The Cow Puncher | Page 5

gave the faintest intimation that a strain of fundamental
relationship links the sexes. By the western wall was a table, with
numerous dishes; and to the wall itself had been nailed wooden
boxes--salmon and tomato cases--now containing an assortment of
culinary supplies. A partially used sack of flour, and another of rolled
oats, leaned against the wall, and a trap-door in the floor gave promise
of further resources beneath. There was a window in the east and
another in the west, both open and unscreened; myriads of flies gave
the only touch of life to the dismal scene.
Irene looked it all over, then leaned against the window sill and
laughed. Her father had brought her west for holidays with the promise
of changed surroundings and new experiences, but he had promised her
no such delight as this. With the Elden kitchen still photographed in her
mind she called up the picture of her own city home; the green lawn,
faultlessly trimmed by a time-serving gardener; the floral borders, the
hedges; the two stately trees; the neat walk, the wide verandah, the dim,
mysterious hall; the rooms, heavily shaded to save the rich carpets; the
order, the precision, the fixedness, the this-sits-here and
that-stands-thereness--the flatness and emptiness and formality of it all,
and she turned again to the Elden kitchen and laughed--a soft, rippling,
irrepressible laugh, as irrepressible as the laughter of the mountain
stream amid the evergreens. Then she thought of her mother; prim,
sedate, conventional, correct--"Always be correct, my dear; there is a
right way and a wrong way, and a well-bred person always chooses the
right"--and her eyes sobered a trifle, then flashed in brighter merriment
as they pictured her mother amid these surroundings.
"She would be so shocked, oh, dreadfully shocked," she rippled to
herself. "I am quite sure she would never approve of Father breaking
his leg with such consequences. It wasn't the correct thing--very
commonplace, I should say--and think of Irene! Why, the child--she's

but a child, Andrew, a very beautiful child, but with just a little
weakness for the--ah--unconventional--she must be restrained--she
needs her mother's guidance to protect her from the suggestion of
maybe--shall I say?--vulgarity. That's a very dreadful word. Think of
all the vulgar people there are in the world. . . . And here is dear little
Irene right in the midst of it, and--horrors--revelling in it."
Then she looked again from the open window, this time with eyes that
saw the vista of valley and woodland and foothill that stretched down
into the opening prairie. Suddenly she realized that she was looking
down upon a picture--one of Nature's obscure masterpieces--painted in
brown and green and saffron against an opal canvas. It was beautiful,
not with the majesty of the great mountains, nor the solemnity of the
great plains, but with that nearer, more intimate relationship which is
the peculiar property of the foothill country. Here was neither the
flatness that, with a change of mood, could become in a moment
desolation, nor the aloofness of eternal rocks towering into cold space,
but the friendship of hills that could be climbed, and trees that lisped in
the light wind, and water that babbled playfully over gravel ridges
gleaming in the August sunshine. The girl drew a great breath of the
pure air and was about to dream a new day-dream when the voice of
her father brought her to earth.
"Can't you find anything that will do for a bandage?" he asked.
"Oh you dear Daddykins," she replied, her voice tremulous with
self-reproach. "I had forgotten. There was a spell, or something; it just
came down upon me in the window. That's a good idea, blaming one's
negligence on a spell. I must remember that. But the bandage? Dear, no;
the only cloth I see is the kitchen towel, and I can't recommend it. But
what a goose I am! Our grips are in the car, or under it, or somewhere.
I'll be back in a jiffy." And she was off at a sharp trot down the trail
along which she had so recently come in Dave Elden's wagon.
At the little stream she paused. A single log was the only bridge, and
although the water was not deep it ran swiftly, and still with the
coldness of its glacier source. She ventured along the log, but near the
centre she was seized with an acute sense of her temerity. Perhaps she

had been foolish in attempting this passage without the aid of a stick. A
stick, which could be shoved against the gravel below that blue water,
would have been a very practical aid. Suddenly, the waverings of the
mind were transmuted to the body. She felt an impetuous desire to fall
upstream, which she resisted so successfully that she promptly