it was late, almost dark, that evening when cannon left his office. he had sat on after berny’s departure, sunk in a reverie, which was not compounded of those gentle thoughts that are usually associated with that state of being. in the past, when he had been struggling up from poverty, he had had his fierce fights, and his mortifying defeats. he had risen from them tougher and more combative than ever, filled with the lust of vengeance which in the course of time was assuaged. but of late years few (and these antagonists of his own measure) had had the temerity to cross swords with him.
now he had been defied in his stronghold and by the sort of person that he looked upon as a worm in the path—the kind of worm a man did not even tread on but simply brushed aside. it was incredible in its audacity, its bold insolence. as he walked down montgomery street to the car, he pondered on berny, wonderingly and with a sort of begrudging, astonished admission of a[377] courage that he could not but admire. what a nerve the woman had to dare to threaten him! to threaten bill cannon! there was something wild, uncanny, preposterous in it that was almost sublime, had the large, elemental quality of a lofty indifference to danger, that seemed to belong more to heroic legend than to modern life in the west. but his admiration was tempered by his alarm at the thought of his daughter’s learning of the sordid intrigue. the bare idea of rose’s censuring him—and he knew she would if she ever learned of his part in the plot—was enough to make him decide that some particularly heavy punishment would be meted out to the woman who dared shatter the only ideal of him known to exist.
but he did not for a moment believe that berny would tell. she was angry and was talking blusteringly, as angry women talk. he did not know why she was in such a state of ill temper, but at this stage of the proceedings he did not bother his head about that. for the third time she had refused the money—that was the only thing that concerned him. if she refused three hundred thousand dollars, she would refuse anything. it was as much to her as a million would be. she would know it was as large a sum as she could expect. if that would not buy her, nothing would. her threats were nonsense, bluff and bluster; the important thing was, she[378] had determined, for some reason of her own, to stick to dominick ryan.
how she had found out about rose he could not imagine, only it was very enraging that she should have done so. it was the last, and most detestable fact in the whole disagreeable business. brooding on the subject as the car swept him up the hill, he decided that she had guessed it. she was as sharp as a needle and she had put this and that together, the way women do, and had guessed the rest. pure ugliness might be actuating her present line of conduct, and that state of mind was rarely of long duration. the jealous passions of women soon burn themselves out. those shallow vessels could not long contain feelings of such a fiery potency, especially when harboring the feeling was so inconvenient and expensive. no one knew better than berny how well worth her while it would be to cultivate a sweet reasonableness. this was the only gleam of hope left. her power to endure the present conditions of her life might give out.
that was all the consolation the bonanza king could extract from the situation, and it did not greatly mitigate his uneasiness and bad humor. this latter condition of being had other matter to feed it, matter which in the interview of the afternoon had been pushed into the background, but which now once again obtruded itself upon his attention. it was the first of may. by the[379] morning’s mail he had received a letter from gene announcing, with the playful blitheness which marked all the young man’s allusions to the transfer of the santa trinidad ranch, that the year of probation was up and he would shortly arrive in san francisco to claim his own.
gene’s father had read this missive in grim-visaged silence. the sense of self-approval that he might have experienced was not his; he only felt that he had been “done”. two months before, thinking that the ranch was slipping too easily from his grasp, that he was making too little effort to retain his own, he had hired a detective to go to san luis obispo and watch the career of gene for signs of his old waywardness. on the thirtieth of april the man had reported that gene’s course had been marked by an abstinence as genuine and complete as the most exacting father could wish.
the old man crumpled up the letter and threw it into the waste-paper basket, muttering balefully, like a cloud charged with thunder. it was not that he wished gene to drink again; it was that he hated most bitterly giving him the finest piece of ranch land in california. it was not that he did not wish his son to be prosperous and respectable, only he wished that this happy condition had been achieved at some one else’s expense.
his mood was unusually black when he entered the house. the servant, who came forward to[380] help him off with his coat, knew it the moment he saw the heavy, scowling face. the piece of intelligence the man had to convey—that mr. gene cannon had arrived half an hour earlier from san luis obispo—was not calculated to abate the bonanza king’s irritation. he received it with the expressionless grunt he reserved for displeasing information, and, without further comment or inquiry, went up the stairs to his own rooms. from these he did not emerge till dinner was announced, when he greeted gene with a bovine glance of inspection and the briefest sentence of welcome.
gene, however, was not at all abashed by any lack of cordiality. at the best of times, he was not a sensitive person, and as this had been his portion since his early manhood, he was now used to it. moreover, to-night he was in high spirits. in his year of exile he had learned to love the outdoor life for which he was fitted, and had conceived a passionate desire to own the splendid tract of land for which he felt the love and pride of a proprietor. now it was his without let or hindrance. he was the owner of a principality, the lord of thousands of teeming acres, watered by crystal streams and shadowed by ancient oaks. he glowed with the joy of possession, and if anything was needed to complete his father’s discomfiture, it was gene’s naïve and bridling triumph.
always a loquacious person, a stream of talk[381] flowed from him to which the old man offered no interruption, and in which even rose found it difficult to insert an occasional, arresting question. gene had any number of new plans. his head was fuller than it had been for years with ideas for the improvement of his land, the development of his irrigating system, the planting of new orchards, the erecting of necessary buildings. he used the possessive pronoun continually, rolled it unctuously on his tongue with a new, rich delight. he directed most of his conversation toward rose, but every now and then he turned on his father, enthusiastically dilating on a projected improvement certain to increase the ranch’s revenues by many thousands per annum.
the old man listened without speaking, his chin on his collar, his eyes fixed in a wide, dull stare on his happy boy. at intervals—gene almost clamoring for a response—he emitted one of those inarticulate sounds with which it was his custom to greet information that he did not like or the exact purport of which he did not fathom.
the only thing which would have sweetened his mood would have been a conversation, peaceful and uninterrupted, with his daughter. he had not seen as much of her as usual during the last few days, as she had been confined to her room with a cold. this was the first evening she had been at dinner for four days, and the old man[382] had looked forward to one of their slow, enjoyable meals together, with a long, comfortable chat over the black coffee, as was their wont. even if rose did not know of his distractions and schemes, she soothed him. she never, like this chattering jackass from san luis obispo—and he looked sulkily at his son—rubbed him the wrong way. and he had hardly had a word with her, hardly, in fact, had heard her voice during the whole meal.
when it was over, and she rose from her seat, he asked her to play on the piano in the sitting-room near by.
“give us some music,” he said, “i want to hear something pleasant. the whole day i’ve been listening to jays and knaves and fools, and i want to hear something different that doesn’t make me mad or make me sick.”
rose left the room and presently the sound of her playing came softly from the sitting-room across the hall. neither of the men spoke for a space, and the old man, casting a side look at gene, was maliciously gratified by the thought that his son was offended. but he had reckoned without his offspring’s amiable imperviousness to the brutalities of the parental manner, wrought to-night to a condition of absolute invulnerability by the young man’s unclouded gladness. gene, his eyes on his coffee-cup, was in anything but a state of insulted sullenness, as was proved by his[383] presently looking up and remarking, with innocent brightness,
“you didn’t expect i’d get it, did you, pop? i knew from the start you were sure i’d slip up before the year was out.”
his father eyed him without replying, a blank, stony stare, before which gene did not show the slightest sign of quailing. he went on jubilantly in his high, throaty voice.
“i wasn’t dead certain of it myself at the start. you know it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to break off drinking habits that have had you as long as mine had me. but when i went down there and lived right on the land, when i used to get up in the morning and look out of my window across the hills and see the cattle dotted all over them, and the oaks thick and big and bushy, and feel the air just as soft as silk, i said to myself, ‘by gum, gene cannon, you’ve got to have this ranch if you die for want of whisky.’”
“well, you’ve got it!” said his father in a loud, pugnacious tone. “you’ve got it, haven’t you?”
“well, i guess i have,” said gene, his triumph tempered by an air of modesty, “and i guess i earned it fair. i stuck to the bargain and there were times when i can tell you it was a struggle. i never once slipped up. if you don’t believe my word, i can bring you men from down there[384] that know me well, and they’ll testify that i speak the truth.”
the father raised his eyebrows but said nothing. if there was anything further needed to show him what a complete, consistent fool his son was, it was the young man’s evident impression that the santa trinidad ranch had been relinquished upon his own unsupported testimony. that was just like gene. for weeks the detective had trotted at his heels, an entirely unsuspected shadow.
“it was rose who really put me up to it,” he went on. “she’d say to me i could do it, i only had to try; any one could do anything they really made their minds up to. if you said you couldn’t do a thing, why, then you couldn’t, but if you said you could, you got your mind into that attitude, and it wasn’t hard any more. and she was right. when i got my mind round to looking at it that way, it came quite easily. rose’s always right.”
this, the first statement of his son’s to which the bonanza king could subscribe, did not placate the old man. on the contrary, it still further inflamed his sense of angry grievance. it was bad enough to have gene stealing the ranch—that’s all it was—but to have him chuckling and grinning over it, when that very day rose’s chances of happiness had come to a deadlock, was just what you might expect of such a fool. out[385] of the fullness of the heart the mouth spoke, growled rather,
“i was just waiting to hear you give some credit to rose. here you are talking all through dinner like a megaphone all about yourself and your affairs, and not giving a thought to your sister.”
gene stared at his parent in ingenuous, concerned amaze.
“not a thought to rose?” he repeated, in a high, surprised key. “oh, yes i have—lots of thoughts. i was just telling you now about how she braced me up.”
“braced you up! of course she braced you up. hasn’t she been doing it all her life? but you can’t think of anything but yourself. don’t you ever look at your sister and think about her and how she feels?”
“yes,” said gene, giving his head a confirmatory wag, “i do, i do whenever i’m in town. you see, being away on the ranch so much——”
the old man leaned back in his chair, emitting a loud, interrupting groan. gene stared at him with a dawning uneasiness. he had begun to grasp the fact that his father was in a state of mind which had complications that included more than the old familiar contemptuousness of his every-day mood. he decided to advance more gingerly, for even gene’s imperviousness to snubs did not make him proof against the bonanza king’s roused displeasure.
[386]“i’m sure,” he said mildly, “no man ever had a more unselfish sister than i have, or was more devoted to her than i am.”
“then, why the hell,” said the old man, “do you go on talking about yourself and your damned concerns, bothering the life out of her when she’s got troubles of her own?”
the look of foolish amaze on gene’s face deepened into one of genuine concern.
“troubles of her own? what troubles has she got?”
one of the most aggravating features of the situation was that gene could not be told why rose was troubled and his father was cross. while they were bent under unaccustomed cares, he went happy and free, with nothing to think of except the ranch he had stolen. if he had been any other kind of person, he could have been taken into the secret and might have helped them out. the bonanza king had thought of ways in which a young and intelligent man could have been of assistance in inducing mrs. dominick ryan to listen to reason. gene, if he’d had any ability, if he’d had the brains of a mouse, could have made love to her, induced her to run away with him, and then they could have given her the money and got rid of her without any more fuss. he could have been of incalculable value and here he was, perfectly useless, too much of a fool even to be told the position, moved by the[387] mere gross weight of his stupidity into an outside place of tranquil ignorance. that his father could not force him to be a sharer in the family troubles made the old man still more angry, and it was a poignant pain to him that the only way he could show his rage was by roaring wrathfully.
“yes, rose has troubles. of course she has, but what have they got to do with you, who don’t care about a thing but your damned ranch?”
“what’s the matter with her?” said gene, roused into active uneasiness and quite oblivious to his father’s insults. “i didn’t know anything was wrong. she didn’t tell me.”
“no, and she won’t,” said the father. “and let me tell you if i catch you asking her any questions or giving her any hints that i’ve said anything to you, you can stay on your ranch and never come back into this house. i won’t have rose worried and upset by every fool that comes along.”
“well, but how am i to find out what’s the matter with her,” said the altogether baffled brother, “if you won’t tell me, and i’m not to ask her?”
“you needn’t find out. it’s her affair—hers and mine. don’t you go poking your nose in and trying to find out. i don’t want you butting into rose’s affairs.”
“just now,” said gene in an aggrieved tone, “you said i didn’t take any interest in anything[388] but my ranch. now, when i want to take an interest in rose, you tell me not to butt in. i love my sister more than most men, and i’d like to know if anything’s wrong with her.”
“she’s got a cold,” said cannon.
he spoke sharply and looked at gene with a sidelong eye full of observant malice. the young man gazed back at him, confused, for a moment half inclined to laugh, thinking his father, in a sudden unaccustomed playfulness, was joking with him.
“well, if it’s only a cold,” he stammered, “it’s nothing to tear up the ground about. i thought it was something serious, that rose was unhappy about something. but a cold——”
he was interrupted by the sudden appearance of rose herself, her hand drawing back the portière that veiled the doorway. she, who knew her father so well, had decided that in his present mood it was better to curtail his after-dinner chat with gene. her quick eye took in their two faces, and she felt that her brother had probably had a trying half-hour.
“i’m tired of making music,” she said. “i’ve played my whole repertoire. now i want gene to come back into the sitting-room with me and tell me about the linen and the furniture i’m to send down to the ranch. we’ll talk it over to-night and make a list and arrange for the packing to-morrow.”
[389]the young man rose, very glad to go with her, still uneasy and puzzled.
“how’s your cold, rosey?” he said. “i didn’t know it was bad or i’d have asked more about it.”
“oh, it’s all right,” she said carelessly. “it was never really bad, but i stayed in my room for a few days to be safe.” her eye caught her father’s, half-shut and full of brooding scorn, shot through with a gleam of sardonic humor. gene’s half-hour must have been even more trying than she had at first thought.
“come along, gene,” she said, holding out her hand to him, “we’ll leave the old man to his dreams. i know he never listened to a note of my music and only told me to play as an excuse to get rid of me.”
she threw a laughing look at her father, who answered it with a lazy, fond cast of his eye in her direction. taking gene’s hand, she drew him into the hall and dropped the portière. the father could hear their voices diminishing and growing muffled as they passed up the hall to the sitting-room.
he sat on as they had left him in his favorite crumpled-up attitude. after all, it was a good thing the boy did not know, was of the kind who could not be trusted with any information of importance. he did not want gene or anybody else to interfere. he, rose’s father, and he alone,[390] without any outside assistance, would reach up and pick out for her any star that sparkled in the heavens, any moon for which she might choose to cry. she wanted dominick ryan for her husband. she should have him and it would be her father who would get him for her. he would give her dominick ryan, as he would a pearl necklace or a new automobile to which she had taken a fancy.
it whetted the old man’s lust of battle that dominick was so hard to get. sitting fallen together in his chair he thought about new ways of approaching berny, new ways of bribing, or wheedling, or terrifying her into giving up her husband. he was not at the end of his rope yet, by any means. and it lent an added zest to the game that he had an adversary of so much spirit. he was beginning to respect her. even if he had not been fighting for rose, he would have gone on with the struggle for its own sake. it was not bill cannon’s way to enter a contest, and then be beaten—a contest with a spitfire woman at that.
