The Moccasin Ranch Read online

  Blanche staggered on her numb feet, which felt like clods. She was weak with cold, and everything grew dark before her.

  "Oh, Jim, I can't go on. I'll freeze. I'll die—I know I shall. My feet are frozen solid."

  He dragged a chair to the hearth of the stove, in which a coal fire lay. His action was bold and confident.

  "No, you won't. I'll have you all right in a jiffy. Trouble is, you're not half dressed. You need woollen underclothing and a new fur cloak. We'll make it sealskin to pay for this."

  He unlaced her shoes and slipped them off, and, while she sobbed with agony, he rolled her stockings down and took her cold, white feet in his warm, swift hands. In a few minutes the wrinkles of pain on her face smoothed out, and a flush came into her cheeks. The tears stood on her eyelashes. She was like a sorrowing child who forgets its grief in a quick return of happiness.

  Suddenly Rivers stopped and listened. His face grew set and dark with apprehension. "Here, put your veil back, quick! It's Bailey! Don't answer him, unless I tell you to."

  Outside a clear voice pierced through the wind. It was Bailey speaking to the horses.

  Rivers went on, angrily: "If you'd been half dressed, this wouldn't have happened. There'll be hell to pay unless I can convince him—"

  A hand was laid on the knob and Bailey entered.

  "Hello, Jim! I didn't think you'd come out to-day." He eyed the muffled woman sharply. "Who've you got with you—Mrs. Burke?"

  "It don't concern you," Rivers replied. He saw his mistake instantly, and changed his tone. "Yes, I'm taking her home. Come, Mrs. Burke, we must be going."

  "Wait a minute, Jim," said Bailey. He studied them both carefully. "Something's wrong here. I feel that. Where are you going, Jim?"

  Rivers' wrath flamed out. "None o' your business. Come, Blanche." He turned to her. His tones betrayed him again.

  Bailey faced him, with his back to the door.

  "Wait a minute, Jim."

  "Get out o' my way."

  There was a silence, and in that silence the two men faced each other as if under some strange light. They seemed alien to each other, yet familiar, too. Bailey spoke first:

  "Jim, I know all about it. You're stealing another man's wife—and, by God, I won't let you do it!" His voice shook so that he hardly uttered his sentence intelligibly. The sweat of shame broke out on his face, but he did not falter. "I've seen this coming on all summer. I ought to have interfered before—"

  Rivers laid a hand on him. "Stand out o' my way, or I'll kill you."

  The quiver went out of Bailey's voice. He took his partner's hand down from his shoulder, and when he dropped it there was a bracelet of whitened flesh where his fingers had circled it. "You'll stay right here, Jim, till I say 'go.'"

  Rivers reached for a weapon. "Will I?" he asked. "I wonder if I will?"

  Blanche burst out: "Oh, Jim, don't! Please don't!"

  The men did not hear her. They saw no one, heard no one. They were facing each other in utter disregard of time or place.

  Bailey's tone grew sad and tender, but he did not move: "All right, Jim. If you want to go to hell as the murderer of your best friend, as well as for stealing another man's wife, do it. But you sha'n't go out of this door with that woman while I live. Now, that's final." His voice was low, and his words came slowly, but not from weakness.

  For a moment hell looked from the other man's eyes. He was like a tiger intercepted in his leap upon his prey. The laugh had vanished from his hazel eyes—they were gray and cold and savage, but there was something equally forceful in Bailey's gaze.

  Rivers could not shoot. He was infuriate, but he was not insane. He turned away, cursing his luck. His face, twitching and white, was terrible to look upon, but the crisis was over.

  Bailey's eyes lightened. "Come, old man, you can't afford to do this. Go out and put up the team, and to-morrow we'll take Mrs. Burke home—I'll explain that she came over after the mail and couldn't get back."

  Rivers turned on him again with a sneer. "You cussed fool, can't you see that she can't go back to Burke? I've made her mine—you understand?"

  Bailey's hands fell slack. He suddenly remembered something. He brushed his hand over his brow as if to clear his vision:

  "Jim, Jim, I—good God!—how could you do such a thing?" He was helpless as a boy, in face of this hideous complication.

  Rivers pushed his advantage. He developed a species of swagger:

  "Never mind about that. It's done. Now what are you going to do? Can you fix up such a thing as that?" Bailey was still silent. "It simply means that I'm her husband from this time on. Sit down, Blanche—I'm going to put up the team, but to-morrow morning we go. We couldn't make it now, anyway," he added. "There's nothing for it but to stay here all night."

  Bailey stood aside to let him go out, then went to the stove and mechanically stirred it up and put some water heating. This finished, he sat down and leaned his head in his hands in confused thought.

  To his clear sense his partner's act seemed monstrous. He had been brought up to respect the marriage bond, and to protect and honor women. The illicit was impossible to his candid soul. All the men he had associated with had been respecters of marriage, though some of them were obscene—thoughtlessly, he always believed—and now Jim, his chum, had come between a man and his wife! With Estelle in his mind as the type of purity, he could not understand how a wife could be the faithless creature Blanche Burke seemed. Her weakness opened a new world to him. He could not trust himself to speak to her.

  The bubbling of the kettle aroused him, and he rose and went about getting supper. After a few moments he felt able to ask, with formal politeness:

  "Won't you lay off your things, Mrs. Burke?"

  She made no reply, but sat like an old gypsy, crouched low, with brooding face. She, too, was wordless. She had made the curious mistake of looking to Bailey for justification. She had felt that he would understand and pity her, and his accusing eyes hurt her sorely. "If I could only speak? If I could only find words to tell him my thought, he would at least not despise me," she thought. Her face turned toward him piteously, but she dared not lift her eyes to his. He typified the world to her, and, furthermore, he was kindly and just; and yet he was about to condemn her because she could not make him understand.

  Trained to laugh when she should weep, how could she plead overmastering desire, the pressure of loneliness and poverty, and, last of all, the power of a man who stood, in her fancy, among the most brilliant of her world. She felt herself in the grasp of forces as vast, as impersonal, and as illimitable as the wind and the sky, but, reduced to words, her poor plea for mercy would have been, "I could not help it."

  Her maternity, which should have been her glory and her pride, was at this hour an insupportable shame. She had experienced her moments of emotional exaltation wherein she was lifted above self-abasement, but now she crouched in the lowest depths of self-suspicion. The rising storm seemed the approach of the remorseless judgment-day, the howl of the wind, the voice of devils, exulting in her fall.

  She did not trouble herself about her husband. At times she flamed out in anger against his weakness, his business failures, his boyish gullibility. Sometimes she pitied him, sometimes she hated him.

  She watched Bailey furtively. The firm lines of his face, his sturdy figure, and his frank, brusque manner were as familiar to her as the face of Rivers, and almost as dear—but she could not speak!

  At last she gave up all thought of speaking, and drew her shawl about her with an air of final reserve. She resembled an old crone as she crouched there.

  Rivers returned soon and took off his overcoat without looking at Bailey, who bustled about getting the supper, his resolute cheerfulness once more aglow.

  Rivers sat down beside Blanche. "It would be death to attempt Wheatland to-night," he said. "I could make it all right, but it would be the end of you."

  Bailey could not hear the words she spoke in reply. "Supper's ready,"
said he. "We all have to eat, no matter what comes."

  Something in his voice and manner affected Blanche deeply. She buried her face in her hands and wept while Rivers sat helplessly looking at her. She could not rise and walk before him yet. The shame of her sin weighed her down.

  Bailey poured some tea and gave it to Rivers.

  "Take this to her while I toast her some bread."

  She drank the tea but refused food, and Rivers sat down again still wearing an air of defiance, though Bailey did not appear to notice it. He ate a hearty supper, making a commonplace remark now and again.

  Once he said, "We're in for a hard winter."

  "It's hell on the squatters," Rivers replied, for want of other words. "I don't know what they'll do. No money and no work for most of them. They'll have to burn hay. If it hadn't been for the price on buffalo bones, I guess some of them would starve."

  Rising from the table, Bailey moved about doing up the work. He was very thoughtful, and the constraint increased in tension.

  The storm steadily increased. Its lashings of sleet grew each hour more furious. The cabin did not reel, for it sat close in a socket of sods—it endured in the rush of snow like a rock set in the swash of savage seas. The icy dust came in around the stovepipe and fell in a fine shower down upon Bailey's hands, fell with a faintly stinging touch, and the circle of warmth about the fire grew less wide each hour. "If the horses don't all freeze we'll be in luck," said he.

  The stove roared as a chained leopard might do in answer to a lion outside. Slender mice came from their dark corners and skittered across the floor before the silent men, their sleek sides palpitating with timorous excitement.

  Bailey hovered over the stove, trying to figure up some accounts. Rivers sat beside Blanche. With watchful care he kept her shawl upon her shoulders and her feet wrapped in a blanket. He spoke to her now and then in a voice inaudible to Bailey, who studied them with an occasional keen glance.

  "Well, now," he said, at last, "no use sitting here like images; we might as well turn in. Jim, you take the bunk over there; and, Mrs. Burke, you occupy the bed. I'll make up a shake-down here by the stove and keep the fire going."

  Rivers sullenly acquiesced, and Blanche lay down without removing her outside garments, in the same bed in which she had slept that first night in this wild land—that beautiful, buoyant spring night. How far away it all was now!

  Rivers heaped blankets upon her and tenderly tucked her in, whispered good-night, and without a word to Bailey rolled himself in a fur robe and stretched himself on his creaking, narrow couch.

  So, in the darkness, while the storm intensified with shrieking, wild voices, with whistling roar and fluttering tumult, Bailey gave his whole thought to the elemental war within. His mind went out first to Burke, who seemed some way to be the wronged man and chief sufferer, cut off from help, alone in the cold and snow. By contrast, Rivers seemed lustful and savage and treacherous.

  Such a drama had never before come into Bailey's life. He had read of somewhat similar cases in the papers, and had passed harsh judgment on the man and woman. He had called the woman wanton and the man a villain, but here the verdict was less easy to render. He liked Mrs. Burke, and he loved his friend. He had looked into their faces many times during the last six months without detecting any signs of degradation; on the contrary, Blanche had apparently grown in womanly qualities; and as for Jim, he had never been more manly, more generous and kind. If their acts were crimes, why could they remain so clear of eye?

  Without reaching a conclusion, he put the question from him and willed himself to sleep.

  When he awoke it was morning, but there was no change in the wind, except in an increase of its ferocity. The roar was still steady, high-keyed, relentless. A myriad new voices seemed to have joined the screaming tumult. The cold was still intense.

  He looked at his watch and found it marking the hour of sunrise, but there was no light. The world was only a gray waste. He renewed the fire, and began preparations for breakfast, his sturdy heart undismayed by the demons without. Rivers, awakened by the clatter of dishes, rose and scraped a peep-hole in a window-pane. Nothing could be seen but a chaos of snow.

  "No moving out of here to-day," he muttered, with a sullen curse.

  Bailey assumed a cheerful tone.

  "No; we're in for another day of it."

  Inwardly he was appalled at the thought of what the long hours might bring to him. To spend twenty-four hours more in this terrible constraint would be ghastly. He set about the attempt to break it up. He whistled and sang at his work, calling out to his partner as if there were no evil passions between them.

  "This is the fourth blizzard this month. Good thing they didn't come last winter. This land wouldn't have been settled at all. What do you suppose these poor squatters will do?"

  Rivers did not respond.

  Blanche tried to rise, but turned white and dizzy, and fell back upon the bed, seized with a sudden weakness. Rivers brought her some tea and sat by her side, while Bailey again toasted some bread for her. She looked very weak and ill.

  Bailey went out to feed the horses, glad of the chance to escape his problem for a moment. Finding Rivers still sullen upon his return, he got out some old magazines and read them aloud. Rivers swore under his breath, but Blanche listened to the reading with relief. The stories dealt mostly with young people who wished to marry, but were prevented by somebody who wished them to "wed according to their station." They were innocent creatures who had not known any other attachment, and their bliss was always complete and unalloyed at the end.

  Bailey read the tender passages in the same prosaic tone with which he described the shipwreck, and his elocution would have been funny to any other group of persons; as it was, neither of his hearers smiled.

  Blanche's heart was filled with rebellion. Why could she not have known Jim in the days when she, too, was young and innocent like the heroines of these stories?

  At noon, when Rivers went out to feed the team, Bailey went over toward the wretched woman. His face was kind but firm:

  "Mrs. Burke, I hope you've decided not to do this thing."

  She looked at him with shrinking eyes.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean you can't afford to go away with Jim this way."

  "What else can I do? I can't live without him, and I can't go back."

  "Well, then, go away alone. Go back to your folks."

  "Oh, I can't do that! Can't you see," she said, finding words with effort—"can't you see, I must go? Jim is my real husband. I must be true to him now. My folks can't help me—nobody can help me but Jim—If he stands by me, I can live." She stopped, feeling sure she had explained nothing. It was so hard to find words.

  "There must be some way out of it," he replied, and his hesitation helped her. She saw that he was thinking upon the problem, and found it not at all a clear case against her.

  After Rivers came back they resumed their seats about the fire, talking about the storm—at least, Bailey talked, and Rivers had the grace to listen. He really seemed less sullen and more thoughtful.

  Outside the warring winds howled on. The eye could not penetrate the veils of snow which streamed through the air on level lines. The powdered ice rose from the ground in waves which buffeted one another and fell in spray, only to rise again in ceaseless, tumultuous action. There was no sky and no earth. Everything slid, sifted, drifted, or madly swirled.

  The three prisoners fell at last into silence. They sat in the dim, yellow-gray dusk and stared gloomily at the stove, growing each moment more repellent to one another. They met one another's eyes at intervals with surprise and horror. The world without seemed utterly lost. Wailing voices sobbed in the pipe and at the windows. Sudden agonized shrieks came out of the blur of sound. The hours drew out to enormous length, though the day was short. The windows were furred deep with frost. At four o'clock it was dark, and, as he placed the lamp on the table, Bailey said,

 
"Well, Jim, we're in for another night of it."

  Rivers leaped up as if he had been struck.

  "Yes, curse it. It looks as if it would never let up again." He raged up and down the room with the spirit of blasphemy burning in his eyes. "I wish I'd never seen the accursed country."

  "Will you go feed the team, or shall I?" Bailey quietly interrupted.

  "I'll go." And he went out into the storm with savage resolution, while Bailey prepared supper.

  "The storm is sure to end to-night," he said, as they were preparing for sleep. As before, Blanche lay down upon the bed, Rivers took the bunk, and Bailey camped upon the floor, content to see his partner well bestowed.

  Blanche, unable to sleep, lay for a long time listening to the storm, thinking disconnectedly on the past and the morrow. The strain upon her was twisting her toward insanity. The never-resting wind appalled her. It was like the iron resolution of the two men. She saw no end to this elemental strife. It was the cyclone of July frozen into snow, only more relentless, more persistent—a tornado of frost. It filled her with such awe as she had never felt before. It seemed as if she must not sleep—that she must keep awake for the sake of the little heart of which she had been made the guardian.

  As she lay thus a sudden mysterious exaltation came upon her, and she grew warm and happy. She cared no longer for any man's opinion of her. She was a mother, and God said to her, "Be peaceful and hopeful." Light fell around her, and the pleasant odors of flowers. She looked through sunny vistas of oaks and apple-trees. Bees hummed in the clover, and she began to sing with them, and her low, humming song melted into the roar of the storm. She saw birds flying like butterflies over fields of daisies, and her song grew louder. It became sweet and maternal—full of lullaby cadences. As she lay thus, lovely and careless and sinless as a prattling babe, her eyes fixed upon the gleam of lights in the dark, a shaking hand was laid on her shoulder, and Rivers spoke in anxious voice:

  "What is it, Blanche?—are you sick?"

  She looked at him drowsily, and at last slowly said: "No, Jim—I am happy. See my baby there, in the sunshine! Isn't she lovely?"