The Gay Cockade
He glanced at her hands. "I cannot believe that you scrub," he said.
"I sit up at night to care for my hands"--there was a note of bitterness
in her tone--"and I wear gloves when I work. There are some things that
one desires to hold on to, and my mother and my grandmother were ladies
of leisure."
"Would you like that--to be a lady of leisure?"
She turned and smiled at him. "How can I tell?" she asked; "I have never
tried it."
She started to leave him as she said it, but he held her with a
question: "Shall you sit up all night?"
She nodded. "His mother has had no sleep for two nights."
"Is he very ill?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows? There is no doctor near,
and his mother is poor. We are fighting it out together."
There was something heroic in her cool acceptance of her hard life. He
was silent for a moment, and then he said: "Would you have time to read
my book to-night?"
"Oh, if I might," she said eagerly, "but you haven't it with you."
"I will bring it," he told her, "after supper."
"But," she protested.
"There are no 'buts,'" he said, smiling; "if you will read it, I will
get it to you."
The sky had darkened, and, as he went toward home, he faced clouds in
the southeast.
"It is going to rain," Otto Brand prophesied as they sat down to supper.
The other three men hoped that it would not. Already the ground was
soaked, making the cutting of corn impossible, and another rain with a
frost on top of it would spoil all chance of filling the silo.
Van Alen could not enter into their technical objections. He hoped it
would not rain, because he wanted to take a book to Mazie Wetherell, and
he had not brought a rain-coat.
But it did rain, and he went without a rain-coat!
The house, as he neared it, showed no light, and under the thick canopy
of the trees there was no sound but the drip, drip of the rain. By
feeling and instinct he found the front door, and knocked.
There was a movement inside, and then Mazie Wetherell asked softly:
"Who's there?"
"I have brought the book."
The bolt was withdrawn, and in the hall, scarcely lighted by the shaded
lamp in the room beyond, stood the girl, in a loose gray gown, with
braided shining hair--a shadowy being, half-merged into the shadows.
"I thought you would not come," in a hushed tone, "in such a storm."
"I said I should come. The book may help you through the long night."
She caught her breath quickly. "The child is awfully ill."
"Are you afraid? Let me stay."
"Oh, no, no. His mother is sleeping, and I shall have your book."
She did not ask him in, and so he went away at once, beating his way
back in the wind and rain, fording a little stream where the low
foot-bridge was covered, reaching home soaking wet, but afire with
dreams.
Otto Brand was waiting for him, a little curious as to what had taken
him out so late, but, getting no satisfaction, he followed Van Alen
up-stairs, and built a fire for him in the big bedroom. And presently,
in the light of the leaping flames, the roses on the canopy of the bed
glowed pink.
"Ain't you goin' to sleep in the bed?" Otto asked, as he watched Van
Alen arrange the covers on the couch.
"No," said Van Alen shortly, "the honor is too great. It might keep me
awake."
"My feet would hang over," Otto said. "Funny thing, wasn't it, for a man
to make a will like that?"
"I suppose every man has a right to do as he pleases," Van Alen
responded coldly. He was not inclined to discuss the eccentricities of
his little old ancestor with this young giant.
"Of course," Otto agreed, and his next remark was called forth by Van
Alen's pale blue pajamas.
"Well, those are new on me."
Van Alen explained that in the city they were worn, and that silk was
cool, but while he talked he was possessed by a kind of fury. For the
first time the delicate garments, the luxurious toilet articles packed
in his bag, seemed foppish, unnecessary, things for a woman. With all of
them, he could not compete with this fair young god, who used a rough
towel and a tin basin on the kitchen bench.
"Maybe I'd better go," the boy offered. "You'll want to go to bed."
But Van Alen held him. "I always smoke first," he said, and, wrapped in
his dressing-gown, he flung himself into a chair on the opposite side of
the fireplace.
And after a time he brought the conversation around to Mazie Wetherell.
He found the boy rather sure of his success with her.
"All women are alike," he said; "you've just got to keep after them long
enough."
To Van Alen the idea of this hulking youngster as a suitor for such a
woman seemed preposterous. He was not fit to touch the hem of her
garment. He was unmannerly, uneducated; he was not of her class--and
even as he analyzed, the boy stood up, perfect in his strong young
manhood.
"I've never had much trouble making women like me," he said; "and I
ain't goin' to give up, just because she thinks she's better than the
rest round about here."
He went away, and Van Alen stared long into the fire, until the flames
left a heart of opal among the ashes.
He had not been unsuccessful with women himself. Many of them had liked
him, and might have loved him if he had cared to make them. But until
he met Mazie Wetherell he had not cared.
Desperately he wished for some trial of courage where he might be
matched against Otto Brand. He grew melodramatic in his imaginings, and
saw himself at a fire, fighting the flames to reach Mazie, while Otto
Brand shrank back. He stood in the path of runaway horses, and Otto
showed the white feather. He nursed her through the plague, and Otto
fled fearfully from the disease.
And then having reached the end of impossibilities, he stood up and
shook himself.
"I'm a fool," he said to the flames, shortly, and went to bed, to lie
awake, wondering whether Mazie Wetherell had reached that chapter of his
book where he had written of love, deeply, reverently, with a
foreknowledge of what it might mean to him some day. It was that chapter
which had assured the success of his novel. Would it move her, as it had
moved him when he reread it? That was what love ought to be--a thing
fine, tender, touching the stars! That was what love might be to him, to
Mazie Wetherell, what it could never be to Otto Brand.
At breakfast the next morning he found Mrs. Brand worrying about her
waitress.
"I guess she couldn't get back, and I've got a big day's work."
"I'll go and look her up," Van Alen offered; but he found that he was
not to go alone, for Otto was waiting for him at the gate.
"I ain't got nothin' else to do," the boy said; "everything is held up
by the rain."
It was when they came to the little stream that Van Alen had forded the
night before that they saw Mazie Wetherell.
"I can't get across," she called from the other side.
The bridge, which had been covered when Van Alen passed, was now washed
away, and the foaming brown waters overflowed the banks.
"I'll carry you over," Otto called, and straightway he waded through the
stream, and the water came above his high boots to his hips.
He lifted her in his strong arms and brought her back, with her bright
hair fluttering against his lips, and Van Alen, raging impotently, stood
and watched him.
It seemed to him that Otto's air was almost insultingly triumphant as he
set the girl on her feet and smiled down at her. And as she smiled back,
Van Alen turned on his heel and left them.
Presently he heard her running after him lightly over the sodden ground.
And when she reached his side she said: "Your book was wonderful."
"But he carried you over the stream."
Her eyes flashed a question, then blazed. "There, you've come back to
it," she said. "What makes you?"
"Because I wanted to carry you myself."
"Silly," she said; "any man could carry me across the stream--but only
you could write that chapter in the middle of the book."
"You liked it?" he cried, radiantly.
"Like it?" she asked. "I read it once, and then I read it again--on my
knees."
Her voice seemed to drop away breathless. Behind them Otto Brand
tramped, whistling; but he might have been a tree, or the sky, or the
distant hills, for all the thought they took of him.
"I wanted to beg your pardon," the girl went on, "for what I said the
other day--it is a great thing to write a book like that--greater than
fighting a battle or saving a life, for it saves people's ideals;
perhaps in that way it saves their souls."
"Then I may sleep in the canopy bed?" His voice was calm, but inwardly
he was much shaken by her emotion.
Her eyes, as she turned to him, had in them the dawn of that for which
he had hoped.
"Why not?" she said, quickly. "You are greater than your
grandfather--you are--" She stopped and laughed a little, and, in this
moment of her surrender, her beauty shone like a star.
"Oh, little great man," she said, tremulously, "your head touches the
skies!"
SANDWICH JANE
I
"No man," said O-liver Lee, "should earn more than fifteen dollars a
week. After that he gets--soft."
"Soft nothing!"
O-liver sat on a box in front of the post-office. He was lean and young
and without a hat. His bare head was one of the things that made him
unique. The other men within doors and without wore hats--broad hats
that shielded them from the California sun; or, as in the case of Atwood
Jones, who came from the city, a Panama of an up-to-the-minute model.
But O-liver's blond mane waved in every passing breeze. It was only when
he rode forth on his mysterious journeys that he crowned himself with a
Chinese straw helmet.
Because he wore no hat his skin was tanned. He had blue eyes that
twinkled and, as I have said, a blond mane.
"Fifteen dollars a week," he reaffirmed, "is enough."
Fifteen dollars was all that O-liver earned. He was secretary to an
incipient oil king. As the oil king's monarchy was largely on paper he
found it hard at times to compass even the fifteen dollars that went to
his secretary.
The other men scorned O-liver's point of view and told him so. They were
a rather prosperous bunch, all except Tommy Drew, who dealt in a
dilettante fashion in insurance, and who sat at O-liver's feet and
worshiped him.
It was Saturday and some of the men had drifted in from the surrounding
ranches; others from the cities, from the mountains, from the valleys,
from the desert, from the sea. Tinkersfield had assumed a sudden
importance as an oil town. All of the men had business connected in some
way with Tinkersfield. And all of them earned more than fifteen dollars
a week.
Therefore they disputed O-liver's statement. "If you had a wife--" said
one.
"Ah," said O-liver, "if I had--"
"Ain't you got any ambition?" Henry Bittinger demanded. Henry was
pumping out oil in prodigious quantities. He had bought a motor car and
a fur coat. It was too hot most of the time for the coat, but the car
stood now at rest across the road--long and lovely--much more of an
aristocrat than the man who owned it.
"Ambition for what?" O-liver demanded.
Henry's eyes went to the pride of his heart.
"Well, I should think you'd want a car."
"I'd give," said O-liver, "my kingdom for a horse, but not for a car."
O-liver's little mare stood quite happily in the shade; she was slim as
to leg, shining as to coat, and with the eyes of a loving woman.
"I should think you'd want to get ahead," said Atwood Jones, who sold
shoes up and down the coast. He was a junior member of the firm, but
still liked to go on the road. He liked to lounge like this in front of
the post-office and smoke in the golden air with a lot of men sitting
round. Atwood had been raised on a ranch. He had listened to the call of
the city, but he was still a small-town man.