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He had not been sitting in the leather chair for more than fifteen minutes when there came a knock on a door behind him.
“Come!” he commanded.
A tall man entered, closed the door behind him and with hat in hand stood looking at Carrington with a half-smile which might have been slightly diffident, or impudent or defiant – it was puzzling.
Carrington had twisted in his chair to get a glimpse of his visitor; he now grunted, resumed his former position and said, gruffly:
“Hello, Danforth!”
Danforth stepped over to the bay, and without invitation drew up a chair and seated himself near Carrington.
Danforth was slender, big-framed, and sinewy. His shoulders were broad and his waist slim. There was a stubborn thrust to his chin; his nose was a trifle too long to perfectly fit his face; his mouth a little too big, and the lips too thin. The nose had a slight droop that made one think of selfishness and greed, and the thin lips, with a downward swerve at the corners, suggested cruelty.
These defects, however, were not prominent, for they were offset by a really distinguished head with a mass of short, curly hair that ruffled attractively under the brim of the felt hat he wore.
The hat was in his right hand, now, but it had left its impress on his hair, and as he sat down he ran his free hand through it. Danforth knew where his attractions were.
He grinned shallowly at Carrington when the latter turned and looked at him.
He cleared his throat. “I suppose you’ve heard about it?”
“I couldn’t help hearing.” Carrington scowled at the other. “What in hell was wrong? We send you out here, give you more than a year’s time and all the money you want – which has been plenty – and then you lose. What in the devil was the matter?”
“Too much Taylor,” smirked the other.
“But what else?”
“Nothing else – just Taylor.”
Carrington exclaimed profanely.
“Why, the man didn’t even know he was a candidate! He was on the train I came in on!”
“It was Neil Norton’s scheme,” explained Danforth. “I had him beaten to a frazzle. I suppose he knew it. Two days before election he suddenly withdrew his name and substituted Taylor’s. You know what happened. He licked me two to one. He was too popular for me – damn him!
“Norton owns a newspaper here – the only one in the county – the Eagle.”
“Why didn’t you buy him?”
Danforth grinned sarcastically: “I didn’t feel that reckless.”
“Honest, eh?”
Carrington rested his chin in the palm of his right hand and scowled into the street. He was convinced that Danforth had done everything he could to win the election, and he was bitterly chagrined over the result. But that result was not the dominating thought in his mind. He kept seeing Taylor as the latter had stood on the station platform, stunned with surprise over the knowledge that he had been so signally honored by the people of Dawes.
And Carrington had seen Marion Harlan’s glances at the man; he had been aware of the admiring smile she had given Taylor; and bitter passion gripped Carrington at the recollection of the smile.
More – he had seen Taylor’s face when the girl had smiled. The smile had thrilled Taylor – it had held promise for him, and Carrington knew it.
Carrington continued to stare out into the street. Danforth watched him furtively, in silence.
At last, not opening his lips, Carrington spoke:
“Tell me about this man, Taylor.”
“Taylor owns the Arrow ranch, in the basin south of here. His ranch covers about twenty thousand acres. He has a clear title.
“According to report, he employs about thirty men. They are holy terrors – that is, they are what is called ‘hard cases,’ though they are not outlaws by any means. Just a devil-may-care bunch that raises hell when it strikes town. They swear by Taylor.”
So far as Carrington could see, everybody in Dawes swore by Taylor. Carrington grimaced.
“That isn’t what I want to know,” he flared. “How long has he been here; what kind of a fellow is he?”
“Taylor owned the Arrow before Dawes was founded. When the railroad came through it brought with it some land-sharks that tried to frame up on the ranch-owners in the vicinity. It was a slick scheme, they tell me. They had clouded every title, and figured to grab the whole county, it seems.
“Taylor went after them. People I’ve talked with here say it was a dandy shindy while it lasted. The land-grabbers brought the courts in, and a crooked judge. Taylor fought them, crooked judge and all, to a bite-the-dust finish. Toward the end it was a free-for-all – and the land-grabbers were chased out of the county.
“Naturally, the folks around here think a lot of Taylor for the part he played in the deal. Besides that, he’s a man that makes friends quickly – and holds them.”
“Has Taylor any interests besides his ranch?”
“A share in the water company, I believe. He owns some land in town; and he is usually on all the public committees here.”
“About thirty, isn’t he?”
“Twenty-eight.”
Carrington looked at the other with a sidelong, sneering grin:
“Have any ladies come into his young life?”
Danforth snickered. “You’ve got me – I hadn’t inquired. He doesn’t seem to be much of a ladies’ man, though, I take it. Doesn’t seem to have time to monkey with them.”
“H-m!” Carrington’s lips went into a pout as he stared straight ahead of him.
Danforth at last broke a long silence with:
“Well, we got licked, all right. What’s going to happen now? Are you going to quit?”
“Quit?” Carrington snapped the word at the other, his eyes flaming with rage. Then he laughed, mirthlessly, resuming: “This defeat was unexpected; I wasn’t set for it. But it won’t alter things – very much. I’ll have to shake a leg, that’s all. What time does the next train leave here for the capital?”
“At two o’clock this afternoon.” Danforth’s eyes widened as he looked at Carrington. The curiosity in his glance caused Carrington to laugh shortly.
“You don’t mean that the governor is in this thing?” said Danforth.
“Why not?” demanded Carrington. “Bah! Do you think I came in with my eyes closed!”
There was a new light in Danforth’s eyes – the flame of renewed hope.
“Then we’ve still got a chance,” he declared.
Carrington laughed. “A too-popular mayor is not a good thing for a town,” he said significantly.
CHAPTER VII – THE SHADOW OF THE PAST
Marion Harlan and her uncle, Elam Parsons, did not accompany Carrington to the Castle Hotel. By telegraph, through Danforth, Carrington had bought a house near Dawes, and shortly after Quinton Taylor left the station platform accompanied by his friends and admirers, Marion and her uncle were in a buckboard riding toward the place that, henceforth, was to be their home.
For that question had been settled before the party left Westwood. Parsons had declared his future activities were to be centered in Dawes, that he had no further interests to keep him in Westwood, and that he intended to make his home in Dawes.
Certainly Marion had few interests in the town that had been the scene of the domestic tragedy that had left her parentless. She was glad to get away. For though she had not been to blame for what had happened, she was painfully conscious of the stares that followed her everywhere, and aware of the morbid curiosity with which her neighbors regarded her. Also – through the medium of certain of her “friends,” she had become cognizant of speculative whisperings, such as: “To think of being brought up like that? Do you think she will be like her mother?” Or – “What’s bred in the bone, et cetera.”
Perhaps these good people did not mean to be unkind; certainly the crimson stains that colored the girl’s cheeks when she passed them should have won their charity and their silence.
There was nothing in Westwood for her; and so she was glad to get away. And the trip westward toward Dawes opened a new vista of life to her. She was leaving the old and the tragic and adventuring into the new and promising, where she could face life without the onus of a shame that had not been hers.
Before she was half way to Dawes she had forgotten Westwood and its wagging tongues. She alone, of all the passengers in the Pullman, had not been aware of the heat and the discomfort. She had loved every foot of the great prairie land that, green and beautiful, had flashed past the car window; she had gazed with eager, interested eyes into the far reaches of the desert through which she had passed, filling her soul with the mystic beauty of this new world, reveling in its vastness and in the atmosphere of calm that seemed to engulf it.
Dawes had not disappointed her; on the contrary, she loved it at first sight. For though Dawes was new and crude, it looked rugged and honest – and rather too busy to hesitate for the purpose of indulging in gossip – idle or otherwise. Dawes, she was certain, was occupying itself with progress – a thing that, long since, Westwood had forgotten.
Five minutes after she had entered the buckboard, the spirit of this new world had seized upon the girl and she was athrob and atingle with the joy of it. It filled her veins; it made her cheeks flame and her eyes dance. And the strange aroma – the pungent breath of the sage, borne to her on the slight breeze – she drew into her lungs with great long breaths that seemed to intoxicate her.
“Oh,” she exclaimed delightedly, “isn’t it great! Oh, I love it!”
Elam Parsons grinned at her – the habitual smirk with which he recognized all emotion not his own.
“It does look like a good field for business,” he conceded.
The girl looked at him quickly, divined the sordidness of his thoughts, and puckered her brows in a frown. And thereafter she enjoyed the esthetic beauties of her world without seeking confirmation from her uncle.
Her delight grew as the journey to the new home progressed. She saw the fertile farming country stretching far in the big section of country beyond the water-filled basin; her eyes glowed as the irrigation ditches, with their locks and gates, came under her observation; and she sat silent, awed by the mightiness of it all – the tall, majestic mountains looming somberly many miles distant behind a glowing mist – like a rose veil or a gauze curtain lowered to partly conceal the mystic beauty of them.
Intervening were hills and flats and draws and valleys, and miles and miles of level grass land, green and peaceful in the shimmering sunlight that came from somewhere near the center of the big, pale-blue inverted bowl of sky; she caught the silvery glitter of a river that wound its way through the country like a monstrous serpent; she saw dark blotches, miles long, which she knew were forests, for she could see the spires of trees thrusting upward. But from where she rode the trees seemed to be no larger than bushes.
Looking backward, she could see Dawes. Already the buckboard had traveled two or three miles, but the town seemed near, and she had quite a shock when she looked back at it and saw the buildings, mere huddled shanties, spoiling the beauty of her picture.
A mile or so farther – four miles altogether, Parsons told her – and they came in sight of a house. She had difficulty restraining her delight when they climbed out of the buckboard and Parsons told her the place was to be their permanent home. For it was such a house as she had longed to live in all the days of her life.
The first impression it gave her was that of spaciousness. For though only one story in height, the house contained many rooms. Those, however, she saw later.
The exterior was what intrigued her interest at first glance. So far as she knew, it was the only brick building in the country. She had seen none such in Dawes.
There was a big porch across the front; the windows were large; there were vines and plants thriving in the shade from some big cottonwood trees near by – in fact, the house seemed to have been built in a grove of the giant trees; there were several outhouses, one of which had chickens in an enclosure near it; there was a garden, well-kept; and the girl saw that back of the house ran a little stream which flowed sharply downward, later to tumble into the big basin far below the irrigation dam.
While Parsons was superintending the unloading of the buckboard, Marion explored the house. It was completely furnished, and her eyes glowed with pleasure as she inspected it. And when Parsons and the driver were carrying the baggage in she was outside the house, standing at the edge of a butte whose precipitous walls descended sharply to the floor of the irrigation basin, two or three hundred feet below. She could no longer see the cultivated level, with its irrigation ditches, but she could see the big dam, a mile or so up the valley toward Dawes, with the water creeping over it, and the big valley itself, slumbering in the pure, white light of the morning.
She went inside, slightly awed, and Parsons, noting her excitement, smirked at her. She left him and went to her room. Emerging later she discovered that Parsons was not in the house. She saw him, however, at a distance, looking out into the valley.
And then, in the kitchen, Marion came upon the housekeeper, a negro woman of uncertain age. Parsons had not told her there was to be a housekeeper.
The negro woman grinned broadly at her astonishment.
“Lawsey, ma’am; you jes’ got to have a housekeeper, I reckon! How you ever git along without a housekeeper? You’re too fine an’ dainty to keep house you’self!”
The woman’s name, the latter told her, was Martha, and there was honest delight – and, it seemed to Marion, downright relief in her eyes when she looked at the new mistress.
“You ain’t got no ‘past,’ that’s certain, honey,” she declared, with a delighted smile. “The woman that lived here befo’ had a past, honey. A man named Huggins lived in this house, an’ she said she’s his wife. Wife! Lawsey! No man has a wife like that! She had a past, that woman, an’ mebbe a present, too – he, he, he!
“He was the man what put the railroad through here, honey. I done hear the woman say – her name was Blanche, honey – that Huggins was one of them ultra rich. But whatever it was that ailed him, honey, didn’t help his looks none. Pig-eye, I used to call him, when I’se mad at him – which was mostly all the time – he, he, he!”
The girl’s face whitened. Was she never to escape the atmosphere she loathed? She shuddered and Martha patted her sympathetically on the shoulder.
“There, there, honey; you ain’t ’sponsible for other folks’ affairs. Jes’ you hold you’ head up an’ go about you’ business. Nobody say anything to you because you’ livin’ here.”
But Martha’s words neither comforted nor consoled the girl. She went again to her room and sat for a long time, looking out of a window. For now all the cheer had gone out of the house; the rooms looked dull and dreary – and empty, as of something gone out of them.
CHAPTER VIII – CONCERNING “SQUINT”
Marion Harlan had responded eagerly to Carrington’s fabrication regarding the rumor of Lawrence Harlan’s presence in Dawes. Carrington’s reference to her father’s sojourn in the town had been vague – he merely told her that a rumor had reached him – a man’s word, without details – and she had accepted it at its face value. She was impatient to run the rumor down, to personally satisfy herself, and she believed Carrington.
But she spent a fruitless week interrogating people in Dawes. She had gone to the courthouse, there to pass long hours searching the records – and had found nothing. Then, systematically, she had gone from store to store – making small purchases and quizzing everyone she came in contact with. None had known a man named Harlan; it seemed that not one person in Dawes had ever heard of him.
Parsons had returned to town in the buckboard shortly after noon on the day of their arrival at the new house, and she had not seen him again until the following morning. Then he had told her that Carrington had gone away – he did not know where. Carrington would not return for a week or two, he inferred.
Parsons had bought some horses. A little bay, short-coupled but wiry, belonged to her, Parsons said – it was a present from Carrington.
She hesitated to accept the horse; but the little animal won her regard by his affectionate mannerisms, and at the end of a day of doubt and indecision she accepted him.
She had ridden horses in Westwood – bareback when no one had been looking, and with a side-saddle at other times – but she discovered no side-saddle in Dawes. However, she did encounter no difficulty in unearthing a riding-habit with a divided skirt, and though she got into that with a pulse of trepidation and embarrassment, she soon discovered it to be most comfortable and convenient.
And Dawes did not stare at her because she rode “straddle.” At first she was fearful, and watched Dawes’s citizens furtively; but when she saw that she attracted no attention other than would be attracted by any good-looking young woman in more conventional attire, she felt more at ease. But she could not help thinking about the sanctimonious inhabitants of Westwood. Would they not have declared their kindly predictions vindicated had they been permitted to see her? She could almost hear the chorus of “I-told-you-so’s” – they rang in her ears over a distance of many hundreds of miles!
But the spirit of the young, unfettered country had got into her soul, and she went her way unmindful of Westwood’s opinions.
For three days she continued her search for tidings of her father, eager and hopeful; and then for the remainder of the week she did her searching mechanically, doggedly, with a presentiment of failure to harass her.
And then one morning, when she was standing beside her horse near the stable door, ready to mount and fully determined to pursue the Carrington rumor to the end, the word she sought was brought to her.
She saw a horseman coming toward her from the direction of Dawes. He was not Parsons – for the rider was short and broad; and besides, Parsons was spending most of his time in Dawes.
The girl watched the rider, assured, as he came nearer, that he was a stranger; and when he turned his horse toward her, and she saw he was a stranger, she leaned close and whispered to her own animal:
“Oh, Billy; what if it should be!”
An instant later she was watching the stranger dismount within a few feet of where she was standing.
He was short and stocky, and undeniably Irish. He was far past middle age, as his gray hair and seamed wrinkles of his face indicated; but there was the light of a youthful spirit and good-nature in his eyes that squinted at the girl with a quizzical interest.
With the bridle-rein in the crook of his elbow and his hat in his hand, he bowed elaborately to the girl.
