Part 33 (1/2)
Dry Valley, less fleet, followed them nearly to the pickets. Checking his useless pursuit, he rounded a bush, dropped his whip and stood, voiceless, motionless, the capacity of his powers consumed by the act of breathing and preserving the perpendicular.
Behind the bush stood Panchita O'Brien, scorning to fly. She was nineteen, the oldest of the raiders. Her night-black hair was gathered back in a wild ma.s.s and tied with a scarlet ribbon. She stood, with reluctant feet, yet nearer the brook than to the river; for childhood had environed and detained her.
She looked at Dry Valley Johnson for a moment with magnificent insolence, and before his eyes slowly crunched a luscious berry between her white teeth. Then she turned and walked slowly to the fence with a swaying, conscious motion, such as a d.u.c.h.ess might make use of in leading a promenade. There she turned again and grilled Dry Valley Johnson once more in the dark flame of her audacious eyes, laughed a trifle school-girlishly, and twisted herself with pantherish quickness between the pickets to the O'Brien side of the wild gourd vine.
Dry Valley picked up his whip and went into his house. He stumbled as he went up the two wooden steps. The old Mexican woman who cooked his meals and swept his house called him to supper as he went through the rooms. Dry Valley went on, stumbled down the front steps, out the gate and down the road into a mesquite thicket at the edge of town. He sat down in the gra.s.s and laboriously plucked the spines from a p.r.i.c.kly pear, one by one. This was his att.i.tude of thought, acquired in the days when his problems were only those of wind and wool and water.
A thing had happened to the man--a thing that, if you are eligible, you must pray may pa.s.s you by. He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer of the Soul.
Dry Valley had had no youth. Even his childhood had been one of dignity and seriousness. At six he had viewed the frivolous gambols of the lambs on his father's ranch with silent disapproval. His life as a young man had been wasted. The divine fires and impulses, the glorious exaltations and despairs, the glow and enchantment of youth had pa.s.sed above his head. Never a thrill of Romeo had he known; he was but a melancholy Jaques of the forest [100] with a ruder philosophy, lacking the bitter-sweet flavour of experience that tempered the veteran years of the rugged ranger of Arden. And now in his sere and yellow leaf [101] one scornful look from the eyes of Panchita O'Brien had flooded the autumnal landscape with a tardy and delusive summer heat.
[FOOTNOTE 100: In Shakespeare's _As You Like It_ the erudite Jaques, one of the banished duke's attendants in the Forest of Arden, is cynical and sarcastic.]
[FOOTNOTE 101: now in his sere and yellow leaf--_Macbeth_, Act V, Sc. iii: ”I have liv'd long enough: my way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; . . .”]
But a sheepman is a hardy animal. Dry Valley Johnson had weathered too many northers to turn his back on a late summer, spiritual or real.
Old? He would show them.
By the next mail went an order to San Antonio for an outfit of the latest clothes, colours and styles and prices no object. The next day went the recipe for the hair restorer clipped from a newspaper; for Dry Valley's sunburned auburn hair was beginning to turn silvery above his ears.
Dry Valley kept indoors closely for a week except for frequent sallies after youthful strawberry s.n.a.t.c.hers. Then, a few days later, he suddenly emerged brilliantly radiant in the hectic glow of his belated midsummer madness.
A jay-bird-blue tennis suit covered him outwardly, almost as far as his wrists and ankles. His s.h.i.+rt was ox-blood; his collar winged and tall; his necktie a floating oriflamme [102]; his shoes a venomous bright tan, pointed and shaped on penitential lasts. A little flat straw hat with a striped band desecrated his weather-beaten head.
Lemon-coloured kid gloves protected his oak-tough hands from the benignant May suns.h.i.+ne. This sad and optic-smiting creature teetered out of its den, smiling foolishly and smoothing its gloves for men and angels to see. To such a pa.s.s had Dry Valley Johnson been brought by Cupid, who always shoots game that is out of season with an arrow from the quiver of Momus. Reconstructing mythology, he had risen, a prismatic macaw, from the ashes of the grey-brown phoenix that had folded its tired wings to roost under the trees of Santa Rosa.
[FOOTNOTE 102: oriflamme--the red-orange flag of the Abbey St.
Denis, used as a standard by early French kings]
Dry Valley paused in the street to allow Santa Rosans within sight of him to be stunned; and then deliberately and slowly, as his shoes required, entered Mrs. O'Brien's gate.
Not until the eleven months' drought did Santa Rosa cease talking about Dry Valley Johnson's courts.h.i.+p of Panchita O'Brien. It was an uncla.s.sifiable procedure; something like a combination of cake-walking, deaf-and-dumb oratory, postage stamp flirtation and parlour charades. It lasted two weeks and then came to a sudden end.
Of course Mrs. O'Brien favoured the match as soon as Dry Valley's intentions were disclosed. Being the mother of a woman child, and therefore a charter member of the Ancient Order of the Rat-trap [103], she joyfully decked out Panchita for the sacrifice. The girl was temporarily dazzled by having her dresses lengthened and her hair piled up on her head, and came near forgetting that she was only a slice of cheese. It was nice, too, to have as good a match as Mr.
Johnson paying you attentions and to see the other girls fluttering the curtains at their windows to see you go by with him.
[FOOTNOTE 103: Rat-trap--O. Henry was married twice, once in his twenties (she died a few years after they were married) and again near the end of his life. Both marriages were somewhat stormy, and he often complained that marriage was too confining.]
Dry Valley bought a buggy with yellow wheels and a fine trotter in San Antonio. Every day he drove out with Panchita. He was never seen to speak to her when they were walking or driving. The consciousness of his clothes kept his mind busy; the knowledge that he could say nothing of interest kept him dumb; the feeling that Panchita was there kept him happy.
He took her to parties and dances, and to church. He tried--oh, no man ever tried so hard to be young as Dry Valley did. He could not dance; but he invented a smile which he wore on these joyous occasions, a smile that, in him, was as great a concession to mirth and gaiety as turning hand-springs would be in another. He began to seek the company of the young men in the town--even of the boys. They accepted him as a decided damper, for his attempts at sportiveness were so forced that they might as well have essayed their games in a cathedral. Neither he nor any other could estimate what progress he had made with Panchita.
The end came suddenly in one day, as often disappears the false afterglow before a November sky and wind.
Dry Valley was to call for the girl one afternoon at six for a walk.
An afternoon walk in Santa Rosa was a feature of social life that called for the pink of one's wardrobe. So Dry Valley began gorgeously to array himself; and so early that he finished early, and went over to the O'Brien cottage. As he neared the porch on the crooked walk from the gate he heard sounds of revelry within. He stopped and looked through the honeysuckle vines in the open door.
Panchita was amusing her younger brothers and sisters. She wore a man's clothes--no doubt those of the late Mr. O'Brien. On her head was the smallest brother's straw hat decorated with an ink-striped paper band. On her hands were flapping yellow cloth gloves, roughly cut out and sewn for the masquerade. The same material covered her shoes, giving them the semblance of tan leather. High collar and flowing necktie were not omitted.
Panchita was an actress. Dry Valley saw his affectedly youthful gait, his limp where the right shoe hurt him, his forced smile, his awkward simulation of a gallant air, all reproduced with startling fidelity.