The Port of Adventure | Page 6

up a smile of interest. She looked older than she had looked when she held out her hands to Nick. She had been about twenty-six then. Now she was over thirty.
"Is the lady young or old?" she asked.
"I don't know anything about her," Nick answered with a ring of truthfulness in his voice which Carmen's keen ears accepted. "All I can tell you is, that she's a Mrs. May, a relation or friend of Franklin Merriam the big California millionaire who died East about ten years ago--about the time I was first cowpunching on your ranch."
"Oh, the Franklin Merriam who made such stacks of money irrigating desert land he owned somewhere in the southern part of the State!" Carmen sighed with relief. "I've heard of him of course. He must have been middle-aged when he died, so probably this woman's old or oldish."
"I suppose so," Nick readily agreed. "Great king, isn't it mighty sweet here to-night? It looks like heaven, I guess, and you're like--like----"
"If this is heaven, am I an angel? Do I seem like that to you?"
"Well, no--not exactly my idea of an angel, somehow: though I don't know," he reflected aloud. "You're sure handsome enough--for anything, Mrs. Gaylor. But I've always thought of angels lily white, with moonlight hair and starry eyes."
"You're quite poetical!" retorted Carmen, piqued. "But other men have told me my eyes are stars."
He looked straight into them, and at the hot pomegranate colour which blazed up in her olive cheeks, like a reflection of the sunset. And Carmen looked back at him with her big, splendid eyes.
It was a man's look he gave her, a man's look at a woman; but not a man's look at the woman he wants.
"No," he answered. "They're not stars. They're more like the sun at noon in midsummer, when so many flowers are pourin' out perfume you can hardly keep your senses."
Carmen was no longer hurt. "That's the best compliment I ever had, and I've had a good many," she laughed. "Besides--coming from you, Nick! I believe it's the first you ever paid me right out in so many words."
"Was it a compliment?" Nick asked doubtfully and boyishly. "Well, I'm real glad I was smart enough to bring one off. I spoke out just what came into my mind, and I'd have felt mighty bad if you'd been cross."
"I'm not cross!" she assured him. "I'd rather be a woman--for you--than an angel. Angels are cold, far-off, impossible things that men can't grasp. Besides, their wings would probably moult."
Nick laughed, a pleasant, soft laugh, half under his breath. "Say, I don't picture angels with wings! The sort that flits into my mind when I'm tired out after a right hard day and feel kind of lonesome for something beautiful, I don't know hardly what--only something I've never had--that sort of angel is a woman, too, and not cold, though far above me, of course. She has starry eyes and moonlight hair--lots of it, hanging down in waves that could almost drown her. But I guess, after all--as you say--that sort's not my line. I'll never come in the light she makes with her shining, and if I should by accident, she wouldn't go shooting any of her starry glances my way."
Carmen was vexed again. "I didn't know you were so sentimental, Nick!"
He looked half ashamed.
"Well, I didn't know I was, either, till it popped out," he grinned. "But I suppose 'most every man has sentimental spells. Maybe, even, he wouldn't be worth his salt if he hadn't. Sometimes I think that way. But my spells don't come on often. When they do, it's generally nights in spring--like this, when special kinds of night-thoughts come flyin' along like moths--thoughts about past and future. But lately, since that blessed little oil town has been croppin' up like a bed of mushrooms round my big gusher--or rather, the company's gusher, as it is now--I've had my mind on that more than anything else, unless it's been my ditches. Gee! there's as much romance about irrigation in this country, I guess, as there is about angels which you can see only in dreams; for you see every day, when you're wide awake, the miracle of your ditches. You just watch your desert stretches or your meanest grazin' meadows turn into fairyland. I say, Mrs. Gaylor, have you ever read a mighty fine book--old but good and fresh as to-morrow's bread--called The Arabian Nights?"
"I don't know. I dare say I read some of it when I was a little girl," replied Carmen, wondering what Nick was leading up to. "It's for children, isn't it?"
"I reckon it's for every one with the right stuff in 'em," said Nick. "Anyhow, I haven't grown up enough to get beyond it. I don't mean ever to turn