Part 50

Well! Dorr need not be in such thundering spirits! He had no chance with her at any rate!

And only a few months later it turned out that he, Harry Wakefield, had as little chance as Dorr.

At this point in his reflections Wakefield's elbows began to feel rough and gritty. He turned himself round and sat with his back to the mountains, looking eastward, his hands clasping one knee. He was glad the prairie was broken up into mounds and hillocks over there, and had not the look of the sea that it took on from some points of view. There was a group of pines off to the left; he had been too preoccupied to observe them as he came along the road,--strangely enough too, for a group of trees is an unusual sight out on the prairie. What a lot of trees there were in the East though, and how wofully he had come to grief among them up there on the North Shore! Only a year ago it had happened, only a year ago, in the fragrant New England June! His married sister had had Dorothy and himself visiting her at the same time. Well, Fanny had done her best for him, though it was no good. He wondered, in passing, how it happened that a fellow could come to care more for anybody else than for a sister like Fanny!

He had found Dorothy sitting in perfect idleness under a big pine-tree that lovely June morning. There were robins hopping about the lawn; the voices of his sister's children came, shrill and sweet, calling to one another as they dug in the garden by the house. The tide was coming in; he could hear it break against the rocks over yonder, while the far stretches of sea glimmered softly in the sunshine. Dorothy looked so sweet and beneficent as she sat under the big pine-tree in the summer sunshine, that all his misgivings vanished. Before he knew what he was about he had "asked her."

And here the little drama was blurred and muffled in his memory. He wondered, as he clasped his knees and studied the tops of the pine-trees, how he had put the question; whether he had perhaps put it wrong. He could not recall a word he had said; but her words in reply fell as distinct on his ear, as the note of the meadow-lark, down there by the roadside. How the note of the meadow-lark shot a thrill through the thin Colorado air,--informed with a soul the dazzling day! How cruelly sweet Dorothy's voice had been, as she said:

"No, Harry, I couldn't!"

It had made him so angry that he hardly knew how deep his hurt was.

"You have no right to say no!" he had heard himself say.

He could not remember whether that was immediately, or after an interval of discussion. She had stood up and turned away, not deigning to reply. And then the memory of that talk at the ball had struck him like a blow.

"Wait, Dorothy! You must wait!" he had cried, aware that his imperative words clutched her like a detaining hand. Then, while his breath came fast, almost chokingly, he had said: "Tell me, Dorothy, is it because you don't call me a man that you won't have me?"

The angry challenge in his voice hardened her.

"I don't know anything about how much of a man you are, Harry Wakefield," she had declared, with freezing indifference. "I only know you are not the man for me."

That had been practically the end of it. They had got through the day very creditably he believed, and the next morning they had departed on their several ways.

Wakefield had read law like mad for a week, and then he had started for Colorado. He had a favorite cousin out there whose husband was making a fortune in Lame Gulch stocks, and he thought that even prosaic fortune-hunting in a new world would be better than the gnawing chagrin that monopolized things in the old. Better be active than passive, on any terms. By the time he was well on his westward way, the sting of that refusal had yielded somewhat, and he began to take courage again. Perhaps when he had made a fortune! "It takes a man to do that," she had said. Well, he had four times the money to start with that Dick Dayton had had, and look, what chances there were!

Once fairly launched in the stirring, out-of-door Colorado life, his spirits had so far recovered their tone that he could afford to be magnanimous. Accordingly he wrote the following letter to Dorothy:

"DEAR DOROTHY,

"You were right; I wasn't half good enough for you. No fellow is, as far as that goes! Don't you let them fool you on that score! It makes me mad when I think about it. You always knew the worst of me, but you don't really know the first thing about any other man. I'm coming back next year to try again. Do give me the chance, Dorothy! Remember, I don't tell you you could make anything you like of me--that's the rubbish the rest will talk. I'm going to make something of myself first! And if I don't do it in a year, I am ready to work seven years,--or seventy,--or seventy-seven years; if you'll only have me in the end! That would have to be in Heaven, though, wouldn't it? Well, it would come to the same thing in the end! It would be Heaven for me, wherever it was!"

Wakefield had the habit of saying to Dorothy whatever came into his head; and so he had written his letter without any thought of effect. But the answer he got was so carefully worded that he could make nothing of it. At the end of three non-committal pages she wrote:

"I ought not to wish you good luck, for Papa says if you have it it will be your ruin. I did not suppose that circumstances could ruin anybody,--anybody that had any backbone, I mean. But I do wish you good luck all the same, and if you're the kind of person to be ruined by it, why, I'm sorry for you!"

There was something in that letter, non-committal as it was, that gave Wakefield the impression that a correspondence would be no furtherance to his interests. He did not write again, and he only knew, from his sister Fanny, that Dorothy was a greater favorite than ever that season; a fact from which he could gather little encouragement. He had flung himself like a piece of driftwood into the whirl of speculation; he had lost more thousands than he cared to think about, the bulk of his patrimony in fact, and his last chance was gone of making the fortune that was to have been the winning of Dorothy. "It takes a man to do that!" she had said.

Well, that was the end of it! As far as he was concerned, Dorothy Ray had ceased to exist; the past had ceased to exist, the pleasant past, with its deceitful mists and bewildering sunbeams. Things out here were crude, but they were real! He got on his feet and turned about once more. Between Mt. Washington and the range was a fertile ranch; broad fields of vivid alfalfa, big barns, pastures dotted with cattle; a line of light-green cottonwoods ran along the borders of the creek. What was that about the wilderness blossoming like the rose? He turned again and looked toward the barren hillocks. Even they, dead and inhospitable as they appeared at a little distance, afforded nourishment for cactus and painter's-brush, prickly poppy and hardy vetches. Dorothy Ray might do as she pleased,--his fortune might go where it would! That need not be the end of all things. Life, to be sure, might seem a little like a game of chess after the loss of the Queen! Pretty tough work it was likely to be to save the game, but none the less worth while for all that. He wondered what his next move would be,--and meanwhile, before recommencing the game, why not seize the most obvious outlet for his newly roused energies, by tearing down the hill at a break-neck gallop and clearing the wire fence at a bound!

"Took you for a jack-rabbit!" said a gruff voice close at hand, as he landed on his two feet by the dusty roadside.

"Not a bad thing to be," Wakefield panted, falling in step with the speaker, who was walking toward the town at a brisk pace.

"Not unless the dogs are round," the stranger demurred.

"Dogs! A jack-rabbit would never know how game he was, if it wasn't for the dogs!"

"Any on your track?" asked the man with a grin. "Looked like it when you come walluping down the mounting!"

"A whole pack of them," Wakefield answered. "Didn't you see anything of them?"

"Can't say I did."