Elizabeth watched the door close behind him. “There is too big a crack under that door,” she thought. “When the wind blows, a draft will come in under the door. I wonder if I should move to another house.” She spread her skirt tightly down, and then drew her finger up the center so that the cloth adhered to her legs and defined their shape. She inspected her fingers carefully.
“Now I am ready,” she went on. “Now I am all ready to punish him. He is a bumpkin, a blundering fool. He has no manners. He doesn’t know how to do things politely. He wouldn’t know manners if he saw them. I don’t like his beard. He stares too much. And his suit is pitiful.” She thought over the punishment and nodded her head slowly. “He said he didn’t know how to fence. And he wants to marry me. I’d have to bear those eyes all my life. His beard is probably coarse, but I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so. What a fine thing to go straight to a point. And his suit—and he would put his hand on my side.” Her mind bolted away. “I wonder what I will do.” The person who must act in the future was a stranger whose reactions Elizabeth did not quite understand. She walked up the stairs to her bedroom and slowly took off her clothes. “I must look at his palm next time. That will tell.” She nodded gravely, and then threw herself face-downward on the bed and cried. Her crying was as satisfying and as luxurious as a morning’s yawn. After a while she got up and blew out her lamp and dragged a little velvet-seated rocking chair to the window. Resting her elbows on the window-sill, she looked out into the night. There was a heavy misty dampness in the air now; a lighted window down the rutted street was fringed with light.
Elizabeth heard a stealthy movement in the yard below and leaned out to look. There was a pounce, a hissing, rasping cry, and then the crunch of bone. Her eyes pierced the grey darkness and made out a long, low, shadowy cat creeping away with some little creature in its mouth. A nervous bat circled her head, gritting as it looked about. “Now I wonder where he is,” she thought. “He’ll be riding now, and his beard will be blowing. When he gets home he’ll be very tired. And I’m here, resting, doing nothing. It serves him right.” She heard a concertina playing, coming nearer, from the other end of the village, where the saloon was. As it drew close, a voice joined, a voice as sweet and hopeless as a tired sigh.
“Maxwellton’s braes are bonnie—”
Two lurching figures were passing by. “Stop! You’re not playing the right tune. Keep your damn Mexican tunes out of this. Now—Maxwellton’s braes are bonnie—wrong again!” The men paused. “I wish I could play the blasted squeeze-organ.”
“You can try, señor.”
“Try, Hell. I have tried. It only belches when I try.” He paused.
“Shall we try again, señor, this Maxwellton?” One of the men moved close to the fence. Elizabeth could see him looking up at her window.
“Come down,” he pleaded. “Please come down.” Elizabeth sat very still, afraid to move. “I’ll send the cholo along home.”
“Señor, no ‘cholos’ to me!”
“I’ll send the gentleman along home if you’ll come down. I am lonely.”
“No,” she said, and her voice startled her.
“I’ll sing to you if you’ll come down. Listen how I can sing. Play, Pancho, play Sobre las Olas.” His voice filled the air like vaporized gold, and his voice was filled with delicious sorrow. The song finished so softly that she leaned forward to hear. “Now will you come down? I’m waiting for you.”
She shuddered violently and reaching up, pulled the window down, but even through the glass she could hear the voice. “She won’t, Pancho. How about the next house?”
“Old people, señor; eighty, nearly.”
“And the next house?”
“Well, maybe—a little girl, thirteen.”
‘We’ll try the little girl thirteen, then. Now—Maxwellton’s braes are bonnie—”
Elizabeth had pulled the covers over her head, and she was shivering with fright. “I would have gone,” she said miserably. “I’m afraid I would have gone if he had asked again.”
8
JOSEPH allowed two weeks to pass before he went again to call on Elizabeth. The fall was coming hazily, graying the sky with high mist. Huge puffy cotton clouds sailed in from the ocean every day and sat on the hilltops for a while, and then retired to the sea again like reconnoitering navies of the sky. The red-wing blackbirds massed their squadrons and practiced at maneuvering over the fields. The doves, unseen in the spring and summer, came from their hiding and sat in clusters on fences and dead trees. The sun, in its rising and setting, was red behind the autumn veil of air-borne dust.
Burton had taken his wife and gone to a camp meeting in Pacific Grove. Thomas said, wryly, “He’s eating God the way a bear eats meat against the winter.”
Thomas was sad with the coming winter. He seemed to fear the wet and windy time when he could find no cave to crawl into.
The children on the ranch began to consider Christmas as not too far buried in the future for anticipation. They addressed guarded questions to Rama concerning the kind of conduct most admired by the saints of the solstice, and Rama made the most of their apprehension.
Benjy was lazily ill. His young wife tried to understand why no one paid much attention
There was little to be done on the ranch. The tall dry grass on the foothills was thick enough to feed the stock all winter. The barns were full of hay for the horses. Joseph spent a great deal of time sitting under the oak tree thinking of Elizabeth. He could remember how she sat, with her feet close together and her head held high, as though it was only restrained from flying upward by being attached to her body. Juanito came and sat beside him and looked secretly at Joseph’s face to read his temper and to imitate it.
“I might be having a wife before the spring, Juanito,” Joseph said. “Right in my house here, living here. She’d ring a little bell when it came dinnertime—not a cowbell. I would buy a little silver bell. I guess you’d like to hear a little bell like that, Juanito, ringing at dinnertime.”
And Juanito, flattered at the confidence, uncovered his own secret. “I, too, señor.”
“A wife, Juanito? You, too?”
“Yes, señor, Alice Garcia. They have a paper to prove their grandfather was Castilian.”
“Why I’m glad of that, Juanito. We’ll help you to build a house here, and then you won’t be a rider any more. You’ll live here.”
Juanito giggled with happiness. “I’ll have a bell, señor, hanging beside the porch; but a cowbell, me. It wouldn’t be good to hear your bell and come for my dinner.”
Joseph tilted back his head and smiled up at the twisted branches of the tree. Several times he had thought of whispering about Elizabeth, but a shame at doing a thing so silly had forbidden it. “I’m going to drive to town day after tomorrow, Juanito. I guess you’ll want to go with me.”
“Oh yes, señor. I’ll sit in the buckboard and you can say, ‘He is my driver. He is good with horses. Of course I never drive myself.’”
Joseph laughed at the rider. “I guess you’d like me to do the same for you.”
“Oh no, señor, not I.”
“We’ll go in early, Juanito. You should have a new suit for a time like this.”
Juanito stared at him incredulously. “A suit, señor? Not overalls? A suit with a coat?”
“Why, a coat and a vest, and for a wedding present a watch-chain for the vest.”
It was too much. “Señor,” Juanito said. “I have a broken cincha to fix,” and he walked away toward the barn, for it would be necessary to think a good deal about a suit and a watch-chain. His manner of wearing such a costume would require consideration and some practice.
Joseph leaned back against the tree, and the smile slowly left his eyes. He looked again into the branches. A colony of hornets had made a button on a limb above his head and around this nucleus they were beginning to construct their papery nest. To Joseph’s mind there leaped the memory of the round glade among the pines. He remembered every detail of the place, the curious moss-covered rock, the dark cave with its fringe of ferns and the silent clear water flowing out and hurrying stealthily away. He saw how the cress grew in the water and how it moved its leaves in the current. Suddenly Joseph wanted to go to that place, to sit by the rock and to stroke the soft moss.