Part 52

"Are you going away?" she asked.

"Yes. At least, I must go down to Denver to see my father. I shall be gone only over night."

"And will you tell him about our trip?" she pursued, with unflinching directness. "And about--me?"

He gave her a chair, and took a seat himself before replying. "Yes, I shall tell him all about it, and about you and your father and mother. He shall know how kind you've all been to me."

He said this bravely, and at the moment he meant it; but as his father's big, impassive face and cold, keen eyes came back to him his courage sank, and in spite of his firm resolution some part of his secret anxiety communicated itself to the girl, who asked many questions, with intent to find out more particularly what kind of man the elder Norcross was.

Wayland's replies did not entirely reassure her. He admitted that his father was harsh and domineering in character, and that he was ambitious to have his son take up and carry forward his work. "He was willing enough to have me go to college till he found I was specializing on wrong lines. Then I had to fight in order to keep my place. He's glad I'm out here, for he thinks I'm regaining my strength. But just as soon as I'm well enough he expects me to go to Chicago and take charge of the Western office. Of course, I don't want to do that. I'd rather work out some problem in chemistry that interests me; but I may have to give in, for a time at least."

"Will your mother and sisters be with your father?"

"No, indeed! You couldn't get any one of them west of the Hudson River with a log-chain. My sisters were both born in Michigan, but they want to forget it--they pretend they have forgotten it. They both have New-Yorkitis. Nothing but the Plaza will do them now."

"I suppose they think we're all 'Injuns' out here?"

"Oh no, not so bad as that; but they wouldn't comprehend anything about you except your muscle. That would catch 'em. They'd worship your splendid health, just as I do. It's pitiful the way they both try to put on weight. They're always testing some new food, some new tonic--they'll do anything except exercise regularly and go to bed at ten o'clock."

All that he said of his family deepened her dismay. Their interests were so alien to her own.

"I'm afraid to have you go even for a day," she admitted, with simple honesty, which moved him deeply. "I don't know what I should do if you went away. I think of nothing but you now."

Her face was pitiful, and he put his arm about her neck as if she were a child. "You mustn't do that. You must go on with your life just as if I'd never been. Think of your father's job--of the forest and the ranch."

"I can't do it. I've lost interest in the service. I never want to go into the high country again, and I don't want you to go, either. It's too savage and cruel."

"That is only a mood," he said, confidently. "It is splendid up there. I shall certainly go back some time."

He could not divine, and she could not tell him, how poignantly she had sensed the menace of the cold and darkness during his illness. For the first time in her life she had realized to the full the unrelenting enmity of the clouds, the wind, the night; and during that interminable ride toward home, when she saw him bending lower and lower over his saddle-bow, her allegiance to the trail, her devotion to the stirrup was broken. His weariness and pain had changed the universe for her. Never again would she look upon the range with the eyes of the care-free girl. The other, the civilized, the domestic, side of her was now dominant. A new desire, a bigger aspiration, had taken possession of her.

Little by little he realized this change in her, and was touched with the wonder of it. He had never had any great self-love either as man or scholar, and the thought of this fine, self-sufficient womanly soul centering all its interests on him was humbling. Each moment his responsibility deepened, and he heard her voice but dimly as she went on.

"Of course we are not rich; but we are not poor, and my mother's family is one of the oldest in Kentucky." She uttered this with a touch of her mother's quiet dignity. "Your father need not despise us."

"So far as my father is concerned, family don't count, and neither does money. But he confidently expects me to take up his business in Chicago, and I suppose it is my duty to do so. If he finds me looking fit he may order me into the ranks at once."

"I'll go there--I'll do anything you want me to do," she urged. "You can tell your father that I'll help you in the office. I can learn. I'm ready to use a typewriter--anything."

He was silent in the face of her naïve expression of self-sacrificing love, and after a moment she added, hesitatingly: "I wish I could meet your father. Perhaps he'd come up here if you asked him to do so?"

He seized upon the suggestion. "By George! I believe he would. I don't want to go to town. I just believe I'll wire him that I'm laid up here and can't come." Then a shade of new trouble came over his face. How would the stern, methodical old business man regard this slovenly ranch and its primitive ways? She felt the question in his face.

"You're afraid to have him come," she said, with the same disconcerting penetration which had marked every moment of her interview thus far. "You're afraid he wouldn't like me?"

With almost equal frankness he replied: "No. I think he'd like you, but this town and the people up here would gall him. Order is a religion with him. Then he's got a vicious slant against all this conservation business--calls it tommy-rot. He and your father might lock horns first crack out of the box. But I'll risk it. I'll wire him at once."

A knock at the door interrupted him, and Mrs. McFarlane's voice, filled with new excitement, called out: "Berrie, the District office is on the wire."

Berrie opened the door and confronted her mother, who said: "Mr. Evingham 'phones that the afternoon papers contain an account of a fight at Coal City between Settle and one of Alec Belden's men, and that the District Forester is coming down to investigate it."

"Let him come," answered Berrie, defiantly. "He can't do us any harm. What was the row about?"

"I didn't hear much of it. Your father was at the 'phone."