The Cow Puncher | Page 5

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 fell down stream. The water was deeper than it looked, and colder than it looked, and when she scrambled up the farther bank she was a very wet young woman indeed. She was conscious of a deep annoyance toward young Elden. A fine bridge, that! She would tell him--but this thought died at its birth with the consciousness that Elden would be amused over the incident, and would be at little pains to disguise his merriment. And then she laughed, and ran along up the road.
The grips were duly found, and Irene congratulated herself that she and her father were in the habit of traveling with equipment for over night. She had even a spare skirt