The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 11
ALMA was at the gate like a vigilant warden when the two fugitives from the distant cow camp rode up in the twilight. She was surprised to see Fred Grubb, who was in buoyant humor, exalted in spirit by his new freedom, his manly independence, the prospect of coming at last into the green paradise of his dreams. He swung from the saddle lightly, the shotgun in his hand, and made her a gracious, if not too graceful, bow.
My lady fair which I lay them at your feet,
As I have told you so oft many times before,
My lady fair and sweet.
Fred delivered this rather crippled, though gallant tribute with all outward evidence of entire spontaneity, although Barrett was very well able to account now for the poet's silence during the last two or three miles of the ride. Alma, carrying out her part of what appeared to be a set ceremony between them, sank low in a slow curtsy, grave as if her troubadour, in fact, had come to her castle hall with his lute beneath his arm.
"That's a new one, Fred, you precious old humbug!" she said, laughing now, giving each of them a hand in warm welcome.
If troubles hung over her, thought Barrett, they made no shadow.
She told Barrett that Nearing had gone to Saunders two days ago, and was not expected home before tomorrow. Manuel had not returned from Eagle Rock camp. Teresa, his wife, was worried. Had they any news of him?
"We delivered the letters you sent," Barrett explained, halting at the disagreeable news that lay behind the messenger's detention in camp.
"The horses was all out on the range," Fred explained. "I expect he had some trouble ropin' one to fetch him back. He'll be along."
Taking his cue from Fred's diplomatic avoidance of any explanation, Barrett seconded this opinion. Fred doubtless had his own delicate reasons for leaving it to the old Mexican to break the news of what had happened at camp. It was a commendable modesty in the hero of that cowardly plot against his life, Barrett thought; Fred Grubb's stock rose in his appraisement a sharp advance, although it stood pretty well near the top at that.
Mrs. Nearing came to the porch, where Barrett saw her leaning and listening.
"Who's there, Alma?" she inquired, her voice strained, impatient.
"Mr. Barrett and Fred, from Eagle Rock camp."
"Have they brought any word of your Uncle Hal?"
"No, Auntie Hope, they came from Eagle Rock camp," Alma returned, gently patient with the elder woman's querulous anxiety.
"Tell Teresa to give them some supper in the kitchen," Mrs. Nearing instructed, turning again into the house.
"You must excuse Aunt Hope's appearance of inhospitality, Mr. Barrett—both of you. She's been half crazy with neuralgia."
"It's plain that she isn't herself, no apology is necessary," Barrett assured her.
"Don't bother about supper for a couple of ex-wranglers like us, Alma; we'll rustle up something down in the cook-house, we'll open a can of salmon—I know right where to lay my hand on it."
"Ex-wranglers, Fred?" said Alma, surprise big in her voice. "You're not fired, are you?"
"No, I had the honor of resignin' one time in my life. Here comes Manuel now, he'll give you all the accoutrements of the case. Me and Ed we'll go on down to the bunk-house and rustle around/b2"
"I'll fix you some supper myself," Alma stopped him with sweet hospitality. "Mr. Barrett, you are my guest, you are here on"
"Orders," Barrett supplied, quick to express his willingness to serve.
"My orders," she amended. "Put your horses away and come right back to supper, both of you."
"Ordera! her orders!" said Fred, as they went together to unsaddle their horses. "Was she the one that sent for you, Ed?"
"You heard what she said."
"I thought it was Hal Nearing wanted to see you when you said they sent for you to come to the ranch."
Fred whistled to himself in expression of astonishment from time to time as he put his horse in the barn and gave it a charge of the hay cut, as he well knew, from the very land he expected soon to take possession of as his own.
"You go on up to the house and see her, Ed," he insisted, gravely. "I'll nose up a can of salmon and root me up some crackers—that's good enough for a feller like me."
"She wants you, too. Didn't you hear her ask you?"
"She asked me, but she don't want me," the wise poet returned. "Three's a crowd, as it used to say on the candy hearts. You go on up."
Fred was not to be shaken from his can of salmon cand crackers, hard as Barrett tried to bend him.
"No, you go on up there by your lonesome and have it out with her," he said. "Maybe she wants to marry you, Ed. I'd be a purty lookin' feller hangin' around in a case of that kind, wouldn't I now?"
"Come on, you old fool!"
"Not for all the gold of Gopher!" Fred declared, with great solemnity, only to break out the next breath with a loud, unpoetic laugh, slap his young friend on the back and push him off toward the house.
There was no supper spread for him when Barrett returned to the house. Alma had forgotten her obligation of hospitality while listening to Manuel's recital of what had taken place at Eagle Rock camp.
They stood outside the kitchen door, Alma, Teresa and Manuel, the old man's horse close by. Manuel was making his report in Spanish, a language strange to Barrett, Alma questioning him briefly, breathlessly, in the same tongue from time to time. They did not hear Barrett's approach, although the weary horse started' at his step. He paused near them, outside the beam of light that reached out into the shrubbery through the open door.
Teresa stood just in the edge of this diffused beam, her figure sharp in contrast with the other two, holding her hands clasped before her bosom in pose of supplication. Now and again she moaned and shook her: head, whether in sympathy for the man who had fallen, or for his own peril, Barrett had no way of knowing.
Whatever the old man was saying, Barrett knew that he could make him out only a pale sort of heroin that plot. He did not know, even, whether there was much sympathy or consideration for him in any bosom there, for he had reduced himself to an infinitesimal point in his own contempt for the way he had conducted himself at Eagle Rock camp that day.
A man would have slung his gun and cleaned them up before Fred Grubb ever appeared at the door; a man would have come out of it with a feeling of sufficiency in himself, and not as a boy led out of trouble by the hand.
A lame figure of a hero, indeed, standing there in the dark like a spy. He had the thought of sneaking back to Fred and sharing with him the salmon and crackers. He remembered in time to stop this retreat that he was there under orders; he advanced into the beam of light, and approached the door.
Alma turned at the sound of his step, Manuel starting as if to draw and defend. The girl's face was pale, her eyes were great with the horror of the thing she had heard.
"Oh, Mr. Barrett!" she said, a shocked note of lamentation in her tone. "You must not think—I can't bear to have you think—that anybody here—that it was with the knowledge of anybody here"
"Not at all," said Barrett, lying only with his lips, his heart cold in its charity toward another member of that house.
"You would be almost justified, it was so diabolically conceived. If that's Dale Findlay's notion of a joke, I think it's time he practiced his pleasantries on another range!"
"Joke?" Barrett repeated, feeling his heart sink to his heels.
He knew something of the lengths to which men of that calling would go to have their jokes. Could this carefully worked out scheme, carried to a head with so much hard riding and planning in distant parts, have been nothing more in the beginning than a cowpuncher jest? He recalled Manuel's warning, and turned to him sharply.
"Was it a joke—did you know it was a joke?" he demanded.
"No-o-o, señor!" said Manuel, forcefully, solemnly, shaking his head slowly. "It was not a joke!"
"Dale told Manuel it was nothing but a joke—that's what he told you, Manuel?"
"He told me, Mees Alma."
"They didn't expect it to end that way, they only thought they'd throw a scare into you. They didn't count Alvino in, the wicked old devil!"
"No, they didn't count Alvino in," said Barrett, slowly, seeing again the knife-point protruding through the half-breed's breast. "Nor Fred Grubb—they didn't count him in, either."
"Poor old Fred! He's been the victim of so many of their pleasantries he couldn't tell a joke the length of his arm away in broad daylight," said Alma.
"It cost a man his life," Barrett reminded her. "However unworthy, he was a man, You knew—" to Manuel, facing him sharply—"that man came to camp to make trouble?"
"To keel you, señor."
"Did he tell you that, Manuel?" Alma challenged him, almost craftily, it seemed to Barrett, in her sudden desire to establish the whole affair as a pleasantly designed thing with an unfortunate ending in tragedy. She had recovered quickly from her shocked, horrified concern. She was of the blood of the cattle barons, in whom she could see no wrong.
"Did he tell you that?" she demanded again, in growing severity.
"He did not tell me," Manuel replied.
"Well, don't you know it's dangerous to go around guessing such things?"
"He did not tell me, but I knew. Before I—señorita, I knew."
"How did you know? Who told you?" she insisted, with the bullying severity of one accustomed to break ing down obstacles to her will.
Manuel turned away without a word, with that same silent dignity over him that Barrett had marked when—Fred Grubb addressed him on terms of inequality at the 'corral gate. It appeared to lift the silent old man now far above the impatient, overbearing young woman who sought to make a case for those whom she defended out—of her inborn disposition to oppose all who stood against the institutions of the barons' range.
"Señor Nearing will get it out of you!" she threatened.
Manuel was not shaken by the threat. He led his horse away, and Teresa, his wife, returned to the kitchen with the speed of panic, as if she recalled that moment she had left some dish on the fire.
"I ask you to withhold judgment on them, Mr. Barrett, till Uncle Hal gets the straight of it," Alma said. "I was all rattled myself when Manuel told me about it, but I can see now where he could overdraw things in his imaginative Mexican way. Dale Findlay isn't the man, not counting the other two, whom I don't know, to let a poor old chump like Fred Grubb get the drop on him if he's playing a serious game. Don't you see that, Mr. Barrett?"
"I hadn't thought of it in that light," Barrett confessed, but still unshaken in his profound belief that Findlay had meant that noonday hour to be his last.
"He'd have taken the gun away from poor old Fred and bent it around his gourd if he'd been in earnest," she declared. "I'm sorry for the poor mestizo—he must have insulted Alvino terribly to drive him to that deed."
"We'll call it a joke, then, and let it drop," said Barrett.
He was uncomfortable in this discussion with her, hot-headed and biased as she was in her defense of the very men she had arraigned with so much bitterness a few days before. Still it wasn't the cowboys, it was not Dale Findlay, that she labored to prove blameless of any sinister attempt on his life, Barrett very well understood. She was standing in defense of the institution she had been bred to consider vested with overriding and incontestable right on the range.
Teresa was setting his supper out on the kitchen table, the mistress of the house evidently having given direct orders. Alma, seeing this, excused herself on the plea that she must see to the needs of her ailing aunt.
"When you're through supper, go out to the gate," she directed, rather than asked. "I'll come out in a little while—I want to have a talk with you, Mr. Barrett."
Teresa waited on Barrett with assiduous hand, smiling fatly as she brooded close by to anticipate his slightest need. As she poured his second cup of coffee she said, her voice cautious and low:
"When you are boss of this house, Meester Barrett, remember Manuel and me, to keep us here and let us work for you."
Barrett looked up into her face to see if he could head off another of those jokes for which that vicinity was so notable. Her countenance was serene, all save a little eagerness of expression, an unquestionable sincerity in her eyes.
"Why, I haven't got anything to do with it! I'll never be boss here," he said, amazed to see her so set on what she evidently believed to be true.
"It will come," said Teresa, confidently, nodding her sleek black head." Manuel read it in the cards."
"He'd better shuffle them again," said Barrett, laughing.
But Teresa only shook her head, undisturbed in her faith in an event unerringly foretold.