The Heart of Thunder Mountain

By the side of the golden horse stood Marion. Still shocked and bewildered, yet strangely thrilled, she had stretched out one trembling arm, and rested her hand on the neck of the wild creature, from which every other person in the crowd around–and she too in her right senses–had kept away, in full appreciation of his reputation. Whether it was that the outlaw had for the time given up all notion of resistance and hostility, or that he felt the difference between the girl’s gentle touch and the rough handling he had undergone, he did not stir. But this docility, this understanding, was only a part of the sight that brought Haig to a standstill.

He had left many things behind him, but there was one thing he had not been, able to destroy as he would have destroyed it, root and branch and flower. He would always have a weakness–he called it that–for beauty in whatever form it appeared to him. Sunsets and twilights, the shadows of trees in still waters, flowers and reeds, old ruins in the moonlight, sometimes even faces moved him until he was ashamed, and berated himself for a sentimental weakling. And now–

The girl was tawny as a leopard. Her hair was almost exactly the color of the outlaw’s dull yellow mane, but finer, of course, and softer; and her complexion–he wondered that he had not noticed it before–had a peculiar richness and brilliancy that seemed to reflect the luster of Sunnysides’ golden hide. They stood there entrancing his artist-eye with their perfect harmony of line and color; and the last thin rays of the setting sun bathed horse and girl in a golden light–an atmosphere in which they glowed like one of Titian’s mellowed canvases.

“Don’t move, please!” he exclaimed.

But Marion did not hear, or did not heed. She dropped her hand, and glided toward him, while he watched her, curious and rapt. Perhaps it was because he saw her through that golden glow, perhaps because his nerves were a little unsteady in the reaction from the strain they had undergone, that she made a singular appeal to his imagination. He fancied that for all the fineness of her figure, the exquisite poise of her small head, the cameo-like delicacy of her face, there was something in her as wild, untamed, and elemental as the heart of Sunnysides.

Thus she moved slowly past him, and passing gave him a long and steady look, with an unfathomable expression in her eyes,–an expression neither of anger nor of bitterness nor of disgust nor of anything he might have expected after all he had done that day. He turned, and watched her until she had disappeared in the crowd around the stagecoach; and with her went out the last rays of the sun.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Philip Haig.

With a shake of his shoulders, as if to throw off some unwelcome weight upon them, he turned again to take up his business with the gaping cow-punchers.

CHAPTER V

“HE SHALL TELL ME!”

Doctor Wilson, arriving from Tellurium on the third day after the encounter at Paradise, found Huntington in a bad way, due not so much to the wound in his left shoulder as to the state of his mind. Haig’s bullet was extracted without difficulty or serious complications, but Haig’s words were encysted too deep for any probe. Huntington’s self-love had been dealt a mortal blow; and somebody must pay for it.

First of all it was Claire that paid; then Marion. He did not mean to be disagreeable to them, but never having cultivated self-restraint he had none of it now to ease the days of his convalescence. He filled the house with his clamor, and required as much attention as an ailing child. There were just two ways to keep him quiet. Claire soothed him when she sat at his bedside, with one of his huge “paws” held in her tiny hands; and Marion found, somewhat to her surprise, that Seth liked music. The piano was one of the wonders of the Huntington house, for pianos are not essential instruments in the equipment of cattle ranches, and this was the only one in all that region of cattledom.

In music Seth’s tastes were sentimental. “Lost Chords” and “Rosaries” subdued him almost to tears; and if Marion only brought him tuneful violets every morn he tried his best to be good. So when Claire was not on duty at the bedside Marion must needs be on duty at the piano,–an ordeal that Claire endured, of course, more patiently than Marion.

Claire was almost comically unfit to be a ranchman’s wife, and she too had been a trial on occasions. She was small and delicate, but vivacious, amiable, bright. Her blue eyes always had a childlike wonder in them, and she was fond of wearing her fluffy, golden hair in a girlish knot low on her neck, or even in a long, thick braid down her back, with a blue ribbon bow at the end. She flitted about the house like a butterfly, and yet she had managed somehow to make her home the marvel of Paradise Park.

To begin with it was the ordinary, one-story, rambling house of pine, with spruce-clad hills rising behind it, and a little stream, rollicking down between it and the corrals. But a wide veranda had been constructed on three sides of it, furnished with wicker chairs, and half-screened with boxes of growing flowers. All around the house flowers grew,–old-fashioned garden flowers, roses and geraniums; beds of them everywhere, and blossoming shrubs along the stream.

The house contained, besides the kitchen and the bedrooms, just one big room. This, with its low ceiling, unpainted timbers, and small windows, was not unlike the hall of some old manor house. The floor was covered with Navajo rugs in rich and barbaric colors; the walls were draped with burlap in dull red dyes; and the windows were curtained with chintz in bright yellows and reds. Above the windows and doors hung many heads of deer and elk and mountain sheep, and rifles on racks of horn. Between the two front windows stood the upright piano, and near it a small bookcase filled with novels and volumes of poetry. The big oak table at mealtime was made to look very inviting with white napery and modest china and silver, and a bouquet always in its center. At other times it was a library table, heaped with books and magazines, and in the evening, when the kerosene lamps were lighted, and the piñon was blazing in the great fireplace, the room seemed as remote from Paradise Park as Claire herself.

There was an occasional visitor at Huntington’s in the period of his convalescence, usually a ranchwife eager for another glimpse at Claire’s wonderful housekeeping, or a young cow-puncher drawn by the attraction of two very pretty and unusual women in one house. But the ranchmen themselves, with two or three exceptions, were content to be solicitous at long range–an abstention that relieved and at the same time troubled Huntington. He was not eager to talk with his neighbors about that episode at the post-office, but their aloofness filled him with uneasiness. Well, let them wait! They would hear from him again, and so should Haig!

There was, among the visitors, one whose coming perceptibly lightened the tedium of those days. Marion had the good fortune to see him in time not to be taken by surprise. Seated on the veranda after an exhausting recital for the benefit of Huntington, she perceived the figure of a horseman–yes, it was a horseman–riding out of the pines toward the corrals. She stared. He was so little and so lost between his pony, which seemed extraordinarily big, and his sombrero, which undoubtedly was enormous, that she remained for a moment dumb, and then, choking with laughter, fled into the house.

“Look, Claire, look!” she cried, grabbing her cousin’s arm.

Claire, dragged to the door, looked and giggled.

“Haven’t you seen that before?” she asked.

“No! Never!” answered Marion, her hand upon her mouth.

“Of course. He’s just arrived–for the season. He was here last year, and the year before.”

“And they let him?” demanded Marion, thinking of the irrepressible cow-punchers.

“Oh, he’s all right!” Claire assured her. “That is, after you get used to him. The men had all sorts of fun with him the first summer he was here. But he took all their fun good-naturedly, and showed them he had pluck too. They began to like him. Everybody likes him, and so will you.”

“But in the name of–who is he?”

The little man had descended like a parachute from his pony, and was now bobbing rapidly up the graveled walk.

“Smythe,” explained Claire hurriedly. “But he’s here now–I’ll let him tell you–he likes to talk.”

At the foot of the steps he caught sight of the two women in the doorway; removed his wonderful headgear with an eighteenth-century gesture; ducked his head in a twentieth-century bow; and smiled. Claire stepped quickly out on the veranda.

“Oh, Mr. Smythe!” she cried gaily. “I’m so glad to see you. Come in!”

He was an undersized young man, immaculately dressed in brown tweeds and shining boots, a very high white collar and a sky-blue tie. The sombrero swinging in his hand was quite new, ornamented with a broad band of stamped leather, and it had the widest brim obtainable at the shop in Denver where a specialty is made of equipping the tenderfoot for life in the cattle country.

Smythe took Claire’s proffered hand, and bent over it as if he had thought of kissing it, but lacked the courage of his gallantry. Claire introduced him to Marion, answered his questions about Seth, and then fluttered away to the kitchen, where she had an angel cake in the oven not to be entrusted to the cook.

“I arrived only yesterday, Miss Gaylord,” Smythe chirped. “But I’ve heard of you already.”

“I don’t know whether to thank you or not,” answered Marion.

“Oh, if you please! What I heard made me very solicitous about Huntington’s health.”

He smiled knowingly at her, and Marion loosed some of her pent-up laughter. Truly, Smythe was going to be a treat! She studied him stealthily while he chattered on. He wore a pointed beard of reddish hue; his head was quite bald on top, and bulging at the brow; and the contour of that head, with its polished dome, and the narrow face tapering down to the pointed beard, was comically suggestive of a carrot. But it was an intelligent, even intellectual countenance, and his blue eyes were honest and bright. He might be laughed at, but he could not be flouted, she thought.

“Then you’ve been here before, Mr. –” she began, and hesitated.

“Smythe,” he prompted her generously. “J. Hamerton Smythe. S-m-y-t-h-e. I didn’t change it from Smith, and I don’t know what one of my esteemed ancestors did. But I’m glad he did. It gives me a touch of artificiality, don’t you think? I fear being too natural.”

Marion laughed, and that pleased him. She led the way to chairs near an open window where a black and yellow butterfly hovered over a honeysuckle blossom that had nodded its friendly way into the room.

“I’m from New York too,” Smythe rattled on. “Columbia. Doing a little tutoring and a little postgraduate work. This is my third summer in the Park. Found it by chance. Wanted to go somewhere, and was tired of the old places–Maine and Adirondacks and the rest. Looked at a map in a railroad office, and there it was, sticking right out at me, the first name I lighted on. In small type too–curious, wasn’t it? Clerks in office hadn’t heard of it, but I started out to find it. Thought I’d better get to Paradise when I could. And now I’m glad. I feel like an old settler, and I believe the cow-punchers have ceased to regard me as a tenderfoot. That’s as flattering as a Ph.D.”

“I’m afraid they laugh at me,” said Marion.

“On the contrary. Believe me, these cowboys have taken to reading poetry since you came.”

“Please be natural, Mr. Smythe!”

“Fact! I’d hardly got my things unpacked before one of them was riding over to ask me if I had a book about Lady Clara Vere de Vere. It seems he’d heard the poem recited somewhere. I asked him why he wanted it, but he looked so flustered that I let him off. Didn’t have a Tennyson with me, unfortunately, but I gave him my Byron, and I think that will hold him for a while.”

“Charming!” exclaimed Marion. “But what has all that to do with me?”

“He’s the chap that grabbed you in his arms when you were falling from your horse after that little business at Thompson’s the other day.”

Marion blushed, and then laughed.

“But how did you come to hear about that?” she demanded.

He chuckled.

“Oh, I hear everything!” he replied. “My friends say I’ve a nose for news.”