Part 15 (2/2)

”Did you wear spurs?” asked the voice of the unseen person.

”What?”

”Don't look around! I mean, did you wear spurs when you were in the Southwest? Of course you did, hugeous Spanish spurs and an enormous sombrero and woolly sheepskin trousers.”

”As you say!” Phil replied.

”You see, I am doing cartoons of our hero's life,” Helen explained.

”Here he is as he saw himself and the Rocky Mountains when he first arrived, with his college diploma under his arm.”

Only lines of hieroglyphic simplicity, and Phil in enormous spurs and sombrero, with a great roll of parchment under his arm, was looking down on some ant-hills. Only lines, but the nose and the chin under the sombrero's were unmistakably Phil's.

”Now, as our hero sees himself roping his first steer--and as he really was!” she went on. ”We are all for realism.”

A Phil with one arm akimbo, who roped the steer with his thumb and little finger holding a thread, was followed in the next scene by a Phil fluttering heaven high and a steer romping across the prairie.

”What next in the hero's progress?” she continued. ”Undaunted, he goes on his way, our _conquistadore_--is that the right word in Spanish, cousin?”

”Yes,” admitted Phil, who could not see the drawings or confess his curiosity about them.

Henriette went on painting, with intermissions when she lowered her head behind the easel to hide her amus.e.m.e.nt, perhaps, and others when she murmured an apology for Helen; but she was charming all the time.

”Yes, I have it!” said Helen. ”He saves pretty Pepita, the stern, old governor's daughter, from the revolutionista bandittistas--copyright reserved, plot perfectly original. But how does he save Pepita? With one fell glance of his eye?”

Phil moved a trifle restlessly, but said nothing.

”No, there are too many revolutionistas! He might subdue four or five, but not all of them--not even he, particularly when he has left his college diploma in his tent--and the dark Spanish girl must be saved.

It shall be six-shooters--big six-shooters! 'Tis done!”

Phil was seeing Henriette's face and hearing a voice like Henriette's, but with a richness, a variety of tonal range, and a whimsicality and infectiousness which hers lacked. It went perfectly with Henriette's smile at times, for she was enjoying the situation.

”Our hero triumphs!” Helen continued. ”He restores the beautiful belle to her true lover, but with rare n.o.bility of soul hides the mortal wound which her eyes have given him. For she is not for him. Now he starts for home to found some more American colleges and foreign missions, his pockets bulging with gold--thus--home to his first love, the girl in the kitchen at Longfield who makes strawberry shortcakes.

Here he eats a strawberry shortcake as big as a mountain. Yet another transition--he is in Europe. Majestic he sits and the little cousins look up at him and wors.h.i.+p this Gibson man from the United States of Amerikee. Thus he and thus the little cousins! This is triumph, indeed! Now our story is told. We depart.”

”Wait!” cried Phil, springing up. ”For what I have suffered I want to see the result.”

He faced a Helen shaking with laughter, teasing, delightful, in its spontaneous ring. Every fibre in her body seemed to be laughing. She would not have been unattractive then, even had her nose been lumpier than it was.

”It will be painful, I warn you!” she said. He was looking over her shoulder. ”How do you like the local colour? I put in one cactus for that.”

”That is enough for Mexico,” he agreed. ”And may I have them? Father will double up when he sees them and Jane will roar.”

”I was doing them to make myself laugh,” she said soberly, turning her head. He caught a gleam from her eyes baffling in its brightness, as a sharp sunbeam through a lattice. ”If they make other people laugh, so much to the good in war time.”

”Which means that I may have them?”

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