The Max Brand Megapack. Max Brand
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he’s sure to come back. Shorty, after a feller has seen Sally smile—the way she can smile—he couldn’t keep away. I _know_!”
They rode off at a slow trot, like men who have resigned themselves to a long journey, and Sally watched them from the door. She sat down, crosslegged, before the fire, and stirred the embers, and strove to think.
But she was not equipped for thinking, all her life had been merely action, action, action, and now, as she strove to build out some logical sequence and find her destiny in it, she failed miserably, and fell back upon herself. She was one of those single-minded people who give themselves up to emotion rarely, but when they do their whole body, their whole soul burns in the flame.
Into her mind came a phrase she had heard in her childhood. On the outskirts of Eldara there was a little shack owned by a Mexican—José, he was called, and nothing else, “Greaser” José. One night an alarm of fire was given in Eldara, and the whole populace turned out to enjoy the sight; it was a festival occasion, in a way. It was the house of Greaser José.
The cowpunchers manned a bucket line, but the source of water was far away, the line too long, and the flames gained faster than they could be quenched. All through the work of fire-fighting Greaser José was everywhere about the house, flinging buckets of water through the windows into the red furnace within; his wife and the two children stood stupidly, staring, dumb. But in the end, when the fire was towering above the roof of the house, roaring and crackling, the Mexican suddenly raised a long arm and called to the bucket line, “It is done. Señors, I thank you.”
Then he had folded his arms and repeated in a monotone, over and over again: “_Todo es perdo; todo es perdo_!”
His wife came to him, frantic, wailing, and threw her arms around his neck. He merely repeated with heavy monotony: “_Todo es perdo; todo es perdo_!”
The phrase clung in the mind of the girl; and she rose at last and went back to her bunk, repeating: “_Todo es perdo; todo es perdo! All is lost; all is lost_!”
No tears were in her eyes; they were wide and solemn, looking up to the shadows of the ceiling, and so she went to sleep with the solemn Spanish phrase echoing through her whole being: “_Todo es perdo_!”
She woke with the smell of frying bacon pungent in her nostrils.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
BACON
The savour of roasting chicken, that first delicious burst of aroma when the oven door is opened, would tempt an angel from heaven down to the lowly earth. A Southerner declares that his nostrils can detect at a prodigious distance the cooking of “possum and taters.” A Kanaka has a cosmopolitan appetite, but the fragrance which moves him most nearly is the scent of fish baking in Ti leaves. A Frenchman waits unmoved until the perfume of some rich lamb ragout, an air laden with spices, is wafted toward him.
Every man and every nation has a special dish, in general; there is only one whose appeal is universal. It is not for any class or nation; it is primarily for “the hungry man,” no matter what has given him an appetite. It may be that he has pushed a pen all day, or reckoned up vast columns, or wielded a sledge-hammer, or ridden a wild horse from morning to night; but the savour of peculiar excellence to the nostrils of this universal hungry man is the smell of frying bacon.
A keen appetite is even stronger than sorrow, and when Sally Fortune awoke with that strong perfume in her nostrils, she sat straight up among the blankets, startled as the cavalry horse by the sound of the trumpet. What she saw was Anthony Bard kneeling by the coals of the fire over which steamed a coffee-pot on one side and a pan of crisping bacon on the other.
The vision shook her so that she rubbed her eyes and stared again to make sure. It did not seem possible that she had actually wakened during the night and found him gone, and with this reality before her she was strongly tempted to believe that the coming of Nash was only a vivid dream.
“Morning, Anthony.”
He turned his head quickly and smiled to her.
“Hello, Sally.”
He was back at once, turning the bacon, which was done on the first side. Seeing that his back was turned, she dressed quickly.
“How’d you sleep?”
“Well.”
“Where?”
He turned more slowly this time.
“You woke up in the middle of the night?”
“Yes.”
“What wakened you?”
“Nash and Kilrain.”
He sighed: “I wish I’d been here.”
She answered: “I’ll wash up; we’ll eat; and then off on the trail. I’ve an idea that the two will be back, and they’ll have more men behind them.”
After a little her voice called from the outside: “Anthony, have you had a look at the morning?”
He came obediently to the doorway. The sun had not yet risen, but the fresh, rose-coloured light already swept around the horizon throwing the hills in sharp relief and flushing, faraway, the pure snows of the Little Brothers. And so blinding was the sheen of the lake that it seemed at first as though the sun were about to break from the waters, for there all the radiance of the sunrise was reflected, concentrated.
Looking in this manner from the doorway, with the water on either side and straight ahead, and the dark, narrow point of land cutting that colour like a prow, it seemed to Anthony almost as if he stood on the bridge of a ship which in another moment would gather head and sail out toward the sea of fresh beauty beyond the peaks, for the old house of William Drew stood on a small peninsula, thrusting out into the lake, a low, shelving shore, scattered with trees.
Where the little tongue of land joined the main shore the ground rose abruptly into a shoulder of rocks inaccessible to a horse; the entrance and exit to the house must be on either side of this shoulder hugging closely the edge of the water.
Feeling that halo of the morning about them, for a moment Anthony forgot all things in the lift and exhilaration of the keen air; and he accepted the girl as a full and equal partner in his happiness, looking to her for sympathy.
She knelt by the edge of the water, face and throat shining and wet, her head bending back, her lips parted and smiling. It thrilled him as if she were singing a silent song which made the brightness of the morning and the colour beyond the peaks. He almost waited to see her throat quiver—hear the high, sweet tone.
But a scent of telltale sharpness drew him a thousand leagues down and made him whirl with a cry of dismay: “The bacon, Sally!”
It was hopelessly burned; some of it was even charred on the bottom of the pan. Sally, returning on the run, took charge of the cookery and went about it with a speed and ability that kept him silent; which being the ideal mood for a spectator, he watched and found himself learning much.
Whatever that scene of the night before meant in the small and definite, in the large and vague it meant that he had a claim of some sort on Sally Fortune and it is only when a man feels that he has this claim, this proprietorship, as it were, that he begins to see a woman clearly.
Before this his observance has been half blind through prejudice either for or against; he either sees her magnified with adulation, or else the large end of the glass is placed against his eye and she is merely a speck in the distance. But let a woman step past that mysterious wall which separates the formal from the intimate—only one step—at once she is surrounded by the eyes of a man as if by a thousand spies. So it was with Anthony.
It moved him, for instance, to see the supple strength of her fingers when she was scraping the charred bacon from the bottom of the pan, and he was particularly fascinated by the undulations of the small, round wrist. He glanced down to his own hand, broad and bony in comparison.
It was his absorption in this criticism that served to keep him