HonorE Morrow

"The squaws who come at times to crouch upon my back have the slow listening patience of the rabbits."

Musings of the Elephant.

Pen paused, eyes angry, mouth disgusted: "You are the last person I'd ever tell, Sara, if I were. Don't add idiocy to your other accomplishments."

Sara's black eyes continued to glare for a moment. Then for the second time he astonished Penelope by laughing. He dropped back on his pillow.

"Pen! Pen! a lawyer could have given no better answer than that! I'm not worrying, Pen. You've stuck by me all these years. I know I'm safe to the end."

Penelope's scorn changed to pity. "I've been horrid today. You will have to forgive me, Sara. You must remember that you are no mild June day to live with!"

Sara gave a short nod. "Give me my pipe, Pen, and then jolly Mrs. Flynn up."

Mrs. Flynn, whose curiosity was only equaled by her kindness of heart, was only too willing to take care of Sara. Had a caged South African lion been placed in her care she would have had the same thrill at the thought of caring for it as at watching Sara. Great stories of Sara's marvelous temper had gone about the camp. Any extra steps he caused Mrs. Flynn she felt would be more than compensated for in the delectable gossip she would pick.

Pen did not ask Jim to take her down to the Ames place. She arranged to go down with Bill Evans, who kept a hog ranch near the dam. Bill fed his hogs on the camp table scrapings and filled in odd moments "renting out" his automobile. This was a sad-looking vehicle of an early vintage, held together by binding wire and bits of sheet iron. But Bill got twenty miles an hour out of the machine and took better care of it than he did of his wife.

The Ames ranch lay in the desert valley below the dam. Two hours after they left the dam, Bill drew up before the Ames door with a rattle and a series of staccato explosions that would have done credit to an approaching army.

The trip down had been a noisy rush through multicolored ranges out onto a desert floor of brilliant yellow dotted with giant cactus, that austere sentinel of the desolate plains. Long before they left the mountain road Bill pointed out to Penelope the green spot in the desert that was the Ames ranch. The road, leaving the desert, ran along an irrigating ditch fringed with cotton woods. Beyond the road lay acre after acre of alfalfa, its peculiar living green melting far beyond in the shimmering of olive orchard and orange grove.

The ranch house was of yellow gray adobe, long and low, with a red roof. Oscar had made no attempt at beauty when he had added, year after year, room on room to the original box he had built for Jane. But he unknowingly had kept close to real art. He had built of the material of the country in the manner best suited to the exigencies of the country. The result, consequently, was satisfying to eye and taste.

The walls of a desert house must be thick, for coolness. The lines of the house must be broad and low and strong, to withstand the fearful winds of late winter and early spring. The Ames house lay comfortably on the desert as if it had grown up out of the sand and proposed to live forever. It was as natural a part of the landscape as the sentinel cactus.

Jane Ames, in a blue gingham dress, was standing in the door. She waved both hands as she recognized Pen. When the machine stopped she took Pen's bag.

"Of course I knew it was Bill's machine half an hour ago, but I didn't know my luck had changed enough to bring you."

"I can stay over night," said Pen, like a child out of school.

"Come straight into the parlor bedroom," said Jane. "Bill, you'll find Oscar in the lower corral."

Pen followed into the house. Jane led her through a vista of rooms into the parlor, which was furnished with a complete "near" mahogany set in green velvet. The parlor bedroom was furnished to match. Jane always showed the people whose opinion she valued her parlor first that the edge might be taken off the living room. After Pen had taken off her hat, she followed her hostess kitchenward.

The living room was big and square, the original house. It contained a wide adobe fireplace and its windows opened toward the orange grove. It was furnished with tables and chairs that Mrs. Ames had bought from an old mission in the neighborhood. They were hand-hewn and black with age. The Navajo floor rugs were soft and well worn. Jane apologized for the room, saying she left it old and ugly for the hired men and the children, then she established Pen in a rocking chair in the kitchen.

The kitchen was a model of convenience, boasting running water as well as a kitchen cabinet and a gasoline range.

"It took me just five years to raise enough chickens and eggs to buy the cabinet and the range," said Jane, taking a peep at the bread in the oven. "I begged and begged Oscar to get me things to work with every time he sent to the mail-order house to get farm machinery. But he'd just grunt. Finally I got mad. He had running water put in the barn and wouldn't send it on up to the house. He went to San Francisco that fall and I had men out here and put water in the kitchen. When he got back the bill was waiting for him and he was ashamed to complain. It isn't that men are so bad. It's just because they haven't any idea what real work housework is. How is your husband?"

"About as usual," replied Pen.

Jane Ames looked out the door, then back at Pen. "Are you ever sorry you got married?"

Pen looked a little startled, but after a moment she answered, "I used to be."

"You mean you aren't now?" asked Jane.

"I mean I'm glad I've got the things marriage has brought me."

Jane's eyes lighted. She sat down opposite Pen. "I'm just starved for a talk with some woman who isn't afraid to say what she really thinks about this marriage business. What have you got out of being married to a cripple?"

Pen chuckled. "Well, I'm really a first-class nurse, and like Bismarck, I can keep my mouth shut in seven different languages."

"Isn't that so!" exclaimed Jane. "Oscar insists on doing all the talking for us and I let him. Some day if I ever find anything worth saying, though, I'll surprise him. I'm in the 'What's the use?' stage right now. Men are awful hard to live with."

"Almost as hard as women!" said Pen. "We're all so silly about it. We expect marriage to bring us happiness with no effort on our own parts, just as if the only aim of getting married were to be happy."

"Mercy sakes!" exclaimed Jane. She sat forward on the edge of the chair. "Go on! Don't stop. I knew the minute I saw you that talking to you would beat writing to the advice column of a woman's magazine. What is it we marry for, anyhow?"

Pen laughed. "Well, when we don't marry to be happy, we marry out of curiosity. It's funny when you think of it. Two people with nothing in common have a period of insanity during which they tie themselves together in a hard knot which they can't undo and then they must feed on each other for the rest of their lives."

Jane gasped a little. "You—you aren't bitter, are you, Mrs. Penelope? I can't say your other name easy. You believe there are some happy marriages, don't you?"

Pen shrugged her shoulders. "No, I'm not bitter. I've just lost my illusions. I don't happen to know of any marriages so happy that they would tempt me to marry again."

"I feel kind of wicked talking this way," said Jane. "But," recklessly, "you've seen the world and I haven't. And it's my chance to learn real life. You don't mean people ought not to marry, do you?" This in a half-whisper of utter demoralization.

"Oh, no! Marriage is the best means we've found for perpetuating and improving the race. It's a duty we owe society, to marry. I don't believe much in divorce either. Except for unfaithfulness. Unless the average lot of us are true to the marriage ideal the whole institution will be tainted. I guess the safety of society lies in each of us looking at ourselves as average and not exceptional persons. Then we stick to the conventions. And the conventions weren't foisted on society from above. They were sweated out from beneath to satisfy; make it possible for us to endure each other."

Jane Ames threw up both her hands. "O my! You have been hurt or you'd never be so cold-blooded! I can't look at it as calmly as you do as if it all belonged to someone else. You never bore children to a man. You can't realize what selfishness and unkindness from the father of your children can mean. Do you know that I've borne two babies in this room—alone—not even a squaw to help me? And I've watched the desert through the door and I've cursed it for what it's made of my marriage!" Jane gave a short laugh and held up her knotted, rough hands. "I had dimples on my knuckles when I came to this country."

Pen looked out the door and tried to picture to herself this other woman's life.

"I—I guess my safety has lain in my getting an impersonal view of things," she said apologetically.

"There, the bread is burning!" exclaimed Jane.

Pen laughed reminiscently. "There's a verse that says:

"I guess you need me," said Jane, "as much as I need you. There comes Oscar and I haven't set the table."

Oscar was coming up the dooryard. He stepped a little high, in the gait of one accustomed to walking in shifting sands. He was big and upstanding, with a look of honesty that Pen liked.

No one who has not known a desert farmer can realize what his acres meant to Oscar Ames. The farmer of northern lands loves his acres. But he did not create them—he did not fight nature for them, until he had made himself over along with his land.

Nature fights inch by inch every effort of man to harness the desert to his uses. She scorches the soil with heat. She poisons it with alkali. She infests it with deadly vermin and—last and supreme touch of cruelty—she forbids the soil water unless she surrounds the getting of it with infinite travail and danger.

Heat and sandstorm, failure and famine, toil unutterable, these had been Oscar Ames' portion. When at last he had won his acres, had brought the barren sand to bearing, had made three hundred acres of desert a thing of breathing beauty from January to January, the ranch meant something to him that a northern farmer could not understand. And these three hundred acres were Oscar's world. He could not see beyond them. The dam was a mere adjunct to the Ames ranch. He would leave no stone unturned to see that it served his own ranch's needs as he saw them. If Sara saw this quality in Oscar and had any motive for playing on it, he could do infinite harm to Jim.

It was something of all this that Pen was thinking as Oscar crossed the yard. He came into the kitchen in a leisurely way and greeted Pen with the cordiality that belongs to the desert country. Penelope helped Jane to put the dinner on the table and the three sat down to eat.

The two were eager to hear details of Iron Skull's death, and after Pen had described it to them, Oscar began to talk about Sara.

"How long's your husband been bedridden?" he asked.

"Oscar!" exclaimed Jane.

"Jane, you keep quiet. What's the use of being secret about it? I guess both him and her know he's bedridden."

Pen told them the story of the accident.

"Isn't that fierce!" exclaimed Oscar. "He's the smartest young fellow I've met in years. I wish even now he was running the dam instead of Manning."

"Why?" asked Penelope.

"He'd build it for the farmer and have some business sense about it."

"You don't understand Mr. Manning," said Pen. "I wish you'd try to get to know him better."

Oscar grunted. "Does the doctors think your husband will get well?" he asked, finishing off his pie.

"Oscar!" cried Jane.

"Jane, you keep quiet. These are business questions. If Sardox and I are going to run this dam, we got to understand each other's limitations. I can't ask him if he's going to die."

"We just don't know anything about it," said Pen, gently. "Mr. Ames, I'm curious to know just how you and Sara are going to run the dam."

Oscar closed his mouth importantly to open it again and say, "I never talk business with ladies."

Jane laughed suddenly. "Gracious, Oscar! I'm not worrying but what I'll get all the details. He's the original human sieve, Mrs. Penelope."

Oscar joined in Pen's laugh and started for the door, shaking his head and picking his teeth. Pen looked after him uneasily.

That afternoon Pen and Jane went with Bill and Oscar for an automobile ride over the desert. The two women sat in the tonneau, Oscar in front with Bill. The desert road was rough, full of bowlders and ruts. But neither Oscar nor Bill was hampered by roads. Whenever some distant spot roused their curiosity, the machine left the road and plunged madly across the desert, through cactus thickets and yucca clumps, through draws and over sand drifts.

Oscar and Bill kept up a shouted conversation with each other. But Pen and Jane each clutched a side of the machine, braced their feet and gave their entire attention to keeping from being flung bodily from the car. Forewarned for miles, no living creature crossed their path. The din and the dust, the hairbreadth escapes made the discomfort of the ride for the two women indescribable.

When Bill finally drew up before the ranch house door with his usual flourish of staccato explosions, Oscar alighted and watched Pen and his wife crawl feebly from the tonneau.

"Caramba!" he said. "That was a fine ride! I've been wanting to get a look at that country and a talk with you, Bill, for a month. I feel well rested."

Pen and Jane looked at each other and at the two men's grins of complaisance. Then, without a word, the two women sank against each other on the doorstep and laughed until the men, bewildered and exasperated, took themselves off to the barn. Finally Jane rose and wiped her eyes.

"There's not an inch on my body that isn't black and blue," she said weakly.

Pen pulled herself up by clinging to the door knob. "That was a real 'pleasure exertion,'" she whispered feebly. "But I'd do it twice over for a laugh like this. I haven't laughed so for eight years."

Jane gave Pen a kitchen apron and tied one on herself while she nodded. "Thank heaven! I always could laugh. It's saved my reason many a time. I don't want you to do a thing about getting supper, but you'll be sitting round in the kitchen and that'll keep your skirt clean."

Pen picked up a pan of cold boiled potatoes and began to peel them with more good will than skill. "I do like you, Jane Ames," she said. "Two people couldn't laugh together like that and not have been meant to understand each other."

Jane set the tea kettle firmly on the stove. "We'll see each other a lot if we have to walk. Peel them thin, dear child. I'm a little low on potatoes."

"I'm not very expert," apologized Pen. "Sara is putting up with a good deal just now, for I'm learning how to cook."

"I guess he don't suffer in silence!" sniffed Jane.

The next morning, when Penelope climbed regretfully onto the front seat of the automobile, Oscar came hurriedly from the corral with a dark-mustached young man in a business suit.

"This is Mr. Fleckenstein, Mrs. Sardox," he said. "He's a lawyer and him and I are going up to the dam with you. He just stopped here on his way. I'm leaving his horse in the corral, Jane."

Jane and Penelope exchanged puzzled looks. "Your hair needs fixing, Mrs. Penelope," said Jane. "Come in the house for a minute."

Pen clambered down obediently and Jane led her far into the parlor bedroom. "Your hair was all right," she whispered, "but I want to warn you. Oscar is just a great big innocent. He is crazy over anyone he thinks is smart. That Fleckenstein is a shyster lawyer. I wouldn't trust a hot stove in his hands. You see that your husband don't get thick with him. Do you trust your husband in business?"

Pen winced but she looked into Jane's blue eyes and answered, "No."

"Do you like Mr. Manning and want him to succeed?"

"Yes," replied Pen.

"Well then, it's time I took notice of things on this project and you can help me by watching things up there. I won't take time to say any more right now. Oscar will be storming in here in a minute."

When they reached the dam that afternoon, Oscar and Fleckenstein called on Sara. Pen found that they would talk nothing but land values while she was in the tent, so she wandered out in search of Jim.

She found him at the dam site. He was talking to a heavy-set, red-faced man in khaki. He was considerably older than Jim, who introduced the stranger as Mr. Jack Henderson.

"Henderson will take Iron Skull's place," explained Jim. "You must remember how I wrote home of him and how he helped me save my reputation as a road-builder on the Makon. He's been down on the diversion dam."

Penelope held out her hand. "I shall never cease regretting that I didn't get to see the Makon," she said.

Henderson's gray eyes lost their keenness for a moment. "It was hard for me to come up knowing I was to take Iron Skull's job." Pen listened in surprise to his low, gentle voice. "You know, Boss Still Jim, if he'd had a better chance for a education he'd have made his mark. He was just naturally big. He could see all over and around a thing and what it had to do with things a hundred years back and a hundred years on. That's what I call being big. A good many fellows that lives a long time in the desert gets a little of that, but Iron Skull had it more than anyone I know. I wish he'd had a better chance. I can fill his job, Boss, as far as the day's work goes, but I can't give you the big look of things he could."

Henderson was standing with his hat off, and now he rumpled his gray hair and shook his head. Pen liked him at once.

Jim nodded. "I miss him. I always shall miss him. I often thought that if my father had come out to this country, he'd have grown to be like Iron Skull. And they are both gone."

"That's the way life acts," said Henderson. "It's always the man that ought to stay that goes. And there's never any explanation of how you're going to fill the gap. He's jerked out of your life and you will go lame the rest of your life for all you know. These here story books that try to show death has got a lot of logic about it are liars. There ain't any reason or sense about death. It just goes around, hit or miss, like a lizard snapping flies."

There was a moment's silence during which the three stared at the Elephant. Then Jack cleared his throat and said casually, in his gentle voice:

"You're going to have a devil of a job enforcing your liquor ruling, Boss. It'll make trouble with the whites and more with the hombres."

Jim's steel jaw set. "There's not to be a drop of liquor on this dam except in the hospital. I expect you to back me in this, Jack. You know what trouble I had on the Makon because I never came down hard."

"Sure, I'll back you," said Henderson gently. "But I just wanted you to realize that it's going to be hell round a half mile track to enforce it. You never saw me backward about getting into a fight, did you?"

Jim smiled reminiscently and then said, "I'm going to start an ice cream and soft drink joint next to the moving picture show."

Here Pen laughed. "I asked one of the oilers in the cable tower the other day if he liked to work for the government. He grunted. I asked him if Uncle Sam didn't take good care of him and he said: 'Yes, and so does a penitentiary! What does men like the Big Boss know about what we want? Why don't he ask me?'"

Jim nodded. "That's typical. One of the hoboes I brought in half-starved the other day came to my office this morning and told me how to feed the camp. He doesn't like our menu. As near as I can make out this was his first experience at three meals a day and he never saw a bathtub before. There isn't a rough-neck in the camp that isn't convinced he could build that dam better than I. Eh, Jack?"

"Sure, all except the old Makon bunch."

"Well, we're up against the same old problem here, Henderson. We've got to have better co-operation and yet enough rivalry to keep every man on the job working his limit. The foremen don't pull together."

"In that case," said Henderson tenderly, "I'll begin by going over and kick the head off the team boss."

He smiled at Pen and started up the trail. Pen watched the workmen who were cleaning up the top of the concrete section.

"Did you have a good time with Mrs. Ames?" asked Jim.

"Still, she's a dear! And Oscar isn't so bad when you know him. Do you know, Jim, he actually believes that you are not building the dam for the farmers! Can't you do something to make him understand you?"

"Look here, Pen," replied Jim, "I'm building this dam for this valley, for all time, not for Oscar Ames or Bill Evans, nor for any one man. I'm doing my share in building. I'm not hired to educate these idiots."

Pen eyed Jim intently, trying to get his viewpoint and turning old Iron Skull's words over in her mind. Jim was standing with his hat under his arm and his brown hair blowing across his forehead.

"Pen," he said suddenly, "you are the most beautiful woman in the world."

Pen blushed clean to her eyebrows. Jim went on eagerly: "Penelope, I want to tell you how I feel about you. Will you let me?"

Pen looked at the Elephant helplessly. But the great beast lay mute and inscrutable in the sun. There was a look in Jim's eyes that Pen would have found hard to control had not Jim's secretary chosen that moment to interrupt them.

"Mr. Manning," he said, "a letter has just come in for you from the Secretary of the Interior. You told me to notify you when it came."