Arizona Nights
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Stewart Edward White >> Arizona Nights
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Senor Johnson at this stage of his career found himself dropping
into a routine. In March began the spring branding, then the
corralling and breaking of the wild horses, the summer
range-riding, the great fall round-up, the shipping of cattle,
and the riding of the winter range. This happened over and over
again.
You and I would not have suffered from ennui. The roping and
throwing and branding, the wild swing and dash of handling stock,
the mad races to head the mustangs, the fierce combats to subdue
these raging wild beasts to the saddle, the spectacle of the
round-up with its brutish multitudes and its graceful riders, the
dust and monotony and excitement and glory of the Trail, and
especially the hundreds of incidental and gratuitous adventures
of bears and antelope, of thirst and heat, of the joy of taking
care of one's self--all these would have filled our days with the
glittering, changing throng of the unusual.
But to Senor Johnson it had become an old story. After the days
of construction the days of accomplishment seemed to him lean.
His men did the work and reaped the excitement. Senor Johnson
never thought now of riding the wild horses, of swinging the rope
coiled at his saddle horn, or of rounding ahead of the flying
herds. His inspections were business inspections. The country
was tame. The leather chaps with the silver conchas hung behind
the door. The Colt's forty-five depended at the head of the bed.
Senor Johnson rode in mufti. Of his cowboy days persisted still
the high-heeled boots and spurs, the broad Stetson hat, and the
fringed buckskin gauntlets.
The Colt's forty-five had been the last to go. Finally one
evening Senor Johnson received an express package. He opened it
before the undemonstrative Parker. It proved to contain a pocket
"gun"--a nickel-plated, thirty-eight calibre Smith & Wesson
"five-shooter." Senor Johnson examined it a little doubtfully.
In comparison with the six-shooter it looked like a toy.
"How do you, like her?" he inquired, handing the weapon to
Parker.
Parker turned it over and over, as a child a rattle. Then he
returned it to its owner.
"Senor," said he, "if ever you shoot me with that little old gun,
AND I find it out the same day, I'll just raise hell with you!"
"I don't reckon she'd INJURE a man much," agreed the Senor, "but
perhaps she'd call his attention."
However, the "little old gun" took its place, not in Senor
Johnson's hip pocket, but inside the front waistband of his
trousers, and the old shiny Colt's forty-five, with its worn
leather "Texas style" holster, became a bedroom ornament.
Thus, from a frontiersman dropped Senor Johnson to the status of
a property owner. In a general way he had to attend to his
interests before the cattlemen's association; he had to arrange
for the buying and shipping, and the rest was leisure. He could
now have gone away somewhere as far as time went. So can a fish
live in trees--as far as time goes. And in the daily riding,
riding, riding over the range he found the opportunity for
abstract thought which the frontier life had crowded aside.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SHAPES OF ILLUSION
Every day, as always, Senor Johnson rode abroad over the land.
His surroundings had before been accepted casually as a more or
less pertinent setting of action and condition. Now he sensed
some of the fascination of the Arizona desert.
He noticed many things before unnoticed. As he jingled loosely
along on his cow-horse, he observed how the animal waded fetlock
deep in the gorgeous orange California poppies, and then he
looked up and about, and saw that the rich colour carpeted the
landscape as far as his eye could reach, so that it seemed as
though he could ride on and on through them to the distant
Chiricahuas. Only, close under the hills, lay, unobtrusive, a
narrow streak of grey. And in a few hours he had reached the
streak of grey, and ridden out into it to find himself the centre
of a limitless alkali plain, so that again it seemed the valley
could contain nothing else of importance.
Looking back, Senor Johnson could discern a tenuous ribbon of
orange--the poppies. And perhaps ahead a little shadow blotted
the face of the alkali, which, being reached and entered, spread
like fire until it, too, filled the whole plain, until it, too,
arrogated to itself the right of typifying Soda Springs Valley as
a shimmering prairie of mesquite. Flowered upland, dead lowland,
brush, cactus, volcanic rock, sand, each of these for the time
being occupied the whole space, broad as the sea. In the circlet
of the mountains was room for many infinities.
Among the foothills Senor Johnson, for the first time,
appreciated colour. Hundreds of acres of flowers filled the
velvet creases of the little hills and washed over the smooth,
rounded slopes so accurately in the placing and manner of tinted
shadows that the mind had difficulty in believing the colour not
to have been shaded in actually by free sweeps of some gigantic
brush. A dozen shades of pinks and purples, a dozen of blues,
and then the flame reds, the yellows, and the vivid greens.
Beyond were the mountains in their glory of volcanic rocks, rich
as the tapestry of a Florentine palace. And, modifying all the
others, the tinted atmosphere of the south-west, refracting the
sun through the infinitesimal earth motes thrown up constantly by
the wind devils of the desert, drew before the scene a delicate
and gauzy veil of lilac, of rose, of saffron, of amethyst, or of
mauve, according to the time of day. Senor Johnson discovered
that looking at the landscape upside down accentuated the colour
effects. It amused him vastly suddenly to bend over his saddle
horn, the top of his head nearly touching his horse's mane. The
distant mountains at once started out into redder prominence;
their shadows of purple deepened to the royal colour; the rose
veil thickened.
"She's the prettiest country God ever made!" exclaimed Senor
Johnson with entire conviction.
And no matter where he went, nor into how familiar country he
rode, the shapes of illusion offered always variety. One day the
Chiricahuas were a tableland; next day a series of castellated
peaks; now an anvil; now a saw tooth; and rarely they threw a
magnificent suspension bridge across the heavens to their
neighbours, the ranges on the west. Lakes rippling in the wind
and breaking on the shore, cattle big as elephants or small as
rabbits, distances that did not exist and forests that never
were, beds of lava along the hills swearing to a cloud shadow,
while the sky was polished like a precious stone--these, and many
other beautiful and marvellous but empty shows the great desert
displayed lavishly, with the glitter and inconsequence of a
dream. Senor Johnson sat on his horse in the hot sun, his chin
in his band, his elbow on the pommel, watching it all with grave,
unshifting eyes.
Occasionally, belated, he saw the stars, the wonderful desert
stars, blazing clear and unflickering, like the flames of
candles. Or the moon worked her necromancies, hemming him in by
mountains ten thousand feet high through which there was no pass.
And then as he rode, the mountains shifted like the scenes in a
theatre, and he crossed the little sand dunes out from the dream
country to the adobe corrals of the home ranch.
All these things, and many others, Senor Johnson now saw for the
first time, although he had lived among them for twenty years.
It struck him with the freshness of a surprise. Also it reacted
chemically on his mental processes to generate a new power within
him. The new power, being as yet unapplied, made him uneasy and
restless and a little irritable.
He tried to show some of his wonders to Parker.
"Jed," said he, one day, "this is a great country."
"You KNOW it," replied the foreman.
"Those tourists in their nickel-plated Pullmans call this a
desert. Desert, hell! Look at them flowers!"
The foreman cast an eye on a glorious silken mantle of purple, a
hundred yards broad.
"Sure," he agreed; "shows what we could do if we only had a
little water."
And again: "Jed," began the Senor, "did you ever notice them
mountains?"
"Sure," agreed Jed.
"Ain't that a pretty colour?"
"You bet," agreed the foreman; "now you're talking! I always,
said they was mineralised enough to make a good prospect."
This was unsatisfactory. Senor Johnson grew more restless. His
critical eye began to take account of small details. At the
ranch house one evening he, on a sudden, bellowed loudly for
Sang, the Chinese servant.
"Look at these!" he roared, when Sang appeared.
Sang's eyes opened in bewilderment.
"There, and there!" shouted the cattleman. "Look at them old
newspapers and them gun rags! The place is like a cow-yard. Why
in the name of heaven don't you clean up here!"
"Allee light," babbled Sang; "I clean him."
The papers and gun rags had lain there unnoticed for nearly a
year. Senor Johnson kicked them savagely.
"It's time we took a brace here," he growled, "we're livin' like
a lot of Oilers."[5]
[5] Oilers: Greasers--Mexicans
CHAPTER THREE
THE PAPER A YEAR OLD
Sang hurried out for a broom. Senor Johnson sat where he was,
his heavy, square brows knit. Suddenly he stooped, seized one of
the newspapers, drew near the lamp, and began to read.
It was a Kansas City paper and, by a strange coincidence, was
dated exactly a year before. The sheet Senor Johnson happened to
pick up was one usually passed over by the average newspaper
reader. It contained only columns of little two- and three-line
advertisements classified as Help Wanted, Situations Wanted, Lost
and Found, and Personal. The latter items Senor Johnson
commenced to read while awaiting Sang and the broom.
The notices were five in number. The first three were of the
mysterious newspaper-correspondence type, in which Birdie
beseeches Jack to meet her at the fountain; the fourth advertised
a clairvoyant. Over the fifth Senor Johnson paused long. It
reads
"WANTED.-By an intelligent and refined lady of pleasing
appearance, correspondence with a gentleman of means. Object
matrimony.
Just then Sang returned with the broom and began noisily to sweep
together the debris. The rustling of papers aroused Senor
Johnson from his reverie. At once he exploded.
"Get out of here, you debased Mongolian," he shouted; "can't you
see I'm reading?"
Sang fled, sorely puzzled, for the Senor was calm and unexcited
and aloof in his everyday habit.
Soon Jed Parker, tall, wiry, hawk-nosed, deliberate, came into
the room and flung his broad hat and spurs into the corner. Then
he proceeded to light his pipe and threw the burned match on the
floor.
"Been over to look at the Grant Pass range," he announced
cheerfully. "She's no good. Drier than cork legs. Th' country
wouldn't support three horned toads."
"Jed," quoth the Senor solemnly, "I wisht you'd hang up your hat
like I have. It don't look good there on the floor."
"Why, sure," agreed Jed, with an astonished stare.
Sang brought in supper and slung it on the red and white squares
of oilcloth. Then he moved the lamp and retired.
Senor Johnson gazed with distaste into his cup.
"This coffee would float a wedge," he commented sourly.
"She's no puling infant," agreed the cheerful Jed.
"And this!" went on the Senor, picking up what purported to be
plum duff: "Bog down a few currants in dough and call her
pudding!"
He ate in silence, then pushed back his chair and went to the
window, gazing through its grimy panes at the mountains, ethereal
in their evening saffron.
"Blamed Chink," he growled; "why don't he wash these windows?"
Jed laid down his busy knife and idle fork to gaze on his chief
with amazement. Buck Johnson, the austere, the aloof, the grimly
taciturn, the dangerous, to be thus complaining like a querulous
woman!
"Senor," said he, "you're off your feed."
Senor Johnson strode savagely to the table and sat down with a
bang.
"I'm sick of it," he growled; "this thing will kill me off. I
might as well go be a buck nun and be done with it."
With one round-arm sweep he cleared aside the dishes.
"Give me that pen and paper behind you," he requested.
For an hour he wrote and destroyed. The floor became littered
with torn papers. Then he enveloped a meagre result. Parker had
watched him in silence.
The Senor looked up to catch his speculative eye. His own eye
twinkled a little, but the twinkle was determined and sinister,
with only an alloy of humour.
"Senor," ventured Parker slowly, "this event sure knocks me
hell-west and crooked. If the loco you have culled hasn't
paralysed your speaking parts, would you mind telling me what in
the name of heaven, hell, and high-water is up?"
"I am going to get married," announced the Senor calmly.
"What!" shouted Parker; "who to?"
"To a lady," replied the Senor, "an intelligent and refined lady-
-of pleasing appearance."
CHAPTER FOUR
DREAMS
Although the paper was a year old, Senor Johnson in due time
received an answer from Kansas. A correspondence ensued. Senor
Johnson enshrined above the big fireplace the photograph of a
woman. Before this he used to stand for hours at a time slowly
constructing in his mind what he had hitherto lacked--an ideal of
woman and of home. This ideal he used sometimes to express to
himself and to the ironical Jed.
"It must sure be nice to have a little woman waitin' for you when
you come in off'n the desert."
Or: "Now, a woman would have them windows just blooming with
flowers and white curtains and such truck."
Or: "I bet that Sang would get a wiggle on him with his little
old cleaning duds if he had a woman ahold of his jerk line."
Slowly he reconstructed his life, the life of the ranch, in terms
of this hypothesised feminine influence. Then matters came to an
understanding, Senor Johnson had sent his own portrait.
Estrella Sands wrote back that she adored big black beards, but
she was afraid of him, he had such a fascinating bad eye: no
woman could resist him. Senor Johnson at once took things for
granted, sent on to Kansas a preposterous sum of "expense" money
and a railroad ticket, and raided Goodrich's store at Willets, a
hundred miles away, for all manner of gaudy carpets, silverware,
fancy lamps, works of art, pianos, linen, and gimcracks for the
adornment of the ranch house. Furthermore, he offered wages more
than equal to a hundred miles of desert to a young Irish girl,
named Susie O'Toole, to come out as housekeeper, decorator, boss
of Sang and another Chinaman, and companion to Mrs. Johnson when
she should arrive.
Furthermore, he laid off from the range work Brent Palmer, the
most skilful man with horses, and set him to "gentling" a
beautiful little sorrel. A sidesaddle had arrived from El Paso.
It was "centre fire," which is to say it had but the single
horsehair cinch, broad, tasselled, very genteel in its suggestion
of pleasure use only. Brent could be seen at all times of day,
cantering here and there on the sorrel, a blanket tied around his
waist to simulate the long riding skirt. He carried also a sulky
and evil gleam in his eye, warning against undue levity.
Jed Parker watched these various proceedings sardonically.
Once, the baby light of innocence blue in his eye, he inquired if
he would be required to dress for dinner.
"If so," he went on, "I'll have my man brush up my low-necked
clothes."
But Senor Johnson refused to be baited.
"Go on, Jed," said he; "you know you ain't got clothes enough to
dust a fiddle."
The Senor was happy these days. He showed it by an unwonted
joviality of spirit, by a slight but evident unbending of his
Spanish dignity. No longer did the splendour of the desert fill
him with a vague yearning and uneasiness. He looked upon it
confidently, noting its various phases with care, rejoicing in
each new development of colour and light, of form and illusion,
storing them away in his memory so that their recurrence should
find him prepared to recognise and explain them. For soon he
would have someone by his side with whom to appreciate them. In
that sharing be could see the reason for them, the reason for
their strange bitter-sweet effects on the human soul.
One evening he leaned on the corral fence, looking toward the
Dragoons. The sun had set behind them. Gigantic they loomed
against the western light. From their summits, like an aureola,
radiated the splendour of the dust-moted air, this evening a deep
umber. A faint reflection of it fell across the desert,
glorifying the reaches of its nothingness.
"I'll take her out on an evening like this," quoth Senor Johnson
to himself,"and I'll make her keep her eyes on the ground till we
get right up by Running Bear Knob, and then I'll let her look up
all to once. And she'll surely enjoy this life. I bet she never
saw a steer roped in her life. She can ride with me every day
out over the range and I'll show her the busting and the branding
and that band of antelope over by the Tall Windmill. I'll teach
her to shoot, too. And we can make little pack trips off in the
hills when she gets too hot--up there by Deerskin Meadows 'mongst
the high peaks."
He mused, turning over in his mind a new picture of his own life,
aims, and pursuits as modified by the sympathetic and
understanding companionship of a woman. He pictured himself as
he must seem to her in his different pursuits. The
picturesqueness pleased him. The simple, direct vanity of the
man--the wholesome vanity of a straightforward nature--awakened
to preen its feathers before the idea of the mate.
The shadows fell. Over the Chiricahuas flared the evening star.
The plain, self-luminous with the weird lucence of the arid
lands, showed ghostly. Jed Parker, coming out from the lamp-lit
adobe, leaned his elbows on the rail in silent company with his
chief. He, too, looked abroad. His mind's eye saw what his
body's eye had always told him were the insistent notes--the
alkali, the cactus, the sage, the mesquite, the lava, the choking
dust, the blinding beat, the burning thirst. He sighed in the
dim half recollection of past days.
"I wonder if she'll like the country?" he hazarded.
But Senor Johnson turned on him his steady eyes, filled with the
great glory of the desert.
"Like the country!" he marvelled slowly. "Of course! Why
shouldn't she?"
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ARRIVAL
The Overland drew into Willets, coated from engine to observation
with white dust. A porter, in strange contrast of neatness,
flung open the vestibule, dropped his little carpeted step, and
turned to assist someone. A few idle passengers gazed out on the
uninteresting, flat frontier town.
Senor Johnson caught his breath in amazement. "God! Ain't she
just like her picture!" he exclaimed. He seemed to find this
astonishing.
For a moment he did not step forward to claim her, so she stood
looking about her uncertainly, her leather suit-case at her feet.
She was indeed like the photograph. The same full-curved,
compact little figure, the same round face, the same cupid's bow
mouth, the same appealing, large eyes, the same haze of doll's
hair. In a moment she caught sight of Senor Johnson and took two
steps toward him, then stopped. The Senor at once came forward.
"You're Mr. Johnson, ain't you?" she inquired, thrusting her
little pointed chin forward, and so elevating her baby-blue eyes
to his.
"Yes, ma'am," he acknowledged formally. Then, after a moment's
pause: "I hope you're well."
"Yes, thank you."
The station loungers, augmented by all the ranchmen and cowboys
in town, were examining her closely. She looked at them in a
swift side glance that seemed to gather all their eyes to hers.
Then, satisfied that she possessed the universal admiration, she
returned the full force of her attention to the man before her.
"Now you give me your trunk checks," he was saying, "and then
we'll go right over and get married."
"Oh!" she gasped.
"That's right, ain't it?" he demanded.
"Yes, I suppose so," she agreed faintly.
A little subdued, she followed him to the clergyman's house,
where, in the presence of Goodrich, the storekeeper, and the
preacher's wife, the two were united. Then they mounted the
buckboard and drove from town.
Senor Johnson said nothing, because he knew of nothing to say.
He drove skilfully and fast through the gathering dusk. It was a
hundred miles to the home ranch, and that hundred miles, by means
of five relays of horses already arranged for, they would cover
by morning. Thus they would avoid the dust and heat and high
winds of the day.
The sweet night fell. The little desert winds laid soft fingers
on their checks. Overhead burned the stars, clear, unflickering,
like candles. Dimly could be seen the horses, their flanks
swinging steadily in the square trot. Ghostly bushes passed
them; ghostly rock elevations. Far, in indeterminate distance,
lay the outlines of the mountains. Always, they seemed to
recede. The plain, all but invisible, the wagon trail quite so,
the depths of space--these flung heavy on the soul their weight
of mysticism. The woman, until now bolt upright in the buckboard
seat, shrank nearer to the man. He felt against his sleeve the
delicate contact of her garment and thrilled to the touch. A
coyote barked sharply from a neighbouring eminence, then
trailed off into the long-drawn, shrill howl of his species.
"What was that?" she asked quickly, in a subdued voice.
"A coyote--one of them little wolves," he explained.
The horses' hoofs rang clear on a hardened bit of the alkali
crust, then dully as they encountered again the dust of the
plain. Vast, vague, mysterious in the silence of night, filled
with strange influences breathing through space like damp winds,
the desert took them to the heart of her great spaces.
"Buck," she whispered, a little tremblingly. It was the first
time she had spoken his name.
"What is it?" he asked, a new note in his voice.
But for a time she did not reply. Only the contact against his
sleeve increased by ever so little.
"Buck," she repeated, then all in a rush and with a sob, "Oh, I'm
afraid."
Tenderly the man drew her to him. Her head fell against his
shoulder and she hid her eyes.
"There, little girl," he reassured her, his big voice rich and
musical. "There's nothing to get scairt of, I'll take care of
you. What frightens you, honey?"
She nestled close in his arm with a sigh of half relief.
"I don't know," she laughed, but still with a tremble in her
tones. "It's all so big and lonesome and strange--and I'm so
little."
"There, little girl," he repeated.
They drove on and on. At the end of two hours they stopped. Men
with lanterns dazzled their eyes. The horses were changed, and
so out again into the night where the desert seemed to breathe in
deep, mysterious exhalations like a sleeping beast.
Senor Johnson drove his horses masterfully with his one free
hand. The road did not exist, except to his trained eves. They
seemed to be swimming out, out, into a vapour of night with the
wind of their going steady against their faces.
"Buck," she murmured, "I'm so tired."
He tightened his arm around her and she went to sleep,
half-waking at the ranches where the relays waited, dozing again
as soon as the lanterns dropped behind. And Senor Johnson, alone
with his horses and the solemn stars, drove on, ever on, into the
desert.
By grey of the early summer dawn they arrived. The girl wakened,
descended, smiling uncertainly at Susie O'Toole, blinking
somnolently at her surroundings. Susie put her to bed in the
little southwest room where hung the shiny Colt's forty-five in
its worn leather "Texas-style" holster. She murmured incoherent
thanks and sank again to sleep, overcome by the fatigue of
unaccustomed travelling, by the potency of the desert air, by the
excitement of anticipation to which her nerves had long been
strung.
Senor Johnson did not sleep. He was tough, and used to it. He
lit a cigar and rambled about, now reading the newspapers he had
brought with him, now prowling softly about the building, now
visiting the corrals and outbuildings, once even the
thousand-acre pasture where his saddle-horse knew him and came to
him to have its forehead rubbed. The dawn broke in good earnest,
throwing aside its gauzy draperies of mauve. Sang, the Chinese
cook, built his fire. Senor Johnson forbade him to clang the
rising bell, and himself roused the cow-punchers. The girl slept
on. Senor Johnson tip-toed a dozen times to the bedroom door.
Once he ventured to push it open. He looked long within, then
shut it softly and tiptoed out into the open, his eyes shining.
"Jed," he said to his foreman, "you don't know how it made me
feel. To see her lying there so pink and soft and pretty, with
her yaller hair all tumbled about and a little smile on her--
there in my old bed, with my old gun hanging over her that
way--By Heaven, Jed, it made me feel almost HOLY!"
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