Hidden Creek - Katharine Newlin Burt
He stood away a pace and put his question with a lifted forefinger.
Sheila's eyes were caught and held by his. Again her mind seemed to be
fastened to his will. And the blood ran quickly in her veins. Her heart
beat. She was excited, stirred. He had seen through her shell unerringly
as no one else in all her life had seen. He had mysteriously guessed that
she had the dangerous gift of adventure, that under the shyness and
uncertainty of inexperience there was no fear in her, that she was one of
those that would rather play with fire than warm herself before it.
Sheila stood there, discovered and betrayed. He had played upon her as
upon a flexible young reed: that stop, her ambition, this, her
romanticism, that, her vanity, the fourth, her gratitude, the fifth, her
idealism, the sixth, her recklessness. And there was this added urge--she
must stay here and drudge under the lash of "Momma's" tongue or she must
accept this strange, this unimaginable offer. Again she opened her eyes
wider and wider. The pupils swallowed up the misty gray. Her lips parted.
"I'll do it," she said, narrowed her eyes and shut her mouth tight. With
such a look she might have thrown a fateful toss of dice.
Sylvester caught her hands, pressed them up to his chest.
"It's a promise, girl?"
"Yes."
"God bless you!"
He let her go. He walked on air. He threw open the door.
There on the threshold--stood "Momma."
"I kind of see," she drawled, "why Sheila don't take no interest
in dancin'!"
"You're wrong," said Sheila very clearly. "I have been persuaded. I am
going to the dance."
Sylvester laughed aloud. "One for you, Momma!" he said. "Come on down,
old girl, while Miss Sheila gets into her party dress. Say, Aura, aren't
you goin' to give me a dance to-night?"
His wife looked curiously at his red, excited face. She followed him in
silence down the stairs.
Sheila stood still listening to their descending steps, then she knelt
down beside her little trunk and opened the lid. The sound of the fiddle
stole hauntingly, beseechingly, tauntingly into her consciousness. There
in the top tray of her trunk wrapped in tissue paper lay the only evening
frock she had, a filmy French dress of white tulle, a Christmas present
from her father, a breath-taking, intoxicating extravagance. She had worn
it only once.
It was with the strangest feeling that she took it out. It seemed to her
that the Sheila that had worn that dress was dead.
CHAPTER IX
A SINGEING OF WINGS
All the vitality of Millings--and whatever its deficiencies the town
lacked nothing of the splendor and vigor of its youth--throbbed and
stamped and shook the walls of the Town Hall that night. To understand
that dance, it is necessary to remember that it took place on a February
night with the thermometer at zero and with the ground five feet beneath
the surface of the snow. There were men and women and children, too, who
had come on skis and in toboggans for twenty miles from distant ranches
to do honor to the wedding-anniversary of Greely and his wife.
A room near the ballroom was reserved for babies, and here, early in the
evening, lay small bundles in helpless, more or less protesting, rows,
their needs attended to between waltzes and polkas by father or mother
according to the leisure of the parent and the nature of the need. One
infant, whose home discipline was not up to the requirements of this
event, refused to accommodate himself to loneliness and so spent the
evening being dandled, first by father, then by mother, in a chair
immediately beside the big drum. Whether the spot was chosen for the
purpose of smothering his cries or enlivening his spirits nobody cared
to inquire. Infants in the Millings and Hidden Creek communities, where
certified milk and scientific feeding were unknown, were treated rather
like family parasites to be attended to only when the irritation they
caused became acute. They were not taken very seriously. That they grew
up at all was largely due to their being turned out as soon as they could
walk into an air that buoyed the entire nervous and circulatory systems
almost above the need of any other stimulant.
The dance began when the first guests arrived, which on this occasion was
at about six o'clock, and went on till the last guest left, at about ten
the next morning. In the meantime the Greelys' hospitality provided every
variety of refreshment.
When Sheila reached the Town Hall, crowded between Sylvester and joyous
Babe in her turquoise blue on the front seat of the Ford, while the back
seat was occupied by Girlie in scarlet and "Momma" in purple velveteen,
the dance was well under way. The Hudsons came in upon the tumult of a
quadrille. The directions, chanted above the din, were not very exactly
heeded; there was as much confusion as there was mirth. Sheila, standing
near Girlie's elbow, felt the exhilaration which youth does feel at the
impact of explosive noise and motion, the stamping of feet, the shouting,
the loud laughter, the music, the bounding, prancing bodies: savagery in
a good humor, childhood again, but without the painful intensity of
childhood. Sheila wondered just as any _debutante_ in a city ballroom
wonders, whether she would have partners, whether she would have "a good
time." Color came into her face. She forgot everything except the
immediate prospect of flattery and rhythmic motion.
Babe pounced upon a young man who was shouldering his way toward Girlie.
"Say, Jim, meet Miss Arundel! Gee! I've been wanting you two to get
acquainted."
Sheila held out her hand to Mr. James Greely, who took it with a
surprised and dazzled look.
"Pleased to meet you," he murmured, and the dimple deepened in his ruddy
right cheek.
He turned his blushing face to Girlie. "Gee! You look great!" he said.
She was, in fact, very beautiful--a long, firm, round body, youthful and
strong, sheathed in a skin of cream and roses, lips that looked as though
they had been used for nothing but the tranquil eating of ripe fruit,
eyes of unfathomable serenity, and hair almost as soft and creamy as her
shoulders and her finger-tips. Her beauty was not marred to Jim Greely's
eyes by the fact that she was chewing gum. Amongst animals the only
social poise, the only true self-possession and absence of shyness is
shown by the cud-chewing cow. She is diverted from fear and soothed from
self-consciousness by having her nervous attention distracted. The
smoking man has this release, the knitting woman has it. Girlie and Babe
had it from the continual labor of their jaws. Every hope and longing and
ambition in Girlie's heart centered upon this young man now complimenting
her, but as he turned to her, she just stood there and looked up at him.
Her jaws kept on moving slightly. There was in her eyes the minimum of
human intelligence and the maximum of unconscious animal invitation--a
blank, defenseless expression of--"Here I am. Take me." As Jim Greely
expressed the look: "Girlie makes everything easy. She don't give a
fellow any discomfort like some of these skittish girls do. She's kind of
home folks at once."
"We can't get into the quadrille now," said Jim, "but you'll give me the
next, won't you, Girlie?"
"Sure, Jim," said the unsmiling, rosy mouth.
Jim moved uneasily on his patent-leather feet. He shot a sidelong glance
at Sheila.
"Say, Miss Arundel, may I have the next after ... Meet Mr. Gates," he
added spasmodically, as the hand of a gigantic friend crushed his elbow.
Sheila looked up a yard or two of youth and accepted Mr. Gates's
invitation for "the next."
The head at the top of the tower bent itself down to her with a
snakelike motion.
"Us fellows," it said, "have been aiming to give you a good time
to-night."
Sheila was relieved to find him within hearing. Her smile dawned
enchantingly. It had all the inevitability of some sweet natural event.
"That's very good of--you fellows. I didn't know you knew that there was
such a person as--as me in Millings."
"You bet you, we knew. Here goes the waltz. Do you want to Castle it? I
worked in a Yellowstone Park Hotel last summer, and I'm wise on dancing."
Sheila found herself stretched ceilingwards. She must hold one arm
straight in the air, one elbow as high as she could make it go, and she
must dance on her very tip-toes. Like every girl whose life has taken her
in and out of Continental hotels, she could dance, and she had the gift
of intuitive rhythm and of yielding to her partner's intentions almost
before they were muscularly expressed. Mr. Gates felt that he was dancing
with moonlight, only the figure of speech is not his own.
Girlie in the arms of Jim spoke to him above her rigid chin. Girlie had
the haughty manner of dancing.
"She's not much of a looker, is she, Jim?" But the pain in her heart gave
the speech an audible edge.
"She's not much of anything," said Jim, who had not looked like the
young man on the magazine cover for several busy years in vain. "She's
just a scrap."
But Girlie could not be deceived. Sheila's delicate, crystalline beauty
pierced her senses like the frosty beauty of a winter star: her dress of
white mist, her slender young arms, her long, slim, romantic throat, the
finish and polish of her, every detail done lovingly as if by a master's
silver-pointed pencil, her hair so artlessly simple and shining, smooth
and rippled under the lights, the strangeness of her face! Girlie told
herself again that it was an irregular face, that the chin was not right,
that the eyes were not well-opened and lacked color, that the nose was
odd, defying classification; she knew, in spite of the rigid ignorance of
her ideals, that these things mysteriously spelled enchantment. Sheila
was as much more beautiful than anything Millings had ever seen as her
white gown was more exquisite than anything Millings had ever worn. It
was a work of art, and Sheila was, also, in some strange sense, a work of
art, something shaped and fashioned through generations, something tinted
and polished and retouched by race, something mellowed and restrained,
something bred. Girlie did not know why the white tulle frock, absolutely
plain, shamed her elaborate red satin with its exaggerated lines. But she
did know. She did not know why Sheila's subtle beauty was greater than
her obvious own. But she did know. And so great and bewildering a fear
did this knowledge give her that, for an instant, it confused her wits.
"She's going back East soon," she said sharply.
"Is she?" Jim's question was indifferent, but from that instant his
attention wandered.
When he took the small, crushable silken partner into his arms for "the
next after," a one-step, he was troubled by a sense of hurry, by that
desire to make the most of his opportunity that torments the reader of a
"best-seller" from the circulating library.
"Say, Miss Arundel," he began, looking down at the smooth, jewel-bright
head, "you haven't given Millings a square deal."
Sheila looked at him quizzically.
"You see," went on Jim, "it's winter now."
"Yes, Mr. Greely. It _is_ winter."
"And that's not our best season. When summer comes, it's awfully pretty
and it's good fun. We have all sorts of larks--us fellows and the girls.
You'd like a motor ride, wouldn't you?"
"Not especially, thank you," said Sheila, who really at times deserved
the Western condemnation of "ornery." "I don't like motors. In fact, I
hate motors."
Jim swallowed a nervous lump. This girl was not "home folks." She made
him feel awkward and uncouth. He tried to remember that he was Mr. James
Greely, of the Millings National Bank, and, remembering at the same time
something that the girl from Cheyenne had said about his smile, he caught
Sheila's eye deliberately and made use of his dimple.
"What do you like?" he asked. "If you tell me what you like, I--I'll see
that you get it."
"You're very powerful, aren't you? You sound like a fairy godmother."
"You look like a fairy. That's just what you do look like."
"I like horses much better than motors," said Sheila. "I thought the West
would be full of adorable little ponies. I thought you'd ride like
wizards, bucking--you know."
"Well, I can ride. But, I guess you've been going to the movies or the
Wild West shows. This town _must_ seem kind of dead after Noo York."
"I hate the movies," said Sheila sweetly.
"Say, it would be easy to get a pony for you as soon as the snow goes. I
sold my horse when Dad bought me my Ford."
"Sold him? Sold your own special horse!"
"Well, yes, Miss Arundel. Does that make you think awfully bad of me?"
"Yes. It does. It makes me think _awfully_ 'bad' of you. If I had a
horse, I'd--I'd tie him to my bedpost at night and feed him on
rose-leaves and tie ribbons in his mane."
Jim laughed, delighted at her childishness. It brought back something of
his own assurance.
"I don't think Pap Hudson would quite stand for that, would he? Seems to
me as if--"
But here his partner stopped short, turned against his arm, and her face
shone with a sudden friendly sweetness of surprise. "There's Dickie!"
She left Jim, she slipped across the floor. Dickie limped toward her. His
face was white.
"Dickie! I'm so glad you came. Somehow I didn't expect you to be here.
But you're lame! Then you can't dance. What a shame. After Mr. Greely and
I have finished this, could you sit one out with me?"
"Yes'm," whispered Dickie.
He was not as inexpressive as it might seem however. His face, a rather
startling face here in this crowded, boisterous room, a face that seemed
to have come in out of the night bringing with it a quality of eternal
childhood, of quaint, half-forgotten dreams--his face was very
expressive. So much so, that Sheila, embarrassed, went back almost
abruptly to Jim. Her smile was left to bewilder Dickie. He began to
describe it to himself. And this was the first time a woman had stirred
that mysterious trouble in his brain.
"It's not like a smile at all," thought Dickie, the dancing crowd
invisible to him; "it's like something--it's--what is it? It's as if the
wind blew it into her face and blew it out again. It doesn't come from
anywhere, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, at least not anywhere a
fellow knows ..." Here he was rudely joggled by a passing elbow and the
pain of his ankle brought a sharp "Damn!" out of him. He found a niche to
lean in, and he watched Sheila and Jim. He found himself not quite so
overwhelmed as usual by admiration of his friend. His mood was even very
faintly critical. But, as the dance came to an end, Dickie fell a prey to
base anxiety. How would "Poppa" take it if he, Dickie, should be seen
sitting out a dance with Miss Arundel? Dickie was profoundly afraid of
his father. It was a fear that he had never been allowed the leisure to
outgrow. Sylvester with torture of hand and foot and tongue had fostered
it. And Dickie's childhood had lingered painfully upon him. He could not
outgrow all sorts of feelings that other fellows seemed to shed with
their short trousers. He was afraid of his father, physically and
morally; his very nerves quivered under the look of the small brown eyes.
Nevertheless, as Sheila thanked Jim for her waltz, her elbow was touched
by a cold finger.
"Here I am," said Dickie. He had a demure and startled look. "Let's sit
it out in the room between the babies and the dancin'-room--two kinds of
a b-a-w-l, ain't it? But I guess we can hear ourselves speak in there.
There's a sort of a bench, kind of a hard one..."
Sheila followed and found herself presently in a half-dark place under a
row of dangling coats. An iron stove near by glowed with red sides and a
round red mouth. It gave a flush to Dickie's pale face. Sheila thought
she had never seen such a wistful and untidy lad.
Yet, poor Dickie at the moment appeared to himself rather a dashing and
heroic figure. He had certainly shown courage and had done his deed with
jauntiness. Besides, he had on his only good suit of dark-blue serge,
very thin serge. It was one that he had bought second-hand from Jim, and
he was sure, therefore, of its perfection. He thought, too, that he had
mastered, by the stern use of a wet brush, a cowlick which usually
disgraced the crown of his head. He hadn't. It had long ago risen to its
wispish height.
"Jim dances fine, don't he?" Dickie said. "I kind of wish I liked to
dance. Seems like athletic stunts don't appeal to me some way."
"Would you call dancing an athletic stunt?" Sheila leaned back against a
coat that smelled strongly of hay and tobacco and caught up her knees in
her two hands so that the small white slippers pointed daintily, clear of
the floor.
Dickie looked at them. It seemed to him suddenly that a giant's hand had
laid itself upon his heart and turned it backwards as a pilot turns his
wheel to change the course of a ship. The contrary movement made him
catch his breath. He wanted to put the two white silken feet against his
breast, to button them inside his coat, to keep them in his care.
"Ain't it, though?" he managed to say. "Ain't it an athletic stunt?"
"I've always heard it called an accomplishment."
"God!" said Dickie gently. "I'd 'a' never thought of that. I do like
ski-ing, though. Have you tried it, Miss Arundel?"
"No. If I call you Dickie, you might call me Sheila, I think."
Dickie lifted his eyes from the feet. "Sheila," he said.
He was curiously eloquent. Again Sheila felt the confusion that had sent
her abruptly back to Jim. She smoothed out the tulle on her knee.
"I think I'd love to ski. Is it awfully hard to learn?"
"No, ma'am. It's just dandy. Especially on a moonlight night, like night
before last. And if you'd 'a' had skis on you wouldn't 'a' broke through.
You go along so quiet and easy, pushing yourself a little with your pole.
There's a kind of a swing to it--"
He stood up and threw his light, thin body gracefully into the skier's
pose. "See? You slide on one foot, then on the other. It's as easy as
dreaming, and as still."
"It's like a gondola--" suggested Sheila.
Dickie put his head on one side and Sheila explained. She also sang a
snatch of a Gondel-lied to show him the motion.
"Yes'm," said Dickie. "It's like that. It kind of has a--has a--"
"Rhythm?"
"I guess that's the word. So's riding. I like to do the things that
have that."
"Well, then, you ought to like dancing."
"Yes'm. Maybe I would if it wasn't for havin' to pull a girl round about
with me. It kind of takes my mind off the pleasure."
Sheila laughed. Then, "Did you get my note?" she asked.
"Yes'm." Her laughter had embarrassed him, and he had suddenly a
hunted look.
"And are you going to be my friend?"
The sliding of feet on a floor none too smooth, the music, the wailing of
a baby accompanied Dickie's silence. He was very silent and sat very
still, his hands hanging between his knees, his head bent. He stared at
Sheila's feet. His face, what she could see of it, was, even beyond the
help of firelight, pale.
"Why, Dickie, I believe you're going to say No!"
"Some fellows would say Yes," Dickie answered. "But I sort of promised
not to be your friend. Poppa said I'd kind of disgust you. And I figure
that I would--"
Sheila hesitated.
"You mean because you--you--?"
"Yes'm."
"Can't you stop?"
He shook his head and gave her a tormented look.
"Oh, Dickie! Of course you can! At your age!"
"Seems like it means more to me than anything else."
"Dickie! Dickie!"
"Yes'm. It kind of takes the awful edge off things."
"What _do_ you mean? I don't understand."
"Things are so sort of--sharp to me. I mean, I don't know if I can tell
you. I feel like I had to put something between me and--and things. Oh,
damn! I can't make you see--"
"No," said Sheila, distressed.
"It's always that-a-way," Dickie went on. "I mean, everything's kind
of--too much. I used to run miles when I was a kid. And sometimes now
when I can get out and walk or ski, the feeling goes. But other
times--well, ma'am, whiskey sort of takes the edge off and lets something
kind of slack down that gets sort of screwed up. Oh, I don't know ..."
"Did you ever go to a doctor about it?"
Dickie looked up at her and smiled. It was the sweetest smile--so patient
of this misunderstanding of hers. "No, ma'am."
"Then you don't care to be my friend enough to--to try--"
"I wouldn't be a good friend to you," said Dickie. And he spoke now
almost sullenly. "Because I wouldn't want you to have any other friends.
I hate it to see you with any other fellow."
"How absurd!"
"Maybe it is absurd. I guess it seems awful foolish to you." He moved his
cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor. Again he
looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his
extravagant eyelashes. "There's something I could be real well," he said.
"Only, I guess Poppa's got there ahead of me. I could be a dandy guardian
to you--Sheila."
Again Sheila laughed. But the ringing of her silver coins was not quite
true. There was a false note. She shut her eyes involuntarily. She was
remembering that instant an hour or two before when Sylvester's look had
held hers to his will. The thought of what she had promised crushed down
upon her consciousness with the smothering, sudden weight of its reality.
She could not tell Dickie. She could not--though this she did not
admit--bear that he should know.
"Very well," she said, in a hard and weary voice. "Be my guardian. That
ought to sober any one. I think I shall need as many guardians as
possible. And--here comes your father. I have this dance with him."
Dickie got hurriedly to his feet. "Oh, gosh!" said he. He was obviously
and vividly a victim of panic. Sheila's small and very expressive face
showed a little gleam of amused contempt. "My guardian!" she seemed to
mock. To shorten the embarrassment of the moment she stepped quickly into
the elder Hudson's arm. He took her hand and began to pump it up and
down, keeping time to the music and counting audibly. "One, two, three."
To Dickie he gave neither a word nor look.
Sheila lifted her chin so that she could smile at Dickie over Pap's
shoulder. It was an indulgent and forgiving smile, but, meeting Dickie's
look, it went out.
The boy's face was scarlet, his body rigid, his lips tight. The eyes with
which he had overcome her smile were the hard eyes of a man. Sheila's
contempt had fallen upon him like a flame. In a few dreadful minutes as
he stood there it burnt up a part of his childishness.
Sheila went on, dancing like a mist in Hudson's arms. She knew that she
had done something to Dickie. But she did not know what it was that she
had done....
CHAPTER X
THE BEACON LIGHT
Out of the Wyoming Bad Lands--orange, turquoise-green, and murky blue, of
outlandish ridges, of streaked rock, of sudden, twisted canons, a country
like a dream of the far side of the moon--rode Cosme Hilliard in a
choking cloud of alkali dust. He rode down Crazy Woman's Hill toward the
sagebrush flat, where, in a half-circle of cloudless, snow-streaked
mountains, lay the town of Millings on its rapid glacier river.
Hilliard's black hair was powdered with dust; his olive face was gray;
dust lay thick in the folds of his neck-handkerchief; his pony matched
the gray-white road and plodded wearily, coughing and tossing his head in
misery from the nose-flies, the horse-flies, the mosquitoes, a swarm of
small, tormenting presences. His rider seemed to be charmed into
patience, and yet his aquiline face was not the face of a patient man. It
was young in a keen, hard fashion; the mouth and eyes were those of a
Spanish-American mother, golden eyes and a mouth originally beautiful,
soft, and cruel, which had been tightened and straightened by a man's
will and experience. It had been used so often for careless, humorous
smiling that the cruelty had been almost worked out of it. Almost, not
altogether. His mother's blood kept its talons on him. He was Latin and
dangerous to look at, for all the big white Anglo-Saxon teeth, the slow,
slack, Western American carriage, the guarded and amused expression of
the golden eyes. Here was a bundle of racial contradictions, not yet
welded, not yet attuned. Perhaps the one consistent, the one solvent,
expression was that of alert restlessness. Cosme Hilliard was not happy,
was not content, but he was eternally entertained. He was not uplifted by
the hopeful illusions proper to his age, but he loved adventure. It was a
bitter face, bitter and impatient and unschooled. It seemed to laugh, to
expect the worst from life, and not to care greatly if the worst should
come. But for such minor matters of dust and thirst and weariness, he had
patience. Physically the young man was hard and well-schooled. He rode
like a cowboy and carried a cowboy's rope tied to his saddle. And the
rope looked as though it had been used.
Millings, that seemed so close below there through the clear, high
atmosphere, was far to reach. The sun had slipped down like a thin,
bright coin back of an iron rock before the traveler rode into the town.
His pony shied wearily at an automobile and tried to make up his mind to
buck, but a light pressure of the spur and a smiling word was enough to
change his mind.