Hidden Creek - Katharine Newlin Burt
"Well, ma'am, for a while after the fire, I was pretty near crazy. I was
about loco. Then I was sick. When I got well again, a fellow who come
over from Hidden Creek told me you had gone over to be at a ranch there
and that you had come in alone. That sort of got me to thinking about you
more and more and studying you out, and I begun to see that I had made a
bad mistake. Whatsoever reason brought that damn fool Dickie to your room
that morning, it wasn't your doings, and the way you was waiting for his
kiss was more a mother's way. I have had some hard moments with myself,
Miss Sheila, and I have come to this that I have got to write and tell
you how I feel. And ask your forgiveness. You see you were something in
my life, different from anything that had ever been there. I don't
rightly know--I likely never will know--what you meant in my life. I
handled you in my heart like a flower. Before God, I had a religion for
you. And that was just why, when I thought you was bad, that it drove me
crazy. I wonder if you will understand this. You are awful young and
awful ignorant. And I have hurt your pride. You are terrible proud for
your years, Miss Sheila. I ache all over when I think that I hurt your
pretty mouth. I hope it is smiling now. I am moving out of Millings,--Me
and Momma and Babe. But Girlie is agoing to marry Jim. He run right back
to her like a little lost lamb the second you was gone. Likely, he'll
never touch liquor again. I haven't heard from Dickie. I guess he's gone
where the saloons are bigger and where you can get oysters with your
drinks. He always was a damn fool. I would dearly like to go over to
Hidden Creek and see you, but I feel like I'd better not. It would hurt
me if I got a turn-down from you like it will hurt me if you don't
answer this letter, which is a mighty poor attempt to tell you my bad
reasons for behaving like I did. I am not sorry I thrashed Dickie. He had
ought to be thrashed good and plenty. And he has sure paid me off by
burning down my Aura. That was a saloon in a million, Miss Sheila, and
the picture of you standing there back of my bar, looking so dainty and
sweet and fine in your black dress and your frills--well, ma'am, I'll
sure try to be thinking of that when I cash in.
"Well, Miss Sheila, I wish you good fortune in whatever you do, and I
hope that if you ever need a friend you will overlook my bad break and
remember the artist that tried to put you in his big work and--failed."
This extraordinary document was signed--"Sylvester." Sheila was left
bewildered with strange tears in her throat.
CHAPTER VII
SANCTUARY
There came to the restaurant where Dickie worked, a certain sallow and
irritable man, no longer in his early youth. He came daily for one of his
three meals: it might be lunch or dinner or even breakfast, Dickie was
always in haste to serve him. For some reason, the man's clever and
nervous personality intrigued his interest. And this, although his
customer never threw him a glance, scowled at a newspaper, barked out an
order, gulped his food, stuck a fair-sized tip under the edge of his
plate, and jerked himself away.
On a certain sluggish noon hour in August, Dickie, as far as the
kitchen door with a tray balanced on his palm, realized that he had
forgotten this man's order. He hesitated to go back. "Like as not,"
reasoned Dickie, "he didn't rightly know what the order was. He never
does look at his food. I'll fetch him a Spanish omelette and a salad
and a glass of iced tea. It's a whole lot better order than he'd have
thought of himself."
Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that he set the omelette down
before that lined and averted countenance. Its owner was screwed into his
chair as usual, eyes, with a sharp cleft between their brows, bent on his
folded newspaper, and he put his right hand blindly on the fork. But as
it pricked the contents of the plate a savory fragrance rose and the
reader looked.
"Here, you damn fool--that's not my order," he snapped out.
Dickie tasted a homely memory--"Dickie damn fool." He stood silent a
moment looking down with one of his quaint, impersonal looks.
"Well, sir," then he said slowly, "it ain't your order, but you look a
whole lot more like a feller that would order Spanish omelette than like
a feller that would order Hamburger steak."
For the first time the man turned about, flung his arm over his
chair-back, and looked up at Dickie. In fact, he stared. His thin lips,
enclosed in an ill-tempered parenthesis of double lines, twisted
themselves slightly.
"I'll be derned!" he said. "But, look here, my man, I didn't order
Hamburger steak; I ordered chicken."
Dickie deliberately smoothed down the cowlick on his head. He wore his
look of a seven-year-old with which he was wont to face the extremity of
Sylvester's exasperation.
"I reckon I clean forgot your order, sir," he said. "I figured out that
you wouldn't be caring what was on your plate. This heat," he added,
"sure puts a blinder on a feller's memory."
The man laughed shortly. "It's all right," he said. "This'll go down."
He ate in silence. Then he glanced up again. "What are you waiting
for, anyway?"
Dickie flushed faintly. "I was sort of wishful to see how it would go
down."
"Oh, I don't mean that kind of waiting. I mean--why are you a waiter in
this--hash-hole?"
Dickie meditated. "There ain't no answer to that," he said. "I don't know
why--" He added--"Why anything. It's a sort of extry word in the
dictionary--don't mean much any way you look at it."
He gathered up the dishes. The man watched him, tilting back a little in
his chair, his eyes twinkling under brows drawn together. A moment
afterwards he left the restaurant.
It was a few nights later when Dickie saw him again--or rather when
Dickie was again seen by him. This time Dickie was not in the restaurant.
He was at a table in a small Free Library near Greenwich Avenue, and he
was copying painstakingly with one hand from a fat volume which he held
down with the other. The strong, heavily-shaded light made a circle of
brilliance about him; his fair hair shone silvery bright, his face had a
sort of seraphic pallor. The orderer of chicken, striding away from the
desk with a hastily obtained book of reference, stopped short and stared
at him; then came close and touched the thin, shiny shoulder of the blue
serge coat.
"This the way you take your pleasure?" he asked abruptly.
Dickie looked up slowly, and his consciousness seemed to travel even more
slowly back from the fairy doings of a midsummer night. Under the
observant eyes bent upon it, his face changed extraordinarily from the
face of untroubled, almost immortal childhood to the face of struggling
and reserved manhood.
"Hullo," he said with a smile of recognition. "Well--yes--not always."
"What are you reading?" The man slipped into the chair beside Dickie, put
on his glasses, and looked at the fat book. "Poetry? Hmp! What are you
copying it for?--letter to your girl?"
Dickie had all the Westerner's prejudice against questions, but he felt
drawn to this patron of the "hash-hole," so, though he drawled his answer
slightly, it was an honest answer.
"It ain't my book," he said. "That's why I'm copying it."
"Why in thunder don't you take it out, you young idiot?"
Dickie colored. "Well, sir, I don't rightly understand the workings of
this place. I come by it on the way home and I kep' a-seein' folks goin'
in with books and comin' out with books. I figured it was a kind of
exchange proposition. I've only got one book--and that ain't rightly
mine--" the man looking at him wondered why his face flamed--"so, when I
came in, I just watched and I figured you could read here if you had the
notion to take down a book and fetch it over to the table and copy from
it and return it. So I've been doin' that."
"Why didn't you go to the desk, youngster, and ask questions?"
"Where I come from"--Dickie was drawling again--"folks don't deal so much
in questions as they do here."
"Where you came from! You came from Mars! Come along to the desk and
I'll fix you up with a card and you can take an armful of poetry home
with you."
Dickie went to the desk and signed his name. The stranger signed
his--Augustus Lorrimer. The librarian stamped a bit of cardboard and
stuck it into the fat volume. She handed it to Dickie wearily.
"Thank _you_, ma'am," he said with such respectful fervor that she looked
up at him and smiled.
"Now, where's your diggings," asked Lorrimer, who had taken no hints
about asking questions, "east or west?" He was a newspaper reporter.
"Would you be carin' to walk home with me?" asked Dickie. There was a
great deal of dignity in his tone, more in his carriage.
"Yes. I'd be caring to! Lead on, Martian!" And Lorrimer felt, after
he said that, that he was a vulgarian--a long-forgotten sensation.
"In Mars," he commented to himself, "this young man was some kind of
a prince."
"What do you look over your shoulder that way for, Dick?" he asked aloud,
a few blocks on their way. "Scared the police will take away your book?"
Dickie blinked at him with a startled air. "Did I? I reckon a feller
gets into queer ways when he's alone a whole lot. I get kind of feelin'
like somebody was following me in this town--so many folks goin' to and
fro does it to me most likely."
"Yes, a fellow does get into queer ways when he's alone a whole lot,"
said Lorrimer slowly. His mind went back a dozen years to his own first
winter in New York. He looked with keenness at Dickie's face. It was a
curiously charming face, he thought, but it was tight-knit with a
harried, struggling sort of look, and this in spite of its quaint
detachment.
"Know any one in this city?"
"No, sir, not rightly. I've made acquaintance with some of the waiters.
They've asked me to join a club. But I haven't got the cash."
"What pay do you draw?"
Dickie named a sum.
"Not much, eh? But you've got your tips."
"Yes, sir. I pay my board with my pay and live on the tips."
"Must be uncertain kind of living! Where do you live, anyway?
What? Here?"
They had crossed Washington Square and were entering a tall studio
building to the south and east. Dickie climbed lightly up the stairs.
Lorrimer followed with a feeling of bewilderment. On the top landing,
dimly lighted, Dickie unlocked a door and stood aside.
"Just step in and look up," he said, "afore I light the light. You'll
see something."
Lorrimer obeyed. A swarm of golden bees glimmered before his eyes.
"Stars," said Dickie. "Down below you wouldn't hardly know you had 'em,
would you?"
Lorrimer did not answer. A moment later an asthmatic gas-jet caught its
breath and he saw a bare studio room almost vacant of furniture. There
was a bed and a screen and a few chairs, one window facing an alley wall.
The stars had vanished.
"Pretty palatial quarters for a fellow on your job," Lorrimer remarked.
"How did you happen to get here?"
"Some--people I knowed of once lived here." Dickie's voice had taken on a
certain remoteness, and even Lorrimer knew that here questions stopped.
He accepted a chair, declined "the makings," proffered a cigarette.
During these amenities his eyes flew about the room.
"Good Lord!" he ejaculated, "is all that stuff your copying?"
There was a pile of loose and scattered manuscript upon the table under
the gas-jet.
"Yes, sir," Dickie smiled. "I was plumb foolish to go to all that labor."
Lorrimer drew near to the table and coolly looked over the papers.
Dickie watched him with rather a startled air and a flush that might
have seemed one of resentment if his eyes had not worn their
impersonal, observing look.
"All poetry," muttered Lorrimer. "But some of it only a line--or a
word." He read aloud,--"'Close to the sun in lonely lands--' what's that
from, anyway?"
"A poem about an eagle by a man named Alfred Tennyson. Ain't it the way a
feller feels, though, up on the top of a rocky peak?"
"Never been on the top of a rocky peak--kind of a sky-scraper sensation,
isn't it? What's all this--'An' I have been faithful to thee, Cynara,
after my fashion'?"
Dickie's face again flamed in spite of himself. "It's a love poem. The
feller couldn't forget. He couldn't keep himself from loving that-away
because he loved so much the other way--well, sir, you better read it for
yourself. It's a mighty real sort of a poem--if you were that sort of a
feller, I mean."
"And this is 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' And here's a sonnet, 'It was
not like your great and gracious ways'--? Coventry Patmore. Well, young
man, you've a catholic taste."
"I don't rightly belong to any church," said Dickie gravely. "My mother
is a Methodist."
Lorrimer moved; abruptly away and moved abruptly back.
"Where were you educated, Dick?"
"I was raised in Millings"--Dickie named the Western State--"I didn't
get only to grammar school. My father needed me to work in his hotel."
"Too bad!" sighed Lorrimer. "Well, I'll bid you good-night. And many
thanks. You've got a fine place here." Again he sighed. "I dare say--one
of these days--"
He was absent and irritable again. Dickie accompanied him down the three
long, narrow flights and climbed back to his loneliness. He was, however,
very much excited by his adventure, excited and disturbed. He felt
restless. He walked about and whistled to himself.
Until now he had had but one companion--the thought of Sheila. It was
extraordinary how immediate she was. During the first dreadful weeks of
his drudgery in the stifling confusions of the restaurant, when even the
memory of Sylvester's tongue-lashings faded under the acute reality of
the head waiter's sarcasms, that love of his for Sheila had fled away and
left him dull and leaden and empty of his soul. And his tiny third-story
bedroom had seemed like a coffin when he laid himself down in it and
tried to remember her. It had come to him like a mountain wind,
overwhelmingly, irresistibly, the desire to live where she lived: the
first wish he had had since he had learned that she was not to be found
by him. And the miracle had accomplished itself. Mrs. Halligan had been
instructed to get a lodger at almost any price for the long-vacant studio
room. She lowered the rent to the exact limit of Dickie's wages. She had
never bargained with so bright-eyed a hungry-looking applicant for
lodgings. And that night he lay awake under Sheila's stars. From then on
he lived always in her presence. And here in the room that had known her
he kept himself fastidious and clean. He shut out the wolf-pack of his
shrewd desires. The room was sanctuary. It was to rescue Sheila rather
than himself that Dickie fled up to the stars. So deeply, so intimately
had she become a part of him that he seemed to carry her soul in his
hands. So had the young dreamer wedded his dream. He lived with Sheila as
truly, as loyally, as though he knew that she would welcome him with one
of those downward rushes or give him Godspeed on sultry, feverish dawns
with a cool kiss. Dickie lay sometimes across his bed and drew her cheek
in trembling fancy close to his until the anguish wet his pillow with
mute tears.
Now to this dual loneliness Lorrimer had climbed, and Dickie felt, rather
gratefully, that life had reached up to the aching unrealities of his
existence. His tight and painful life had opened like the first fold of a
fan. He built upon the promise of a friendship with this questioning,
impertinent, mocking, keenly sympathetic visitor.
But a fortnight passed without Lorrimer's appearing at the restaurant
and, when at last he did come, Dickie, flying to his chair, was greeted
by a cold, unsmiling word, and a businesslike quotation from the menu.
He felt as though he had been struck. His face burned. In the West, a
fellow couldn't do that and get away with it! He tightened an impotent,
thin fist. He filled the order and kept his distance, and, absurdly
enough, gave Lorrimer's tip to another waiter and went without his own
dinner. For the first time in his life a sense of social inferiority, of
humiliation concerning the nature of his work, came to him. He felt the
pang of servitude, a pang unknown to the inhabitants of frontier towns.
When Sheila washed dishes for Mrs. Hudson she was "the young lady from
Noo York who helps round at Hudson's house." Dickie fought this shame
sturdily, but it seemed to cling, to have a sticky pervasiveness. Try as
he might he couldn't brush it off his mind. Nevertheless, it was on the
very heels of this embittering experience that life plucked him up from
his slough. One of the leveling public catastrophes came to Dickie's
aid--not that he knew he was a dumb prayer for aid. He knew only that
every day was harder to face than the last, that every night the stars up
there through Sheila's skylight seemed to glimmer more dully with less
inspiration on his fagged spirit.
The sluggish monotony of the restaurant's existence was stirred that
September night by a big neighboring fire. Waiters and guests tumbled out
to the call of fire-engines and running feet. Dickie found himself
beside Lorrimer, who caught him by the elbow.
"Keep by me, kid," he said, and there was something in his tone
that softened injury. "If you want a good look-in, I can get
through the ropes."
He showed his card to a policeman, pulled Dickie after him, and they
found themselves in an inner circle of the inferno. Before them a tall,
hideous warehouse broke forth into a horrible beauty. It was as though a
tortured soul had burst bars. It roared and glowed and sent up petals of
smoky rose and seeds of fire against the blue-black sky. The crowds
pressed against the ropes and turned up their faces to drink in the
terror of the spectacle.
Lorrimer had out his notebook. "Damn fires!" he said. "They bore me. Does
all this look like anything to you? That fire and those people and their
silly faces all tilted up and turned red and blue and purple--"
He was talking to himself, and so, really, was Dickie when he made his
own statement in a queer tone of frightened awe. "They look like a flower
garden in Hell," he whispered.
Lorrimer threw up his chin. "Say that again, will you?" he snapped out.
"Go on! Don't stop! Tell me everything that comes into your damn young
head of a wandering Martian! Fly at it! I'll take you down."
"You mean," said Dickie, "tell you what I think this looks like?"
"That's what I mean, do."
Dickie smiled a queer sort of smile. He had found a listener at last. A
moment later Lorrimer's pencil was in rapid motion. And the reporter's
eyes shot little stabbing looks at Dickie's unselfconscious face. When
it was over he snapped an elastic round his notebook, returned it to his
pocket, and laid his hand on Dickie's thin, tense arm.
"Come along with me, Dick," said Lorrimer. "You've won. I've been
fighting you and my duty to my neighbor for a fortnight. Your waiter days
are over. I've adopted you. I'm my brother's keeper all right. We'll both
go hungry now and then probably, but what's the odds! I need you. I
haven't been able to hand in a story like that for years. I'm a burnt-out
candle and you're the divine fire. I'm going to educate the life out of
you. I'm going to train you till you wish you'd died young and
ungrammatical in Millings. I may not be much good myself," he added
solemnly, "but God gave me the sense to know the real thing when I see
it. I've been fighting you, calling myself a fool for weeks. Come along,
young fellow, don't hang back, and for your credit's sake close your lips
so you won't look like a case of arrested development. First we'll say
good-bye to the hash-hole and the white apron and then I'll take you up
to your sky parlor and we'll talk things over."
"God!" said Dickie faintly. It was a prayer for some enlightenment.
CHAPTER VIII
DESERTION
Hilliard rode up along Hidden Creek on a frosty October morning.
Everywhere now the aspens were torches of gold, the cottonwood trees
smoky and gaunt, the ground bright with fallen leaves. He had the look of
a man who has swept his heart clean of devils...his face was keen with
his desire. He sang as he rode--sweetly an old sentimental Spanish song,
something his mother had taught him; but it was not of his mother he
thought, or only, perhaps, deep down in his subconsciousness, of that
early mother-worship, age-old and most mysterious, which now he had
translated and transferred.
"Sweet, sweet is the jasmine flower--
Let its stars guide thee.
Sweet is the heart of a rose...
Sweet is the thought of thee...
Deep in my heart..."
The dogs were off coursing the woods that afternoon, and the little
clearing lay as still as a green lake under the threatening crest of the
mountain. Cosme slipped from his horse, pulled the reins over his head,
and left him to graze at will.
Miss Blake opened the ranch-house door at his knock. She greeted him with
a sardonic smile. "I don't know whether you'll see your girl or not,"
she said. "Give her time to get over her tantrums."
Cosme turned a lightning look upon her. "Tantrums? Sheila?"
"Oh, my friend, she has a devil of her own, that little angel-face! Make
yourself comfortable." Miss Blake pointed him to a chair. "I'll tell her
you're here."
She went to the foot of the ladder, which rose from the middle of the
living-room floor, and called heartily, an indulgent laugh in her voice,
"You, Sheila! Better come down! Here's your beau."
There was no answer.
"Hear me, Sheila? Mis-ter Cos-me Hill-iard."
This time some brief and muffled answer was returned. Miss Blake smiled
and went over to her elk-horn throne. There she sat and sewed--an
incongruous occupation it looked.
Cosme was leaning forward, elbows on knees, his face a study of
impatience, anger, and suspicion.
"What made her mad?" he asked bluntly.
"O-oh! She'll get over it. She'll be down. Sheila can't resist a young
man. You'll see."
"What did you do?" insisted the stern, crisp, un-western voice. When
Cosme was angry he reverted rapidly to type.
"Why," drawled Miss Blake, "I crept up when she was drying her hair and I
cut it off." She laughed loudly at his fierce start.
"Cut off her hair! What right--?"
"No right at all, my friend, but common sense. What's the good of all
that fluffy stuff hanging about and taking hours of her time to brush
and wash and what-not. Besides"--she shot a look at him--"it's part of
the cure."
"By the Lord," said Cosme, "I'd like you to explain."
The woman crossed her legs calmly. She was still indulgently amused.
"Don't lose your head, young man," she advised. "Better smoke."
After an instant Cosme rolled and lighted a cigarette and leaned back in
his chair. His anger had settled to a sort of patient contempt.
"I've put her into breeches, too," said Miss Blake.
"What the devil! What do you mean? She has a will of her own,
hasn't she?"
"Oh, yes. But you see I've got Miss Sheila just about where I want her.
She's grateful enough for her food and the roof over her head and for the
chance I'm giving her."
"Chance?" He laughed shortly. "Chance to do all your heavy work?"
"Why not say _honest_ work? It's something new to her."
There was a brief, thunderous silence. Cosme's cigarette burned between
his stiff fingers. "What do you mean?" he asked, hoarse with the effort
of his self-control.
She looked at him sharply now. "Are you Paul Carey Hilliard's son--the
son of Roxana Hilliard?" she asked. She pointed a finger at him.
"Yes," he answered with thin lips. His eyes narrowed. His face was all
Latin, all cruel.
"Well"--Miss Blake slid her hands reflectively back and forth on the bone
arms of her chair. She had put down her work. "I was just thinking," she
said slowly and kindly, "that the son of your mother would be rather
extra careful in choosing the mother of his sons."
"I shall be very careful," he answered between the thin lips. "I _am_
being careful."
She fell back with an air of relief. "Oh," she said, as though
illuminated. "O-oh! I understand. Then it's all right. I didn't read
your game."
His face caught fire at her apparent misunderstanding.
"I don't read yours," he said.
"Game? Bless you, I've no game to play. I'm giving Sheila her chance. But
I'm not going to give her a chance at the cost of your happiness. You're
too good a lad for that. I thought you were going to ask her to be your
wife. And I wasn't going to allow you to do it--blind. I was going to
advise you to come back three years from now and see her again. Maybe
this fine clean air and this life and this honest work and the training
she gets from me will make her straight. My God! Cosme Hilliard, have you
set eyes on Hudson? What kind of girl travels West from New York at
Sylvester Hudson's expense and in his company and queens it in the suite
at his hotel?"
"Miss Blake," he muttered, "do you _know_ this?"
The cigarette had burnt itself out. Cosme's face was no longer cruel. It
was dazed.
She laughed shortly. "Why, of course, I know Sheila. I know her whole
history--and it's some history! She's twice the age she looks. Do you
think I'd have her here with me this way without knowing the girl? I tell
you, I want to give her a chance. I don't care if you try to test her
out. I'd like to see if two months has done anything for her. She was
real set on being a good girl when she quit Hudson. I don't _know_, but
I'm willing to bet that she'll turn you down."