Heart's Kindred

The Inger sprang up.

“So it is,” he said, “to-night. Bunchy’s gettin’ spliced.”

“Who’s the antagonist?” asked the other.

“The Moor girl,” said the Inger. “Bunchy’s a fine lot to draw her,” he added. “She’s too good a hand for him. Want to go down and see it pulled off?” he asked.

His father hesitated, looking down the valley to the humble sparkling of Inch.

“I don’t reckon I really want to get drunk to-night,” he said slowly. “I’ll save up till I do.”

The Inger stretched prodigiously, bunching his great shoulders, lifting his tense arms, baring their magnificent muscles.

“I gotta, I guess,” he said. “But, gosh, how I hate it.”

He carried the remnants of the food into the hut, and made his simple preparation for festivity. As he emerged he was arrested by a faint stirring and fluttering. He listened and it was near at hand, and then he saw the wood duck, writhing at the end of the string that bound its legs. Beneath it lay a little dark pool.

“No sense in bleedin’ all the good out of ye,” thought the Inger, and with the butt of the six-shooter that he was pocketing, he struck the bird a friendly blow on the head and stilled it.

The forest lay in premature night, save where a little mountain brook caught and treasured the dying daylight. It was intensely still. The Inger’s tread and brushing at the thickets silenced whatever movement of tiny life had been stirring before him. The trail wound for half a mile down the incline, in the never-broken growth.

Once in the preceding winter when the Flag-pole mine was at last known with certainty to be the sensation of the year, the Inger had sewed a neat sum in the lining of his coat and had gone to inspect San Francisco. He had wanted to see a library, and he saw one, and stood baffled among books of which he had never heard, stammering before a polite young woman who said, “Make out your card, please, over there, and present it at the further desk.” He had wanted to see an art gallery, and he went confused among alien shapes and nameless figures, and had obediently bought a catalogue, of which he made nothing. Then he had gone to dinner with the family of one of the stockholders, and had suffered anguish among slipping rugs and ambiguous silver. The next night, the new collar and cravat discarded, he had turned up in one of his old haunts on the Barbary Coast. On his experience he made only one comment:

“They know too damn much, and there’s too damn much they don’t know,” he said.

But the woods he understood. All that he had hoped to feel in the library and the art gallery and in that home, he felt when the woods had him. Out there he was his own man.

As he went he shouted out a roaring music-hall song. Then when he had ceased, as if he became conscious of some incongruity, he stood still, perhaps with some vague idea of restoring silence. In a moment, he heard something move in the tree above his head – an anxious “Cheep – cheep!” in the leaves, as if some soft breast were beating in fear and an inquiring head were poised, listening. Instantly he lifted his revolver and fired, and fired again. He heard nothing. Had anything fallen, he could certainly not have come upon it next day. It was the need to do something.

As he cleared the wood, the lights of the town lay sparkling in a cup of the desert. At sight of them there was something that he wanted to do or to be. The vastness of the sky, the nearness of the stars, the imminence of people, these possessed him. He caught off his cap, and broke into a run, tossing back his hair like a mane.

“Damn that little town – damn it, damn it!” he chanted, like an invocation to the desert and to the night.

II

Inch was in glory. On the little streets and in the one-story shops, all the lights were kindled. Bursts of music, and screaming laughter, came from the saloons, whose doors stood wide open to the street, and at whose bars already men and women were congregating. In the Mission Saloon, the largest of these hospitable places, an impromptu stage had been arranged, and the seats about the tables were nearly all filled. Here the Inger went in and called for his first drink, negligently including everybody present. He was greeted boisterously by those who knew him and pointed out to those who did not know him. Not one of them understood the sources of his power, or what it signified. He was the only man in the county to be called by his last name and the definite article. This was a title of which a man might be proud, conferred upon him by common consent of his peers.

There was no formality of introduction. The Inger merely scanned the crowd, flashing a smile at one or two of the women who nearly pleased him. When the drinking began, it was to one of these that he lifted his glass. But when immediately she came and sat beside him, linking her arm in his, he drew away laughing, and addressed the crowd at large.

“What’s up?” he demanded. “What’s doin’?”

“B-basket o’ peaches,” volunteered one of the cow punchers, who early in the day had begun to observe the occasion. “B-Bunchy’s complimumps!”

When the improvised curtain of sheets drew back, revealing ten or twelve half-clothed strange women, the Inger understood. This was Bunchy’s magnanimous contribution to the general jollity of his marriage night.

“Let me have an absinthe,” he said to the barkeeper.

The man leaned across the bar and whispered something.

“No absinthe!” shouted the Inger. “What the hell kind of a joint is this?”

“Leadpipe Pete licked up the bottom of the bottle,” growled the barkeeper, pointing with the stump of a thumb.

The Inger looked. Beside him a big ranchman, swarthy and sweaty and hairy, was just lifting to his lips a tall tumbler of the absinthe. He leered at the Inger, closed one eye, and began to drink luxuriously. The Inger leapt a pace backward; and in an instant a bullet crashed through the glass, shattered it, and the man stood, dripping, with the bottom of the tumbler in his hand. The bullet buried itself in the tin mirror of the bar.

“About how much do I owe you for the lookin’ glass?” inquired the Inger, easily, resting his elbows on the bar. “And charge me up with Pete’s drink he’s mussed himself up with so bad. What’ll be the next one, Pete?”

“Leave Pete name the damages,” said the barkeeper, unconcernedly wiping up the liquid.

“You’re too hellish handy with your tools, you are,” grumbled Pete, combing the glass from his beard. “Make it brandy, neat.”

“Brandy, neat, one two,” repeated the Inger. “Bein’ your absinthe has run out.”

Presently he strolled up the street toward the hotel, where the evening’s interest centred. He glanced indifferently into the saloons, nodded a greeting when he wished, but more often ignored one. At a corner a beggar, attracted to the little place from some limbo where news of the wedding had filtered, held out his cap.

“It’s my thirty-third birthday to-day, pal,” he said. “It’ll bring you good luck to cough up somethin’ on me, see if it don’t.”

The Inger stopped with simulated interest. The man – a thin, degenerate creature, with a wrinkled smile – approached him hopefully. Abruptly the Inger’s powerful arm shot out, caught him below the waist, lifted him squirming in the air, and laid him carefully in the gutter.

“What you need is rest,” he said, with perfect gentleness, and left him there.

The hotel where the wedding was to be celebrated had light in every window. Here Bunchy’s preparations had been prodigal. Blankets and skins lined the walls and covered the floor of the office where a fire was roaring and the card tables were in readiness. Shouting and imprecation, chiefly from women, came from the kitchen, where the wedding supper was in preparation. In the hotel desk was Bunchy himself, engaged in somewhat delayed attention to his nails. His hair, still wet from its brushing, ran away from his temples, lifting the corners of his forehead so that it seemed to be smiling. He had a large face, and a little tight mouth, with raw-looking, shiny lips. There was something pathetic in his careful black clothes and his uncomfortable collar and his plaid cravat.

“How much would you sink to back out?” was the Inger’s salutation.

Bunchy grinned sheepishly.

“How much did it cost you?” he inquired.

“Done it for nothing,” the Inger declared. “I ain’t the charmer you are, Bunchy. Never was.”

The groom leaned nearer the light, minutely examining a black, cracked finger.

“She ain’t goin’ to be very much in the way,” said he, confidentially.

“What?” asked the Inger, attentively.

Bunchy shook his head, pursing the tight, raw lips.

“Not her,” he said. “She believes anything you tell her – the whole works. There won’t never be no kickin’ from her about me not loafin’ home.”

“Well,” said the Inger, still with minute attention, “what you gettin’ married for, then?”

“Huh?” said Bunchy, an obstinate finger between his lips.

“I thought,” explained the Inger, “that a fellow got married for to have a home. Far as I can see, though,” he added with an air of great intellectual candor, “home is hell.”

Bunchy threw back his head and looked at him. Curiously, when he laughed, his little tight mouth revealed no teeth. His answer was deliberate, detailed, unspeakable.