Mrs. Whiteside frowned. “Couldn’t think of it. We never take boarders. She’s too pretty to be around that fool of a Bill. What would happen to those cows of his? It’d be a lot of trouble. You can sleep in the third bedroom upstairs,” she said to Molly. “It doesn’t catch much sun anyway.”
Life changed its face. All of a sudden Molly found she was a queen. From the first day the children of the school adored her, for she understood them, and what was more, she let them understand her. It took her some time to realize that she had become an important person. If two men got to arguing at the store about a point of history or literature or mathematics, and the argument deadlocked, it ended up, “Take it to the teacher! If she doesn’t know, she’ll find it.” Molly was very proud to be able to decide such questions. At parties she had to help with the decorations and to plan refreshments.
“I think we’ll put pine boughs around everywhere. They’re pretty, and they smell so good. They smell like a party.” She was supposed to know everything and to help with everything, and she loved it.
At the Whiteside home she slaved in the kitchen under the mutterings of Willa. At the end of six months, Mrs. Whiteside grumbled to her husband, “Now if Bill only had any sense. But then,” she continued, “if she has any sense—” and there she left it.
At night Molly wrote letters to the few friends she had made in Teachers’ College, letters full of little stories about her neighbors, and full of joy. She must attend every party because of the social prestige of her position. On Saturdays she ran about the hills and brought back ferns and wild flowers to plant about the house.
Bill Whiteside took one look at Molly and scuttled back to his cows. It was a long time before he found the courage to talk to her very much. He was a big, simple young man who had neither his father’s balance nor his mother’s humor. Eventually, however, he trailed after Molly and looked after her from distances.
One evening, with a kind of feeling of thanksgiving for her happiness, Molly told Bill about her father. They were sitting in canvas chairs on the wide veranda, waiting for the moon. She told him about the visits, and then about the disappearance. “Do you see what I have, Bill?” she cried. “My lovely father is some place. He’s mine. You think he’s living, don’t you, Bill?”
“Might be,” said Bill. “From what you say, he was a kind of an irresponsible cuss, though. Excuse me, Molly. Still, if he’s alive, it’s funny he never wrote.”
Molly felt cold. It was just the kind of reasoning she had successfully avoided for so long. “Of course,” she said stiffly, “I know that. I have to do some work now, Bill.”
High up on a hill that edged the valley of the Pastures of Heaven, there was an old cabin which commanded a view of the whole country and of all the roads in the vicinity. It was said that the bandit Vasquez had built the cabin and lived in it for a year while the posses went crashing through the country looking for him. It was a landmark. All of the people of the valley had been to see it at one time or another. Nearly everyone asked Molly whether she had been there yet. “No,” she said, “but I will go up some day. I’ll go some Saturday. I know where the trail to it is.” One morning she dressed in her new hiking boots and corduroy skirt. Bill sidled up and offered to accompany her. “No,” she said. “You have work to do. I can’t take you away from it.”
“Work be hanged!” said Bill.
“Well, I’d rather go alone. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I just want to go alone, Bill.” She was sorry not to let him accompany her, but his remark about her father had frightened her. “I want to have an adventure,” she said to herself. “If Bill comes along, it won’t be an adventure at all. It’ll just be a trip.” It took her an hour and a half to climb up the steep trail under the oaks. The leaves on the ground were as slippery as glass, and the sun was hot. The good smell of ferns and dank moss and yerba buena filled the air. When Molly came at last to the ridge crest, she was damp and winded. The cabin stood in a small clearing in the brush, a little square wooden room with no windows. Its doorless entrance as a black shadow. The place was quiet, the kind of humming quiet that flies and bees and crickets make. The whole hillside sang softly in the sun. Molly approached on tiptoe. Her heart was beating violently.
“Now I’m having an adventure,” she whispered. “Now I’m right in the middle of an adventure at Vasquez’ cabin.” She peered in at the doorway and saw a lizard scuttle out of sight. A cobweb fell across her forehead and seemed to try to restrain her. There was nothing at all in the cabin, nothing but the dirt floor and the rotting wooden walls, and the dry, deserted smell of the earth that has long been covered from the sun. Molly was filled with excitement. “At night he sat in there. Sometimes when he heard noises like men creeping up on him, he went out of the door like the ghost of a shadow, and just melted into the darkness.” She looked down on the valley of the Pastures of Heaven. The orchards lay in dark green squares; the grain was yellow, and the hills behind, a light brown washed with lavender. Among the farms the roads twisted and curled, avoiding a field, looping around a huge tree, half circling a hill flank. Over the whole valley was stretched a veil of heat shimmer. “Unreal,” Molly whispered, “fantastic. It’s a story, a real story, and I’m having an adventure.” A breeze rose out of the valley like the sigh of a sleeper, and then subsided.
“In the daytime that young Vasquez looked down on the valley just as I’m looking. He stood right here, and looked at the roads down there. He wore a purple vest braided with gold, and the trousers on his slim legs widened at the bottom like the mouths of trumpets. His spur rowels were wrapped with silk ribbons to keep them from clinking. Sometimes he saw the posses riding by on the road below. Lucky for him the men bent over their horses’ necks, and didn’t look up at the hilltops. Vasquez laughed, but he was afraid, too. Sometimes he sang. His songs were soft and sad because he knew he couldn’t live very long.”
Molly sat down on the slope and rested her chin in her cupped hands. Young Vasquez was standing beside her, and Vasquez had her father’s gay face, his shining eyes as he came on the porch shouting, “Hi, kids!” This was the kind of adventure her father had. Molly shook herself and stood up. “Now I want to go back to the first time and think it all over again.”
In the late afternoon Mrs. Whiteside sent Bill out to look for Molly. “She might have turned an ankle, you know.” But Molly emerged from the trail just as Bill approached it from the road.
“We were beginning to wonder if you’d got lost,” he said. “Did you go up to the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Funny old box, isn’t it? Just an old woodshed. There are a dozen just like it down here. You’d be surprised, though, how many people go up there to look at it. The funny part is, nobody’s sure Vasquez was ever there.”
“Oh, I think he must have been there.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know.”
Bill became serious. “Everybody thinks Vasquez was a kind of a hero, when really he was just a thief. He started in stealing sheep and horses and ended up robbing stages. He had to kill a few people to do it. It seems to me, Molly, we ought to teach people to hate robbers, not worship them.”
“Of course, Bill,” she said wearily. “You’re perfectly right. Would you mind not talking for a little while, Bill? I guess I’m a little tired, and nervous, too.”
The year wheeled around. Pussywillows had their kittens, and wild flowers covered the hills. Molly found herself wanted and needed in the valley. She even attended school board meetings. There had been a time when those secret and august conferences were held behind closed doors, a mystery and a terror to everyone. Now that Molly was asked to step into John Whiteside’s sitting room, she found that the board discussed crops, told stories, and circulated mild gossip.