is queer, most queer, isn't it? And do you know, I want to go
+out with love-songs in my ears. You first, Evan, sing the 'Gypsy
+Trail.'--Why, I was singing it with you less than an hour ago. Think
+of it! Do, Evan, please."
+
+Graham looked to Dick for permission, and Dick gave it with his eyes.
+
+"Oh, and sing it robustly, gladly, madly, just as a womaning Gypsy man
+should sing it," she urged. "And stand back there, so, where I can see
+you."
+
+And while Graham sang the whole song through to its:
+
+  "The heart of a man to the heart of a maid, light of my
+        tents be fleet,
+   Morning waits at the end of the world and the world is
+       all at our feet,"
+
+Oh My, immobile-faced, a statue, stood in the far doorway awaiting
+commands. Oh Dear, grief-stricken, stood at her mistress's head, no
+longer wringing her hands, but holding them so tightly clasped that
+the finger-tips and nails showed white. To the rear, at Paula's
+dressing table, Doctor Robinson noiselessly dissolved in a glass the
+anodyne pellets and filled his hypodermic.
+
+When Graham had finished, Paula thanked him with her eyes, closed
+them, and lay still for a space.
+
+"And now, Red Cloud," she said when next she opened them, "the song of
+Ai-kut, and of the Dew-Woman, the Lush-Woman. Stand where Evan did, so
+that I can see you well."
+
+And Dick chanted:
+
+"I am Ai-kut, the first man of the Nishinam. Ai-kut is the short for
+Adam, and my father and my mother were the coyote and the moon. And
+this is Yo-to-to-wi, my wife. Yo-to-to-wi is the short for Eve. She is
+the first woman of the Nishinam.
+
+"Me, I am Ai-kut. This is my dew of women. This is my honey-dew of
+women. Her father and her mother were the Sierra dawn and the summer
+east wind of the mountains. Together they conspired, and from the air
+and earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love
+the leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed with the
+honey dew.
+
+"Yo-to-to-wi is my honey-dew woman. Hear me! I am Ai-kut! Yo-to-to-wi
+is my quail-woman, my deer-woman, my lush-woman of all soft rain and
+fat soil. She was born of the thin starlight and the brittle dawn-
+light, in the morning of the world, and she is the one woman of all
+women to me."
+
+Again, with closed eyes, she lay silent for a while. Once she
+attempted to draw a deeper breath, which caused her to cough slightly
+several times.
+
+"Try not to cough," Dick said.
+
+They could see her brows contract with the effort of will to control
+the irritating tickle that might precipitate a paroxysm.
+
+"Oh Dear, come around where I can see you," she said, when she opened
+her eyes.
+
+The Chinese girl obeyed, moving blindly, so that Robinson, with a hand
+on her arm, was compelled to guide her.
+
+"Good-by, Oh Dear. You've been very good to me always. And sometimes,
+maybe, I have not been good to you. I am sorry. Remember, Mr. Forrest
+will always be your father and your mother.... And all my jade is
+yours."
+
+She closed her eyes in token that the brief audience was over.
+
+Again she was vexed by the tickling cough that threatened to grow more
+pronounced.
+
+"I am ready, Dick," she said faintly, still with closed eyes. "I want
+to make my sleepy, sleepy noise. Is the doctor ready? Come closer.
+Hold my hand like you did before in the little death."
+
+She turned her eyes to Graham, and Dick did not look, for he knew love
+was in that last look of hers, as he knew it would be when she looked
+into his eyes at the last.
+
+"Once," she explained to Graham, "I had to go on the table, and I made
+Dick go with me into the anaesthetic chamber and hold my hand until I
+went under. You remember, Henley called it the drunken dark, the
+little death in life. It was very easy."
+
+In the silence she continued her look, then turned her face and eyes
+back to Dick, who knelt close to her, holding her hand.
+
+With a pressure of her fingers on his and a beckoning of her eyes, she
+drew his ear down to her lips.
+
+"Red Cloud," she whispered, "I love you best. And I am proud I
+belonged to you for such a long, long time." Still closer she drew him
+with the pressure of her fingers. "I'm sorry there were no babies, Red
+Cloud."
+
+With the relaxing of her fingers she eased him from her so that she
+could look from one to the other.
+
+"Two bonnie, bonnie men. Good-by, bonnie men. Good-by, Red Cloud."
+
+In the pause, they waited, while the doctor bared her arm for the
+needle.
+
+"Sleepy, sleepy," she twittered in mimicry of drowsy birds. "I am
+ready, doctor. Stretch the skin tight, first. You know I don't like to
+be hurt.--Hold me tight, Dick."
+
+Robinson, receiving the eye permission from Dick, easily and quickly
+thrust the needle through the stretched skin, with steady hand sank
+the piston home, and with the ball of the finger soothingly rubbed the
+morphine into circulation.
+
+"Sleepy, sleepy, boo'ful sleepy," she murmured drowsily, after a time.
+
+Semi-consciously she half-turned on her side, curved her free arm on
+the pillow and nestled her head on it, and drew her body up in
+nestling curves in the way Dick knew she loved to sleep.
+
+After a long time, she sighed faintly, and began so easily to go that
+she was gone before they guessed. From without, the twittering of the
+canaries bathing in the fountain penetrated the silence of the room,
+and from afar came the trumpeting of Mountain Lad and the silver
+whinny of the Fotherington Princess.
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Little Lady of the Big House, by Jack London
+
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