Heart of the Sunset Part 7

Why don't you divorce me? G.o.d knows I never see anything of you. You have your part of the house and I have mine; all we share in common is meal-hours, and--and a mail address. You're about as much my wife as Dolores is."

Alaire turned upon him eyes dark with misery. "You know why I don't divorce you. No, Ed, we're going to live out our agreement, and these Brownsville episodes are going to cease." Her lips whitened. "So are your visits to the pumping-station."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You transferred Panfilo because he was growing jealous of you and Rosa."

Ed burst into sudden laughter. "Good Lord! There's no harm in a little flirtation. Rosa's a pretty girl."

His wife uttered a breathless, smothered exclamation; her hands, as they lay on the table-cloth, were tightly clenched. "She's your tenant--almost your servant. What kind of a man are you? Haven't you any decency left?"

"Say! Go easy! I guess I'm no different to most men." Austin's unpleasant laughter had been succeeded by a still more unpleasant scowl. "I have to do SOMETHING. It's dead enough around here--"

"You must stop going there."

"Humph! I notice YOU go where YOU please. Rosa and I never spent a night together in the chaparral--"

"Ed!" Alaire's exclamation was like the snap of a whip. She rose and faced her husband, quivering as if the lash had stung her flesh.

"That went home, eh? Well, I'm no fool! I've seen something of the world, and I've found that women are about like men. I'd like to have a look at this David Law, this gunman, this Handsome Harry who waits at water-holes for ladies in distress." Ed ignored his wife's outflung hand, and continued, mockingly: "I'll bet he's all that's manly and splendid, everything that I'm NOT."

"You'd--better stop," gasped the woman. "I can't stand everything."

"So? Well, neither can I."

"After--this, I think you'd better go--to San Antonio. Maybe I'll forget before you come back."

To this "Young Ed" agreed quickly enough. "Good!" said he. "That suits me. It's h.e.l.l around Las Palmas, anyhow, and I'll at least get a little peace at my club." He glowered after his wife as she left the room.

Then, still scowling, he lurched out to the gallery where the breeze was blowing, and flung himself into a chair.

V

SOMETHING ABOUT HEREDITY

It had required but one generation to ripen the fruits of "Old Ed"

Austin's lawlessness, and upon his son heredity had played one of her grimmest pranks. The father had had faults, but they were those of his virtues; he had been a strong man, at least, and had "ridden herd" upon his unruly pa.s.sions with the same thoroughness as over his wild cattle.

The result was that he had been universally respected. At first the son seemed destined to be like his father. It was not until "Young Ed" had reached his full manhood that his defects had become recognizable evil tendencies, that his infirmity had developed into a disease. Like sleeping cancers, the Austin vices had lain dormant in him during boyhood; it had required the mutation from youth to manhood, and the alterative effect of marriage, to rouse them; but, once awakened, their ravages had been swift and destructive. Ed's marriage to Alaire had been inevitable. They had been playmates, and their parents had considered the union a consummation of their own lifelong friends.h.i.+p.

Upon her mother's death, Alaire had been sent abroad, and there she remained while "Young Ed" attended an Eastern college. For any child the experience would have been a lonesome one, and through it the motherless Texas girl had grown into an imaginative, sentimental person, living in a make-believe world, peopled, for the most part, with the best-remembered figures of romance and fiction. There were, of course, some few flesh-and-blood heroes among the rest, and of these the finest and the n.o.blest had been "Young Ed" Austin.

When she came home to marry, Alaire was still very much of a child, and she still considered Ed her knight. As for him, he was captivated by this splendid, handsome girl, whom he remembered only as a shy, red-headed little comrade.

Never was a marriage more propitious, never were two young people more happily situated than these two, for they were madly in love, and each had ample means with which to make the most of life.

As Las Palmas had been the elder Austin's wedding-gift to his son, so Alaire's dowry from her father had been La Feria, a grant of lands across the Rio Grande beyond the twenty-league belt by which Mexico fatuously strives to guard her border. And to Las Palmas had come the bride and groom to live, to love, and to rear their children.

But rarely has there been a shorter honeymoon, seldom a swifter awakening. Within six months "Young Ed" had killed his wife's love and had himself become an alcoholic. Others of his father's vices revived, and so multiplied that what few virtues the young man had inherited were soon choked. The change was utterly unforeseen; its cause was rooted too deeply in the past to be remedied. Maturity had marked an epoch with "Young Ed"; marriage had been the mile-post where his whole course veered abruptly.

To the bride the truth had come as a stunning tragedy. She was desperately frightened, too, and lived a nightmare life, the while she tried in every way to check the progress of that disintegration which was eating up her happiness. The wreck of her hopes and glad imaginings left her sick, bewildered, in the face of "the thing that couldn't."

Nor had the effect of this transformation in "Young Ed" been any less painful to his father. For a time the old man refused to credit it, but finally, when the truth was borne in upon him unmistakably, and he saw that Las Palmas was in a fair way to being ruined through the boy's mismanagement, the old cattleman had risen in his wrath. The ranch had been his pride as Ed had been his joy; to see them both go wrong was more than he could bear. There had been a terrible scene, and a tongue-las.h.i.+ng delivered in the language of early border days. There had followed other visits from Austin, senior, other and even bitterer quarrels; at last, when the girl-wife remained firm in her refusal to divorce her husband, the understanding had been reached by which the management of Las Palmas was placed absolutely in her hands.

Of course, the truth became public, as it always does. This was a new country--only yesterday it had been the frontier, and even yet a frontier code of personal conduct to some extent prevailed.

Nevertheless, "Young Ed" Austin's life became a scorn and a hissing among his neighbors. They were not unduly fastidious, these neighbors, and they knew that hot blood requires more than a generation to cool, but everything Ed did outraged them. In trying to show their sympathy for his wife they succeeded in wounding her more deeply, and Alaire withdrew into herself. She became almost a recluse, and fenced herself away not only from the curious, but also from those who really wished to be her friends. In time people remarked that Ed Austin's metamorphosis was no harder to understand than that of his wife.

It was true. She had changed. The alteration reached to the very bone and marrow of her being. At first the general pity had wounded her, then it had offended, and finally angered her. That people should notice her affliction, particularly when she strove so desperately to hide it, seemed the height of insolence.

The management of Las Palmas was almost her only relief. Having sprung from a family of ranchers, the work came easy, and she grew to like it--as well as she could like anything with that ever-present pain in her breast. The property was so large that it gave ample excuse for avoiding the few visitors who came, and the range boss, Benito Gonzales, attended to most of the buying and selling. Callers gradually became rarer; friends dropped away almost entirely. Since Las Palmas employed no white help whatever, it became in time more Mexican than in the days of "Old Ed" Austin's owners.h.i.+p.

In such wise had Alaire fas.h.i.+oned her life, living meanwhile under a sort of truce with her husband.

But Las Palmas had prospered to admiration, and La Feria would have prospered equally had it not been for the armed unrest of the country across the border. No finer stock than the "Box A" was to be found anywhere. The old lean, long-horned cattle had been interbred with white-faced Herefords, and the sleek coats of their progeny were stretched over twice the former weight of beef. Alaire had even experimented with the Brahman strain, importing some huge, hump-backed bulls that set the neighborhood agog. People proclaimed they were sacred oxen and whispered that they were intended for some outlandish pagan rite--Alaire by this time had gained the reputation of being "queer"--while experienced stockmen declared the venture a woman's folly, affirming that buffaloes had never been crossed successfully with domestic cattle. It was rumored that one of these imported animals cost more than a whole herd of Mexican stock, and the ranchers speculated freely as to what "Old Ed" Austin would have said of such extravagance.

It was Blaze Jones, one of the few county residents granted access to Las Palmas, who first acquainted himself with the outcome of Alaire's experiment, and it was he who brought news of it to some visiting stock-buyers at Brownsville.

Blaze was addicted to rhetorical extravagance. His voice was loud; his fancy ran a splendid course.

"Gentlemen," said he, "you-all interest me with your talk about your prize Northern stock; but I claim that the bigger the state the bigger the cattle it raises. That's why old Texas beats the world."

"But it doesn't," some one contradicted.

"It don't, hey? My boy"--Blaze jabbed a rigid finger into the speaker's ribs, as if he expected a ground-squirrel to scuttle forth--"we've got steers in this valley that are d.a.m.n near the size of the whole state of Rhode Island. If they keep on growin' I doubt if you could fatten one of 'em in Delaware without he'd bulge over into some neighboring commonwealth. It's the G.o.d's truth! I was up at Las Palmas last month--"

"Las Palmas!" The name was enough to challenge the buyers' interest.

Blaze nodded. "You-all think you know the stock business. You're all swollen up with cow-knowledge, now, ain't you?" He eyed them from beneath his black eyebrows. "Well, some of our people thought they did, too. They figured they'd inherited all there was to know about live stock, and they grew plumb arrogant over their wisdom. But--pshaw! They didn't know nothing. Miz Austin has bred in that Brayma strain and made steers so big they run four to the dozen. And here's the remarkable thing about 'em--they 'ain't got as many ticks as you gentlemen."

Some of the cattlemen were incredulous, but Blaze maintained his point with emphasis. "It's true. They're a grave disappointment to every kind of parasite."

But Alaire had not confined her efforts to cattle; she had improved the breed of "Box A" horses, too, and hand in hand with this work she had carried on a series of agricultural experiments.

Las Palmas, so people used to say, lay too far up the river to be good farming-land; nevertheless, once the pumping-plant was in, certain parts of the ranch raised nine crops of alfalfa, and corn that stood above a rider's head.

There was no money in "finished" stock; the border was too far from market--that also had long been an accepted truism--yet this woman built silos which she filled with her own excess fodder in scientific proportions, and somehow or other she managed to s.h.i.+p fat beeves direct to the packing-houses and get big prices for them.

These were but a few of her many ventures. She had her hobbies, of course, but, oddly enough, most of them paid or promised to do so. For instance, she had started a grove of paper-sh.e.l.led pecans, which was soon due to bear; the ranch house and its clump of palms was all but hidden by a forest of strange trees, which were reported to ripen everything from moth-b.a.l.l.s to bicycle tires. Blaze Jones was perhaps responsible for this report, for Alaire had shown him several thousand eucalyptus saplings and some ornamental rubber-plants.

"That Miz Austin is a money-makin' piece of furniture," he once told his daughter Paloma. "I'm no mechanical adder--I count mostly on my fingers--but her and me calculated the profits on them eucher--what's-their-name trees?--and it gave me a splittin' headache.

She'll be a drug queen, sure."

"Why don't you follow her example?" asked Paloma. "We have plenty of land."

Blaze, in truth, was embarra.s.sed by the size of his holdings, but he shook his head. "No, I'm too old to go rampagin' after new G.o.ds. I 'ain't got the imagination to raise anything more complicated than a mortgage; but if I was younger, I'd organize myself up and do away with that Ed Austin. I'd sure help him to an untimely end, and then I'd marry them pecan-groves, and blooded herds, and drug-store orchards.

She certainly is a heart-breakin' device, with her red hair and red lips and--"

"FATHER!" Paloma was deeply shocked.