Part 28 (1/2)

”I'd like to think that. I'd like to feel that,” Elvine returned. She was smiling up into his eyes. ”You see, Jeff, I was kind of thinking.

We're young now. We've been together just six weeks. Maybe you'll get used to me later. Men do get used to women till they become sort of part of the furniture. Oh, I guess their love goes right on, but--but they wouldn't feel like starting in to fence in the North Pole, or--or hitch up Niagara to their wife's buggy just because she fancied that way. Say, Jeff, when I lose your love I just lose everything in the world. You--you won't ever let me lose it, will you?”

Jeff shook his head, and smiled in the confidence of feelings.

”Don't ever talk that way. Don't ever think like that,” he urged her.

Then, as their horses ambled side by side up the last gentle incline before they dropped down to the great plain of the Rainbow Hill Valley, which was the setting of the Obar Ranch, he drew nearer and reached out one arm and gently encircled her waist. ”Guess you're feeling like me just now, Evie. Do you know what I mean? We're getting home.

Home--yours and mine. Well, say, that home is in my mind now, and it's full to the brim of thoughts of you. You're in it--everywhere. You're part of it. You're just part of me. I can't see any future without you. It don't seem to me there could be any. I don't doubt. I guess the thought of it don't scare me a thing. Maybe with you it's different. Maybe you're scared such happiness can't last. But I tell you it can--it will. You're with me now and always, and I can't see a shadow that could come between us.”

”None? No, none, none!”

The woman forced conviction into her final denial, and, for a moment, she permitted herself to yield to the rea.s.suring embrace. Then she started up and released herself.

”Oh, Jeff!” she cried. ”I just pray all the time that nothing shall ever rob me of your love. Night and day I pray that way. If I were to lose you, I--I think nothing else would much matter.”

The man smiled with supreme confidence. They had reached the top of the hill, and he set his horse into a canter.

”You're just going to live right on--for me, sweetheart,” he cried.

”Be yourself. Just yourself. The frank, honest woman I know and love.

If ever the shadows you fear come to worry us, they'll have to be of your own creating. We have nothing to fear from the future, nothing at all. We'll just drive right on down the clear trail of life. It's only in the byways there's any ugly dumps. Look!” He suddenly flung out one arm, pointing ahead where the great Obar plains rolled away toward the hills below them. ”That's the ranch. There. That one there is Bud's homestead, and the other to the right's your--our home.

Say, it's good to see--mighty good!”

Nan gazed upon the result of her labors and decided that it was good.

Bud was observing her in his un.o.btrusive way. They were together in the new parlor of the home which Jeff had had reconstructed under Nan's most careful supervision.

The girl had put forth her greatest effort, greater even than she herself realized, for it had been inspired by a desire that Jeff and his wife should never realize the pain and bitter disappointment she had endured.

Now, as she surveyed each detail in her final tour of inspection, she convinced herself that nothing, nothing she could think of had been forgotten. Even the city-bred Elvine could find no fault with any detail of it.

She and Bud were standing side by side rather like two children gazing in awed wonder at some undreamed of splendor suddenly discovered in a familiar playground, every square foot of which they had believed themselves familiar with.

”I--don't think I've forgotten a thing,” Nan said, in a tone subdued by her weight of responsibility.

”Not a thing,” agreed Bud, with a perfect disregard for any consequences his statement might have.

He was utterly unchanged. He had made no preparation to receive the bride and bridegroom in their home. He was just the cattleman nothing could change him from. His gray flannel s.h.i.+rt was agape over his sunburned chest. His leather chapps creaked as he moved, his vicious spurs clanked. Then, too, the curling iron-gray hair of his bared head was innocent of all extra combing. With Nan it was different. She had striven to rid herself of every sign of the prairie to which she belonged. She was dressed with consummate care. Every jealous feeling of the woman in her had cried out for her rights, and those rights were that her successful rival should be unable to sneer at or pity her.

The result was a delightful picture that filled Bud's heart with admiration. And for perhaps the thousandth time he silently anathematized the blind folly of the man who had wilfully cast his eyes in another direction.

Nan seated herself in one of the luxuriously inviting armchairs, while Bud insinuated his huge form on to the polished surface of a large central table.

”You know, Daddy, I sort of feel like a feller who's guessed the right answer to a question he hadn't a notion of. Maybe you won't get just how I mean.” The smile in her pretty eyes changed to a deep seriousness. ”You know when I was a little teeny girl all mud and overall, that never could keep me within measurable distance of being clean, you used to talk to me just as if you were speaking your thoughts aloud. Guess it was about the time poor Momma died, or maybe soon after. I kind of remember you were squatting Indian fas.h.i.+on on the veranda of our shack, I'd been busy in the hopes of drowning myself in a half dry mud hole, and had mostly succeeded in absorbing more of the dirt than seemed good for a single meal. Guess I must have started to cry, and you'd reached out and grabbed me, and fetched me up on your lap, and were handing me a few words you reckoned to cheer me up with.

Do you remember them, my Daddy? I don't guess you do. I didn't till a while later, and then I didn't figure out their meaning till I went to school. You said, 'Tears is only for kiddies an' grown women. Kiddies mostly cry because they don't understand, an' grown women because they do. Anyway, neither of 'em need to cry, if they only get busy an'

think a while. Ther' ain't a thing in this life calls for a tear from a living soul, not even a stomachful of moist mud, 'cos, you see, ther's Someone who fixes everything the way it should go, an' it's the right way. So we'll jest give you a dose of physic to help boost the show along.'” She glanced round her with smiling eyes at the tastefully arrayed furnis.h.i.+ngs of the parlor. ”This has been the dose of physic I gave myself, and--and I feel better for it. I had the mud, and, why, the tears came just as they did before. Maybe if I'd been able to think right I wouldn't have shed them. But I just couldn't think right then. But I've thought since, and the physic's helped me.

Do--do you think he'll like it all?”

The contemplative gaze of her father was full of gentle amus.e.m.e.nt.