turned to Paul, spreading his expressive hands. “Reckon it’s up to you now, boss.”
“Then it’s a deal,” replied Paul, glad to get the wearisome details settled. He had a feeling that if he considered the matter further he would lose his interest altogether. And he must have some place to stay, some work to do.
“Wal, Belmont, you an’ me will make the count of cattle. Then we’ll all ride into Wagontongue, fix up papers, payments an’ such. . . . After which I’ll teach Manning to be a cowpuncher.”
“Right-o,” acceded the trader, beaming.
“Wess, I don’t want to go back to town,” said Paul thoughtfully. “You won’t need me. I’ll give you a blank check. Get a lawyer to draw up the contract. . . . Go to my room and fetch all my clothes, everything. Buy me a saddle, bridle, blanket, spurs—all a rider needs—”
“You can buy all that right here,” interrupted Belmont, with gusto.
“Wal, if Belmont wants to rustle with me we can make thet count today an’ get off for Wagontongue tonight.”
“Rustle is my middle name, cowboy,” returned the trader heartily.
“Rustle or—rustler?” drawled Kintell, with a geniality that robbed the query of all save subtlety.
“Yes, I’ve been that last, too, in my younger days,” boomed Belmont, with a loud laugh. “Suppose you come in, Manning. This post ain’t no hotel, but I can put you up tolerable. An’ Sister can’t be beat as a cook.”
Despite Paul’s year of residence in Wagontongue, where he had gone from college at Lawrence, Kansas, to take up a career of writing, he had never been inside a trading post. The great, poorly lighted, barnlike place smelled of sheep wool, tobacco, hides and other odorous things Paul could not identify. A high counter ran the length of the room on one side and a low one on the other. Both were piled with colorful merchandise. Behind the low counter stretched rows of shelves packed with a miscellaneous assortment of objects, most prominent of which were saddles, blankets, bridles, harnesses, boots and sombreros, and a bewildering array of utensils for camp use. A rack of farming tools and one for guns, and shelves full of dry goods, mostly cheap gaudy ginghams and various colored velveteens, attested further to the trader’s surprising stock of merchandise.
A wide door opened into a stone-floored storeroom containing barrels, tins, bins of carded wool and huge burlap sacks, stuffed full, and piles of stinking goat hides.
Belmont led Manning down a long corridor with an uneven earthen floor, covered by coarse blankets, and whitewashed adobe walls thickly hung with blankets and scarfs. Doors opened into rooms on the right side, and windows on the left let in the light from a patio.
The trader entered the last room. Being at the end of that section of the house it had a window, as well as a door, and consequently was well lighted. It contained a narrow bed covered by a red blanket woven with Indian designs, a washstand, a bureau with a spotted mirror, and a shelf in the corner from which hung a curtain. The floor, like that of the corridor, was of uneven, bare earth covered by thickly woven Indian blankets. The walls and ceiling were adobe, pale brown in hue, cracked in places and stained by water. A small open fireplace of crudely cemented stones and a chimney of like construction completed the interior of the small compartment.
“Here you are,” said Belmont. “A table an’ lamp, with some fixin’ up, will make you comfortable. It’ll be cool in summer an’ warm in winter. An’ that’s luxury out here.”
“It’ll be good enough for me,” replied Manning.
The trader made an excuse for the fact that summer storms flooded the corridor at times, a defect he would remedy, and that when the dust storms raged in the spring it was necessary to keep door and window closed.
Kintell followed them with Paul’s coat and belongings from the wagon.
“Let’s rustle, Belmont,” said the cowboy. “When I count cattle I shore count ’em.”
“Right-o. It’s a big range, but if you’re not too damned good a counter we can finish before sunset. . . . Manning, make yourself at home. Loaf in the post an’ learn Indian ways. My woman will call you when supper is ready.”
Paul lay down on the bed with a sudden realization that the impulse under which he had taken this serious step had evaporated. Like all of his late, restless, unhappy impulses! He had become a rudderless craft.
A faint pungent smell, not unpleasant, assailed his nostrils. It was not the mingled odor of blankets, wool, pelts and other Indian essentials of the desert so thickly charging the atmosphere of the trading post. It entered the open door from outside and permeated his room. Wood smoke, that was it. At the same time he heard the faint wails of a baby and a soft crooning song, somehow poignant and sad, then sounds come from a cabin just beyond the corridor. Paul could see a portion of a peeled log wall and a slanting roof covered with red adobe mud.
There was a mother in that cabin and Paul, keenly susceptible to grief, had caught the note in her voice. No doubt she was the woman Belmont had called Sister, probably a sobriquet for his wife. It seemed to be a young voice, however, sweet and slightly contralto; and it arrested Paul’s wandering interest.
After a while silence prevailed and Paul fell prey to the dark mood he had feared, and against which this decisive step had been directed. He had to bow to what he could not break.
The four dismal walls of the adobe room appeared to press down upon him. They were stained and cracked, somber and inscrutable, like the walls of life which had fallen in upon him. They suited this uncanny place. For a long while he gazed around and upward, discovering much that he had not seen upon first glance. The nests of mason bees and wasps, a black spider spinning his web across a corner, faint Indian marks near the door, and a motionless praying mantis on the windowpane. He could see through those walls to the outside world, with its strife and beauty and passion, or through the ceiling to the blue sky and white clouds. Or he could make out of those blank spaces storied walls of his own conceiving. Did he not intend to go on with his long struggle to write? It all lay in the mind.
“Ah!” he mused bitterly. “That’s it. . . . All in the mind! Happiness or hell, life or death, all in the mind. It is what you think.”
And so the old, familiar, yet somehow inexplicable battle began all over again. He had won it before and he could do so again. And yet, why was it still so difficult to throw off the despair he felt? But to what end? He had struggled up out of the abyss; he had progressed; the beautiful and wonderful thing he had felt was dead; love was dead, hate was dead, vivid and torturing memories were dying. And he believed that he was ready to face the future, with courage and intelligence if not with hope.
Of the hundred and one plans that he had considered since his recovery from his futile debauch of oblivion, nothing had developed. They were futile as well. Still the days had passed. Something had been gained from merely living on.
This desert place of bitter water, this lonely upflung world of rock and earth and sage, this barren wasteland keeping its secret—was this the place that could save him? No! Those four blank walls had told him that. No place could give him back what he had lost. He need go no farther to seek, to search, to find what must be in his own soul, or else unattainable.
Therefore, this last and deliberate move to isolate himself on a forbidding and inhospitable desert was only another hopeless gesture. He would give it up. When
