Cressy

“But you are quite sure you won’t regret that you didn’t avail yourself of this broken engagement, and your daughter’s outfit—to send her to some larger boarding-school in Sacramento or San Francisco? Don’t you think she may find it dull, and soon tire of the company of mere children when she has already known the excitement of”—he was about to say “a lover,” but checked himself, and added, “a young girl’s freedom?”

“Mr. Ford,” returned McKinstry, with the slow and fatuous misconception of a one-ideaed man, “when I said just now that, lookin’ inter that kam, peaceful school of yours, I didn’t find a place for Cress, it warn’t because I didn’t think she OUGHTER hev a place thar. Thar was that thar wot she never had ez a little girl with me and the old woman, and that she couldn’t find ez a grownd up girl in any boarding-school—the home of a child; that kind o’ innocent foolishness that I sometimes reckon must hev slipped outer our emigrant wagon comin’ across the plains, or got left behind at St. Joe. She was a grownd girl fit to marry afore she was a child. She had young fellers a-sparkin’ her afore she ever played with ‘em ez boy and girl. I don’t mind tellin’ you that it wern’t in the natur of Blair Rawlins’ darter to teach her own darter any better, for all she’s been a mighty help to me. So if it’s all the same to you, Mr. Ford, we won’t talk about a grownd up school; I’d rather Cress be a little girl again among them other children. I should be a powerful sight more kam if I knowed that when I was away huntin’ stock or fightin’ stakes with them Harrisons, that she was a settin’ there with them and the birds and the bees, and listenin’ to them and to you. Mebbee there’s been a little too many scrimmages goin’ on round the ranch sence she’s been a child; mebbee she orter know suthin’ more of a man than a feller who sparks her and fights for her.”

The master was silent. Had this dull, narrow-minded partisan stumbled upon a truth that had never dawned upon his own broader comprehension? Had this selfish savage and literally red-handed frontier brawler been moved by some dumb instinct of the power of gentleness to understand his daughter’s needs better than he? For a moment he was staggered. Then he thought of Cressy’s later flirtations with Joe Masters, and her concealment of their meeting from her mother. Had she deceived her father also? Or was not the father deceiving him with this alternate suggestion of threat and of kindliness—of power and weakness. He had heard of this cruel phase of Southwestern cunning before. With the feeble sophistry of the cynic he mistrusted the good his scepticism could not understand. Howbeit, glancing sideways at the slumbering savagery of the man beside him, and his wounded hand, he did not care to show his lack of confidence. He contented himself with that equally feeble resource of weak humanity in such cases—good-natured indifference. “All right,” he said carelessly; “I’ll see what can be done. But are you quite sure you are fit to go home alone? Shall I accompany you?” As McKinstry waived the suggestion with a gesture, he added lightly, as if to conclude the interview, “I’ll report progress to you from time to time, if you like.”

“To ME,” emphasized McKinstry; “not over THAR,” indicating the ranch. “But p’rhaps you wouldn’t mind my ridin’ by and lookin’ in at the school-room winder onct in a while? Ah—you WOULD,” he added, with the first deepening of color he had shown. “Well, never mind.”

“You see it might distract the children from their lessons,” explained the master gently, who had however contemplated with some concern the infinite delight which a glimpse of McKinstry’s fiery and fatuous face at the window would awaken in Johnny Filgee’s infant breast.

“Well, no matter!” returned McKinstry slowly. “Ye don’t keer, I s’pose, to come over to the hotel and take suthin’? A julep or a smash?”

“I shouldn’t think of keeping you a moment longer from Mrs. McKinstry,” said the master, looking at his companion’s wounded hand. “Thank you all the same. Good-by.”

They shook hands, McKinstry transferring his rifle to the hollow of his elbow to offer his unwounded left. The master watched him slowly resume his way towards the ranch. Then with a half uneasy and half pleasurable sense that he had taken some step whose consequences were more important than he would at present understand, he turned in the opposite direction to the school-house. He was so preoccupied that it was not until he had nearly reached it that he remembered Uncle Ben. With an odd recollection of McKinstry’s previous performance, he approached the school from the thicket in the rear and slipped noiselessly to the open window with the intention of looking in. But the school-house, far from exhibiting that “kam” and studious abstraction which had so touched the savage breast of McKinstry, was filled with the accents of youthful and unrestrained vituperation. The voice of Rupert Filgee came sharply to the master’s astonished ears.

“You needn’t try to play off Dobell or Mitchell on ME—you hear! Much YOU know of either, don’t you? Look at that copy. If Johnny couldn’t do better than that, I’d lick him. Of course it’s the pen—it ain’t your stodgy fingers—oh, no! P’r’aps you’d like to hev a few more boxes o’ quills and gold pens and Gillott’s best thrown in, for two bits a lesson? I tell you what! I’ll throw up the contract in another minit! There goes another quill busted! Look here, what YOU want ain’t a pen, but a clothes-pin and a split nail! That’ll about jibe with your dilikit gait.”

The master at once stepped to the window and, unobserved, took a quick survey of the interior. Following some ingenious idea of his own regarding fitness, the beautiful Filgee had induced Uncle Ben to seat himself on the floor before one of the smallest desks, presumably his brother’s, in an attitude which, while it certainly gave him considerable elbow-room for those contortions common to immature penmanship, offered his youthful instructor a superior eminence, from which he hovered, occasionally swooping down upon his grown-up pupil like a mischievous but graceful jay. But Mr. Ford’s most distinct impression was that, far from resenting the derogatory position and the abuse that accompanied it, Uncle Ben not only beamed upon his persecutor with unquenchable good humor, but with undisguised admiration, and showed not the slightest inclination to accept his proposed resignation.

“Go slow, Roop,” he said cheerfully. “You was onct a boy yourself. Nat’rally I kalkilate to stand all the damages. You’ve got ter waste some powder over a blast like this yer, way down to the bed rock. Next time I’ll bring my own pens.”

“Do. Some from the Dobell school you uster go to,” suggested the darkly ironical Rupert. “They was iron-clad injin-rubber, warn’t they?”

“Never you mind wot they were,” said Uncle Ben good-humoredly. “Look at that string of ‘C’s’ in that line. There’s nothing mean about THEM.”

He put his pen between his teeth, raised himself slowly on his legs, and shading his eyes with his hand from the severe perspective of six feet, gazed admiringly down upon his work. Rupert, with his hands in his pockets and his back to the window, cynically assisted at the inspection.

“Wot’s that sick worm at the bottom of the page?” he asked.

“Wot might you think it wos?” said Uncle Ben beamingly.

“Looks like one o’ them snake roots you dig up with a little mud stuck to it,” returned Rupert critically.

“That’s my name.”

They both stood looking at it with their heads very much on one side. “It ain’t so bad as the rest you’ve done. It MIGHT be your name. That ez, it don’t look like anythin’ else,” suggested Rupert, struck with a new idea that it was perhaps more professional occasionally to encourage his pupil. “You might get on in course o’ time. But what are you doin’ all this for?” he asked suddenly.

“Doin’ what?”

“This yer comin’ to school when you ain’t sent, and you ain’t got no call to go—you, a grown-up man!”

The color deepened in Uncle Ben’s face to the back of his ears. “Wot would you giv’ to know, Roop? S’pose I reckoned some day to make a strike and sorter drop inter saciety easy—eh? S’pose I wanted to be ready to keep up my end with the other fellers, when the time kem? To be able to sling po’try and read novels and sich—eh?”

An expression of infinite and unutterable scorn dawned in the eyes of Rupert. “You do? Well,” he repeated with slow and cutting deliberation, “I’ll tell you what you’re comin’ here for, and the only thing that makes you come.”