Chapter VIII

Five minutes after Paula had left him, punctual to the second, the four telegrams disposed of, Dick was getting into a ranch motor car, along with Thayer, the Idaho buyer, and Naismith, the special correspondent for the Breeders’ GazetteWardman, the sheep manager, joined them at the corrals where several thousand young Shropshire rams had been assembled for inspection.

There was little need for conversation.Thayer was distinctly disappointed in this, for he felt that the purchase of ten carloads of such expensive creatures was momentous enough to merit much conversation.

“They speak for themselves,” Dick had assured him, and turned aside to give data to Naismith for his impending article on Shropshires in California and the Northwest.

“I wouldn’t advise you to bother to select them,” Dick told Thayer ten minutes later.“The average is all top.You could spend a week picking your ten carloads and have no higher grade than if you had taken the first to hand.”

This cool assumption that the sale was already consummated so perturbed Thayer, that, along with the sure knowledge that he had never seen so high a quality of rams, he was nettled into changing his order to twenty carloads.

As he told Naismith, after they had regained the Big House and as they chalked their cues to finish the interrupted game:

“It’s my first visit to Forrest’s.He’s a wizard.I’ve been buying in the East and importing.But those Shropshires won my judgment.You noticed I doubled my order.Those Idaho buyers will be wild for them.I only had buying orders straight for six carloads, and contingent on my judgment for two carloads more; but if every buyer doesn’t double his order, straight and contingent, when he sees them rams, and if there isn’t a stampede for what’s left, I don’t know sheep.They’re the goods.If they don’t jump up the sheep game of Idaho ...well, then Forrest’s no breeder and I’m no buyer, that’s all.”

As the warning gong for lunch rang out—­a huge bronze gong from Korea that was never struck until it was first indubitably ascertained that Paula was awake—­Dick joined the young people at the goldfish fountain in the big patio.Bert Wainwright, variously advised and commanded by his sister, Rita, and by Paula and her sisters, Lute and Ernestine, was striving with a dip-net to catch a particularly gorgeous flower of a fish whose size and color and multiplicity of fins and tails had led Paula to decide to segregate him for the special breeding tank in the fountain of her own secret patio.Amid high excitement, and much squealing and laughter, the deed was accomplished, the big fish deposited in a can and carried away by the waiting Italian gardener.

“And what have you to say for yourself?”Ernestine challenged, as Dick joined them.

“Nothing,” he answered sadly.“The ranch is depleted.Three hundred beautiful young bulls depart to-morrow for South America, and Thayer—­ you met him last night—­is taking twenty carloads of rams. All I can say is that my congratulations are extended to Idaho and Chile.”

“Plant more acorns,” Paula laughed, her arms about her sisters, the three of them smilingly expectant of an inevitable antic.

“Oh, Dick, sing your acorn song,” Lute begged.

He shook his head solemnly.

“I’ve got a better one.It’s purest orthodoxy.It’s got Red Cloud and his acorn song skinned to death.Listen!This is the song of the little East-sider, on her first trip to the country under the auspices of her Sunday School.She’s quite young.Pay particular attention to her lisp.”

And then Dick chanted, lisping:

  “The goldfish thwimmeth in the bowl,
    The robin thiths upon the tree;
    What maketh them thit so eathily?
    Who stuckth the fur upon their breasths?
      God!       God!       He done it!”

“Cribbed,” was Ernestine’s judgment, as the laughter died away.

“Sure,” Dick agreed. “I got it from the Rancher and Stockman, that got it from the Swine Breeders’ Journal, that got it from the Western Advocate, that got it from Public Opinion, that got it, undoubtedly, from the little girl herself, or, rather from her Sunday School teacher. For that matter I am convinced it was first printed in Our Dumb Animals.”

The bronze gong rang out its second call, and Paula, one arm around Dick, the other around Rita, led the way into the house, while, bringing up the rear, Bert Wainwright showed Lute Ernestine a new tango step.

“One thing, Thayer,” Dick said in an aside, after releasing himself from the girls, as they jostled in confusion where they met Thayer and Naismith at the head of the stairway leading down to the dining room.“Before you leave us, cast your eyes over those Merinos.I really have to brag about them, and American sheepmen will have to come to them.Of course, started with imported stock, but I’ve made a California strain that will make the French breeders sit up.See Wardman and take your pick.Get Naismith to look them over with you.Stick half a dozen of them in your train-load, with my compliments, and let your Idaho sheepmen get a line on them.”

They seated at a table, capable of indefinite extension, in a long, low dining room that was a replica of the hacienda dining rooms of the Mexican land-kings of old California.The floor was of large brown tiles, the beamed ceiling and the walls were whitewashed, and the huge, undecorated, cement fireplace was an achievement in massiveness and simplicity.Greenery and blooms nodded from without the deep-embrasured windows, and the room expressed the sense of cleanness, chastity, and coolness.

On the walls, but not crowded, were a number of canvases—­most ambitious of all, in the setting of honor, all in sad grays, a twilight Mexican scene by Xavier Martinez, of a peon, with a crooked-stick plow and two bullocks, turning a melancholy furrow across the foreground of a sad, illimitable, Mexican plain.There were brighter pictures, of early Mexican-Californian life, a pastel of twilight eucalyptus with a sunset-tipped mountain beyond, by Reimers, a moonlight by Peters, and a Griffin stubble-field across which gleamed and smoldered California summer hills of tawny brown and purple-misted, wooded canyons.

“Say,” Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter, “here’s some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big House.I’ve seen the servants’ dining room.Forty head sit down to it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help.It’s a boarding house in itself.Some head, some system, take it from me.That Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz.He’s housekeeper, or manager, of the whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job—­and, say, it runs that smooth you can’t hear it.”

“Forrest’s the real wooz,” Naismith nodded.“He’s the brains that picks brains.He could run an army, a campaign, a government, or even a three-ring circus.”

“Which last is some compliment,” Thayer concurred heartily.

“Oh, Paula,” Dick said across to his wife.“I just got word that Graham arrives to-morrow morning.Better tell Oh Joy to put him in the watch-tower.It’s man-size quarters, and it’s possible he may carry out his threat and work on his book.”

“Graham?—­Graham?”Paula queried aloud of her memory.“Do I know him?”

“You met him once two years ago, in Santiago, at the Café Venus.He had dinner with us.”

“Oh, one of those naval officers?”

Dick shook his head.

“The civilian.Don’t you remember that big blond fellow—­you talked music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out with the mailed fist.”

“Oh, to be sure,” Paula vaguely recollected.“He’d met you somewhere before...South Africa, wasn’t it?Or the Philippines?”

“That’s the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met was on the Times dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in the Café Venus.

“Heavens—­he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed each other by three days at Levuka—­I was sailing the Wild Duck then. He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at the Café Venus two years ago.”

“But who about him, and what about him?”Paula queried.“And what’s the book?”

“Well, first of all, beginning at the end, he’s broke—­that is, for him, he’s broke.He’s got an income of several thousand a year left, but all that his father left him is gone.No; he didn’t blow it.He got in deep, and the ‘silent panic’ several years ago just about cleaned him.But he doesn’t whimper.

“He’s good stuff, old American stock, a Yale man.The book—­he expects to make a bit on it—­covers last year’s trip across South America, west coast to east coast.It was largely new ground.The Brazilian government voluntarily voted him a honorarium of ten thousand dollars for the information he brought out concerning unexplored portions of Brazil.Oh, he’s a man, all man.He delivers the goods.You know the type—­clean, big, strong, simple; been everywhere, seen everything, knows most of a lot of things, straight, square, looks you in the eyes—­well, in short, a man’s man.”

Ernestine clapped her hands, flung a tantalizing, man-challenging, man-conquering glance at Bert Wainwright, and exclaimed: “And he comes tomorrow!”

Dick shook his head reprovingly.

“Oh, nothing in that direction, Ernestine.Just as nice girls as you have tried to hook Evan Graham before now.And, between ourselves, I couldn’t blame them.But he’s had good wind and fast legs, and they’ve always failed to run him down or get him into a corner, where, dazed and breathless, he’s mechanically muttered ‘Yes’ to certain interrogatories and come out of the trance to find himself, roped, thrown, branded, and married.Forget him, Ernestine.Stick by golden youth and let it drop its golden apples.Pick them up, and golden youth with them, making a noise like stupid failure all the time you are snaring swift-legged youth.But Graham’s out of the running.He’s old like me—­just about the same age—­and, like me, he’s run a lot of those queer races.He knows how to make a get-away.He’s been cut by barbed wire, nose-twitched, neck-burnt, cinched to a fare-you-well, and he remains subdued but uncatchable.He doesn’t care for young things.In fact, you may charge him with being wobbly, but I plead guilty, by proxy, that he is merely old, hard bitten, and very wise.”

Chapter IX

“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?”Dick shouted, stamping with jingling spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.

He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing.It was a door without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall.But Dick shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the spring, and the door swung wide.

“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?”he called and stamped down the length of her quarters.

A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula’s wardrobe room and dressing room.He passed the short, broad stairway that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty, lacy woman’s things that he knew she had spread out for her own sensuous delight of contemplation.He fetched up for a moment at a drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of an awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of madly whinneying for its mother.

“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?”he shouted before him, out to the sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman of thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment into his eyes.

This was Paula’s maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before, because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that made her appear as if ever on the verge of saying, “Oh dear!” In fact, Dick had taken her, as a child almost, for Paula’s service, from a fishing village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as much as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the fishermen. Oh Dear’s first service for Paula had been aboard the three-topmast schooner, All Away, at the same time that Oh Joy, cabin-boy, had begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him, through the years, to rise to the majordomoship of the Big House.

“Where is your mistress, Oh Dear?”Dick asked.

Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.

Dick waited.

“She maybe with ’m young ladies—­I don’t know,” Oh Dear stammered; and Dick, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.

“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?”he shouted, as he stamped out under the porte cochère just as a ranch limousine swung around the curve among the lilacs.

“I’ll be hanged if I know,” a tall, blond man in a light summer suit responded from the car; and the next moment Dick Forrest and Evan Graham were shaking hands.

Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and Dick accompanied his guest to the watch tower quarters.

“You’ll have to get used to us, old man,” Dick was explaining.“We run the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow ourselves all sorts of loosenesses.If you’d arrived two minutes later there’d have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys.I was just going for a ride, and Paula—­Mrs. Forrest—­has disappeared.”

The two men were almost of a size, Graham topping his host by perhaps an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders and depth of chest.Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely similarly bronzed by sun and weather-beat.Graham’s features were in a slightly larger mold; his eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a heavier droop of lids.His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter as well as larger than Dick’s, and his lips were a shade thicker, a shade redder, a shade more bowed with fulsome-ness.

Forrest’s hair was light brown to chestnut, while Graham’s carried a whispering advertisement that it would have been almost golden in its silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun.The cheeks of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrest’s cheek-bones were more pronounced.Both noses were large-nostriled and sensitive.And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the impression of girlish sweetness and chastity along with the muscles that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.

But the inch more in height and the inch less in chest-girth gave Evan Graham a grace of body and carriage that Dick Forrest did not possess.In this particular of build, each served well as a foil to the other.Graham was all light and delight, with a hint—­but the slightest of hints—­of Prince Charming.Forrest’s seemed a more efficient and formidable organism, more dangerous to other life, stouter-gripped on its own life.

Forrest threw a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of correlation, he read the dial.

“Eleven-thirty,” he said.“Come along at once, Graham.We don’t eat till twelve-thirty.I am sending out a shipment of bulls, three hundred of them, and I’m downright proud of them.You simply must see them.Never mind your riding togs.Oh Ho—­fetch a pair of my leggings.You, Oh Joy, order Altadena saddled.—­What saddle do you prefer, Graham?”

“Oh, anything, old man.”

“English?—­Australian?—­McClellan?—­Mexican?”Dick insisted.

“McClellan, if it’s no trouble,” Graham surrendered.

They sat their horses by the side of the road and watched the last of the herd beginning its long journey to Chili disappear around the bend.

“I see what you’re doing—­it’s great,” Graham said with sparkling eyes.“I’ve fooled some myself with the critters, when I was a youngster, down in the Argentine.If I’d had beef-blood like that to build on, I mightn’t have taken the cropper I did.”

“But that was before alfalfa and artesian wells,” Dick smoothed for him.“The time wasn’t ripe for the Shorthorn.Only scrubs could survive the droughts.They were strong in staying powers but light on the scales.And refrigerator steamships hadn’t been invented.That’s what revolutionized the game down there.”

“Besides, I was a mere youngster,” Graham added.“Though that meant nothing much.There was a young German tackled it at the same time I did, with a tenth of my capital.He hung it out, lean years, dry years, and all.He’s rated in seven figures now.”

They turned their horses back for the Big House.Dick flirted his wrist to see his watch.

“Lots of time,” he assured his guest.“I’m glad you saw those yearlings.There was one reason why that young German stuck it out.He had to.You had your father’s money to fall back on, and, I imagine not only that your feet itched, but that your chief weakness lay in that you could afford to solace the itching.”

“Over there are the fish ponds,” Dick said, indicating with a nod of his head to the right an invisible area beyond the lilacs.“You’ll have plenty of opportunity to catch a mess of trout, or bass, or even catfish.You see, I’m a miser.I love to make things work.There may be a justification for the eight-hour labor day, but I make the work-day of water just twenty-four hours’ long.The ponds are in series, according to the nature of the fish.But the water starts working up in the mountains.It irrigates a score of mountain meadows before it makes the plunge and is clarified to crystal clearness in the next few rugged miles; and at the plunge from the highlands it generates half the power and all the lighting used on the ranch.Then it sub-irrigates lower levels, flows in here to the fish ponds, and runs out and irrigates miles of alfalfa farther on.And, believe me, if by that time it hadn’t reached the flat of the Sacramento, I’d be pumping out the drainage for more irrigation.”

“Man, man,” Graham laughed, “you could make a poem on the wonder of water.I’ve met fire-worshipers, but you’re the first real water-worshiper I’ve ever encountered.And you’re no desert-dweller, either.You live in a land of water—­pardon the bull—­but, as I was saying...”

Graham never completed his thought.From the right, not far away, came the unmistakable ring of shod hoofs on concrete, followed by a mighty splash and an outburst of women’s cries and laughter.Quickly the cries turned to alarm, accompanied by the sounds of a prodigious splashing and floundering as of some huge, drowning beast.Dick bent his head and leaped his horse through the lilacs, Graham, on Altadena, followed at his heels.They emerged in a blaze of sunshine, on an open space among the trees, and Graham came upon as unexpected a picture as he had ever chanced upon in his life.

Tree-surrounded, the heart of the open space was a tank, four-sided of concrete.The upper end of the tank, full width, was a broad spillway, sheened with an inch of smooth-slipping water.The sides were perpendicular.The lower end, roughly corrugated, sloped out gently to solid footing.Here, in distress that was consternation, and in fear that was panic, excitedly bobbed up and down a cowboy in bearskin chaps, vacuously repeating the exclamation, “Oh God!Oh God!"—­the first division of it rising in inflection, the second division inflected fallingly with despair.On the edge of the farther side, facing him, in bathing suits, legs dangling toward the water, sat three terrified nymphs.

And in the tank, the center of the picture, a great horse, bright bay and wet and ruddy satin, vertical in the water, struck upward and outward into the free air with huge fore-hoofs steel-gleaming in the wet and sun, while on its back, slipping and clinging, was the white form of what Graham took at first to be some glorious youth.Not until the stallion, sinking, emerged again by means of the powerful beat of his legs and hoofs, did Graham realize that it was a woman who rode him—­a woman as white as the white silken slip of a bathing suit that molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery.As marble was her back, save that the fine delicate muscles moved and crept under the silken suit as she strove to keep her head above water.Her slim round arms were twined in yards of half-drowned stallion-mane, while her white round knees slipped on the sleek, wet, satin pads of the great horse’s straining shoulder muscles.The white toes of her dug for a grip into the smooth sides of the animal, vainly seeking a hold on the ribs beneath.

In a breath, or the half of a breath, Graham saw the whole breathless situation, realized that the white wonderful creature was a woman, and sensed the smallness and daintiness of her despite her gladiatorial struggles.She reminded him of some Dresden china figure set absurdly small and light and strangely on the drowning back of a titanic beast.So dwarfed was she by the bulk of the stallion that she was a midget, or a tiny fairy from fairyland come true.

As she pressed her cheek against the great arching neck, her golden-brown hair, wet from being under, flowing and tangled, seemed tangled in the black mane of the stallion.But it was her face that smote Graham most of all.It was a boy’s face; it was a woman’s face; it was serious and at the same time amused, expressing the pleasure it found woven with the peril.It was a white woman’s face—­and modern; and yet, to Graham, it was all-pagan.This was not a creature and a situation one happened upon in the twentieth century.It was straight out of old Greece.It was a Maxfield Parrish reminiscence from the Arabian Nights.Genii might be expected to rise from those troubled depths, or golden princes, astride winged dragons, to swoop down out of the blue to the rescue.

The stallion, forcing itself higher out of water, missed, by a shade, from turning over backward as it sank.Glorious animal and glorious rider disappeared together beneath the surface, to rise together, a second later, the stallion still pawing the air with fore-hoofs the size of dinner plates, the rider still clinging to the sleek, satin-coated muscles.Graham thought, with a gasp, what might have happened had the stallion turned over.A chance blow from any one of those four enormous floundering hoofs could have put out and quenched forever the light and sparkle of that superb, white-bodied, fire-animated woman.

“Ride his neck!”Dick shouted.“Catch his foretop and get on his neck till he balances out!”

The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for the quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane, the other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and clutching the foretop.The next moment, as the stallion balanced out horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped back to the shoulders.Holding with one hand to the mane, she waved a white arm in the air and flashed a smile of acknowledgment to Forrest; and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse beside Forrest.Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the life that was she.

“Not many women’d tackle that,” Dick said quietly, as Mountain Lad, easily retaining his horizontal position once it had been attained, swam to the lower end of the tank and floundered up the rough slope to the anxious cowboy.

The latter swiftly adjusted the halter with a turn of chain between the jaws.But Paula, still astride, leaned forward, imperiously took the lead-part from the cowboy, whirled Mountain Lad around to face Forrest, and saluted.

“Now you will have to go away,” she called.“This is our hen party, and the stag public is not admitted.”

Dick laughed, saluted acknowledgment, and led the way back through the lilacs to the road.

“Who ...who was it?”Graham queried.

“Paula—­Mrs. Forrest—­the boy girl, the child that never grew up, the grittiest puff of rose-dust that was ever woman.”

“My breath is quite taken away,” Graham said.“Do your people do such stunts frequently?”

“First time she ever did that,” Forrest replied.“That was Mountain Lad.She rode him straight down the spill-way—­tobogganed with him, twenty-two hundred and forty pounds of him.”

“Risked his neck and legs as well as her own,” was Graham’s comment.

“Thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of neck and legs,” Dick smiled.“That’s what a pool of breeders offered me for him last year after he’d cleaned up the Coast with his get as well as himself.And as for Paula, she could break necks and legs at that price every day in the year until I went broke—­only she doesn’t.She never has accidents.”

“I wouldn’t have given tuppence for her chance if he’d turned over.”

“But he didn’t,” Dick answered placidly. “That’s Paula’s luck. She’s tough to kill. Why, I’ve had her under shell-fire where she was actually disappointed because she didn’t get hit, or killed, or near-killed. Four batteries opened on us, shrapnel, at mile-range, and we had to cover half a mile of smooth hill-brow for shelter. I really felt I was justified in charging her with holding back. She did admit a ‘trifle.’ We’ve been married ten or a dozen years now, and, d’ye know, sometimes it seems to me I don’t know her at all, and that nobody knows her, and that she doesn’t know herself—­just the same way as you and I can look at ourselves in a mirror and wonder who the devil we are anyway. Paula and I have one magic formula: Damn the expense when fun is sellingAnd it doesn’t matter whether the price is in dollars, hide, or life.It’s our way and our luck.It works.And, d’ye know, we’ve never been gouged on the price yet.”

Chapter X

It was a stag lunch.As Forrest explained, the girls were “hen-partying.”

“I doubt you’ll see a soul of them till four o’clock, when Ernestine, that’s one of Paula’s sisters, is going to wallop me at tennis—­at least so she’s threatened and pledged.”

And Graham sat through the lunch, where only men sat, took his part in the conversation on breeds and breeding, learned much, contributed a mite from his own world-experiences, and was unable to shake from his eyes the persistent image of his hostess, the vision of the rounded and delicate white of her against the dark wet background of the swimming stallion.And all the afternoon, looking over prize Merinos and Berkshire gilts, continually that vision burned up under his eyelids.Even at four, in the tennis court, himself playing against Ernestine, he missed more than one stroke because the image of the flying ball would suddenly be eclipsed by the image of a white marble figure of a woman that strove and clung on the back of a great horse.

Graham, although an outlander, knew his California, and, while every girl of the swimming suits was gowned for dinner, was not surprised to find no man similarly accoutered.Nor had he made the mistake of so being himself, despite the Big House and the magnificent scale on which it operated.

Between the first and second gongs, all the guests drifted into the long dining room.Sharp after the second gong, Dick Forrest arrived and precipitated cocktails.And Graham impatiently waited the appearance of the woman who had worried his eyes since noon.He was prepared for all manner of disappointment.Too many gorgeous stripped athletes had he seen slouched into conventional garmenting, to expect too much of the marvelous creature in the white silken swimming suit when it should appear garbed as civilized women garb.

He caught his breath with an imperceptible gasp when she entered.She paused, naturally, for just the right flash of an instant in the arched doorway, limned against the darkness behind her, the soft glow of the indirect lighting full upon her.Graham’s lips gasped apart, and remained apart, his eyes ravished with the beauty and surprise of her he had deemed so small, so fairy-like.Here was no delicate midget of a child-woman or boy-girl on a stallion, but a grand lady, as only a small woman can be grand on occasion.

Taller in truth was she, as well as in seeming, than he had judged her, and as finely proportioned in her gown as in her swimming suit.He noted her shining gold-brown hair piled high; the healthy tinge of her skin that was clean and clear and white; the singing throat, full and round, incomparably set on a healthy chest; and the gown, dull blue, a sort of medieval thing with half-fitting, half-clinging body, with flowing sleeves and trimmings of gold-jeweled bands.

She smiled an embracing salutation and greeting.Graham recognized it as kin to the one he had seen when she smiled from the back of the stallion.When she started forward, he could not fail to see the inimitable way she carried the cling and weight of her draperies with her knees—­round knees, he knew, that he had seen press desperately into the round muscle-pads of Mountain Lad.Graham observed, also, that she neither wore nor needed corseting.Nor could he fail, as she crossed the floor, to see two women: one, the grand lady, the mistress of the Big House; one, the lovely equestrienne statue beneath the dull-blue, golden-trimmed gown, that no gowning could ever make his memory forget.

She was upon them, among them, and Graham’s hand held hers in the formal introduction as he was made welcome to the Big House and all the hacienda in a voice that he knew was a singing voice and that could proceed only from a throat that pillared, such as hers, from a chest deep as hers despite her smallness.

At table, across the corner from her, he could not help a surreptitious studying of her.While he held his own in the general fun and foolishness, it was his hostess that mostly filled the circle of his eye and the content of his mind.

It was as bizarre a company as Graham had ever sat down to dinner with. The sheep-buyer and the correspondent for the Breeders’ Gazette were still guests. Three machine-loads of men, women, and girls, totaling fourteen, had arrived shortly before the first gong and had remained to ride home in the moonlight. Graham could not remember their names; but he made out that they came from some valley town thirty miles away called Wickenberg, and that they were of the small-town banking, professional, and wealthy-farmer class. They were full of spirits, laughter, and the latest jokes and catches sprung in the latest slang.

“I see right now,” Graham told Paula, “if your place continues to be the caravanserai which it has been since my arrival, that I might as well give up trying to remember names and people.”

“I don’t blame you,” she laughed concurrence.“But these are neighbors.They drop in any time.Mrs. Watson, there, next to Dick, is of the old land-aristocracy.Her grandfather, Wicken, came across the Sierras in 1846.Wickenberg is named after him.And that pretty dark-eyed girl is her daughter....”

And while Paula gave him a running sketch of the chance guests, Graham heard scarce half she said, so occupied was he in trying to sense his way to an understanding of her.Naturalness was her keynote, was his first judgment.In not many moments he had decided that her key-note was joy.But he was dissatisfied with both conclusions, and knew he had not put his finger on her.And then it came to him—­pride.That was it!It was in her eye, in the poise of her head, in the curling tendrils of her hair, in her sensitive nostrils, in the mobile lips, in the very pitch and angle of the rounded chin, in her hands, small, muscular and veined, that he knew at sight to be the hard-worked hands of one who had spent long hours at the piano.Pride it was, in every muscle, nerve, and quiver of her—­conscious, sentient, stinging pride.

She might be joyous and natural, boy and woman, fun and frolic; but always the pride was there, vibrant, tense, intrinsic, the basic stuff of which she was builded.She was a woman, frank, outspoken, straight-looking, plastic, democratic; but toy she was not.At times, to him, she seemed to glint an impression of steel—­thin, jewel-like steel.She seemed strength in its most delicate terms and fabrics.He fondled the impression of her as of silverspun wire, of fine leather, of twisted hair-sennit from the heads of maidens such as the Marquesans make, of carven pearl-shell for the lure of the bonita, and of barbed ivory at the heads of sea-spears such as the Eskimos throw.

“All right, Aaron,” they heard Dick Forrest’s voice rising, in a lull, from the other end of the table.“Here’s something from Phillips Brooks for you to chew on.Brooks said that no man ’has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him, he gives him for mankind.’”

“So at last you believe in God?”the man, addressed Aaron, genially sneered back.He was a slender, long-faced olive-brunette, with brilliant black eyes and the blackest of long black beards.

“I’m hanged if I know,” Dick answered.“Anyway, I quoted only figuratively.Call it morality, call it good, call it evolution.”

“A man doesn’t have to be intellectually correct in order to be great,” intruded a quiet, long-faced Irishman, whose sleeves were threadbare and frayed.“And by the same token many men who are most correct in sizing up the universe have been least great.”

“True for you, Terrence,” Dick applauded.

“It’s a matter of definition,” languidly spoke up an unmistakable Hindoo, crumbling his bread with exquisitely slender and small-boned fingers. “What shall we mean as great?"

“Shall we say beauty?" softly queried a tragic-faced youth, sensitive and shrinking, crowned with an abominably trimmed head of long hair.

Ernestine rose suddenly at her place, hands on table, leaning forward with a fine simulation of intensity.

“They’re off!”she cried.“They’re off!Now we’ll have the universe settled all over again for the thousandth time.Theodore"—­to the youthful poet—­"it’s a poor start.Get into the running.Ride your father ion and your mother ion, and you’ll finish three lengths ahead.”

A roar of laughter was her reward, and the poet blushed and receded into his sensitive shell.

Ernestine turned on the black-bearded one:

“Now, Aaron.He’s not in form.You start it.You know how.Begin: ’As Bergson so well has said, with the utmost refinement of philosophic speech allied with the most comprehensive intellectual outlook that....’”

More laughter roared down the table, drowning Ernestine’s conclusion as well as the laughing retort of the black-bearded one.

“Our philosophers won’t have a chance to-night,” Paula stole in an aside to Graham.

“Philosophers?”he questioned back.“They didn’t come with the Wickenberg crowd.Who and what are they?I’m all at sea.”

“They—­” Paula hesitated.“They live here.They call themselves the jungle-birds.They have a camp in the woods a couple of miles away, where they never do anything except read and talk.I’ll wager, right now, you’ll find fifty of Dick’s latest, uncatalogued books in their cabins.They have the run of the library, as well, and you’ll see them drifting in and out, any time of the day or night, with their arms full of books—­also, the latest magazines.Dick says they are responsible for his possessing the most exhaustive and up-to-date library on philosophy on the Pacific Coast.In a way, they sort of digest such things for him.It’s great fun for Dick, and, besides, it saves him time.He’s a dreadfully hard worker, you know.”

“I understand that they...that Dick takes care of them?”Graham asked, the while he pleasured in looking straight into the blue eyes that looked so straight into his.

As she answered, he was occupied with noting the faintest hint of bronze—­perhaps a trick of the light—­in her long, brown lashes.Perforce, he lifted his gaze to her eyebrows, brown, delicately stenciled, and made sure that the hint of bronze was there.Still lifting his gaze to her high-piled hair, he again saw, but more pronounced, the bronze note glinting from the brown-golden hair.Nor did he fail to startle and thrill to a dazzlement of smile and teeth and eye that frequently lived its life in her face.Hers was no thin smile of restraint, he judged.When she smiled she smiled all of herself, generously, joyously, throwing the largess of all her being into the natural expression of what was herself and which domiciled somewhere within that pretty head of hers.

“Yes,” she was saying.“They have never to worry, as long as they live, over mere bread and butter.Dick is most generous, and, rather immoral, in his encouragement of idleness on the part of men like them.It’s a funny place, as you’ll find out until you come to understand us.They...they are appurtenances, and—­and hereditaments, and such things.They will be with us always until we bury them or they bury us.Once in a while one or another of them drifts away—­for a time.Like the cat, you know.Then it costs Dick real money to get them back.Terrence, there—­Terrence McFane—­he’s an epicurean anarchist, if you know what that means.He wouldn’t kill a flea.He has a pet cat I gave him, a Persian of the bluest blue, and he carefully picks her fleas, not injuring them, stores them in a vial, and turns them loose in the forest on his long walks when he tires of human companionship and communes with nature.

“Well, only last year, he got a bee in his bonnet—­the alphabet.He started for Egypt—­without a cent, of course—­to run the alphabet down in the home of its origin and thereby to win the formula that would explain the cosmos.He got as far as Denver, traveling as tramps travel, when he mixed up in some I.W.W.riot for free speech or something.Dick had to hire lawyers, pay fines, and do just about everything to get him safe home again.

“And the one with a beard—­Aaron Hancock.Like Terrence, he won’t work.Aaron’s a Southerner.Says none of his people ever did work, and that there have always been peasants and fools who just couldn’t be restrained from working.That’s why he wears a beard.To shave, he holds, is unnecessary work, and, therefore, immoral.I remember, at Melbourne, when he broke in upon Dick and me, a sunburnt wild man from out the Australian bush.It seems he’d been making original researches in anthropology, or folk-lore-ology, or something like that.Dick had known him years before in Paris, and Dick assured him, if he ever drifted back to America, of food and shelter.So here he is.”

“And the poet?”Graham asked, glad that she must still talk for a while, enabling him to study the quick dazzlement of smile that played upon her face.

“Oh, Theo—­Theodore Malken, though we call him Leo.He won’t work, either.His people are old Californian stock and dreadfully wealthy; but they disowned him and he disowned them when he was fifteen.They say he is lunatic, and he says they are merely maddening.He really writes some remarkable verse...when he does write; but he prefers to dream and live in the jungle with Terrence and Aaron.He was tutoring immigrant Jews in San Francisco, when Terrence and Aaron rescued him, or captured him, I don’t know which.He’s been with us two years now, and he’s actually filling out, despite the facts that Dick is absurdly generous in furnishing supplies and that they’d rather talk and read and dream than cook.The only good meals they get is when they descend upon us, like to-night.”

“And the Hindoo, there—­who’s he?”

“That’s Dar Hyal.He’s their guest.The three of them invited him up, just as Aaron first invited Terrence, and as Aaron and Terrence invited Leo.Dick says, in time, three more are bound to appear, and then he’ll have his Seven Sages of the Madroño Grove.Their jungle camp is in a madroño grove, you know.It’s a most beautiful spot, with living springs, a canyon—­but I was telling you about Dar Hyal.

“He’s a revolutionist, of sorts. He’s dabbled in our universities, studied in France, Italy, Switzerland, is a political refugee from India, and he’s hitched his wagon to two stars: one, a new synthetic system of philosophy; the other, rebellion against the tyranny of British rule in India. He advocates individual terrorism and direct mass action. That’s why his paper, Kadar, or Badar, or something like that, was suppressed here in California, and why he narrowly escaped being deported; and that’s why he’s up here just now, devoting himself to formulating his philosophy.

“He and Aaron quarrel tremendously—­that is, on philosophical matters.And now—­” Paula sighed and erased the sigh with her smile—­"and now, I’m done.Consider yourself acquainted.And, oh, if you encounter our sages more intimately, a word of warning, especially if the encounter be in the stag room: Dar Hyal is a total abstainer; Theodore Malken can get poetically drunk, and usually does, on one cocktail; Aaron Hancock is an expert wine-bibber; and Terrence McFane, knowing little of one drink from another, and caring less, can put ninety-nine men out of a hundred under the table and go right on lucidly expounding epicurean anarchy.”

One thing Graham noted as the dinner proceeded.The sages called Dick Forrest by his first name; but they always addressed Paula as “Mrs. Forrest,” although she called them by their first names.There was nothing affected about it.Quite unconsciously did they, who respected few things under the sun, and among such few things not even work—­ quite unconsciously, and invariably, did they recognize the certain definite aloofness in Dick Forrest’s wife so that her given name was alien to their lips.By such tokens Evan Graham was not slow in learning that Dick Forrest’s wife had a way with her, compounded of sheerest democracy and equally sheer royalty.

It was the same thing, after dinner, in the big living room.She dared as she pleased, but nobody assumed.Before the company settled down, Paula seemed everywhere, bubbling over with more outrageous spirits than any of them.From this group or that, from one corner or another, her laugh rang out.And her laugh fascinated Graham.There was a fibrous thrill in it, most sweet to the ear, that differentiated it from any laugh he had ever heard.It caused Graham to lose the thread of young Mr. Wombold’s contention that what California needed was not a Japanese exclusion law but at least two hundred thousand Japanese coolies to do the farm labor of California and knock in the head the threatened eight-hour day for agricultural laborers.Young Mr. Wombold, Graham gleaned, was an hereditary large land-owner in the vicinity of Wickenberg who prided himself on not yielding to the trend of the times by becoming an absentee landlord.

From the piano, where Eddie Mason was the center of a group of girls, came much noise of ragtime music and slangtime song.Terrence McFane and Aaron Hancock fell into a heated argument over the music of futurism.And Graham was saved from the Japanese situation with Mr. Wombold by Dar Hyal, who proceeded to proclaim Asia for the Asiatics and California for the Californians.

Paula, catching up her skirts for speed, fled down the room in some romp, pursued by Dick, who captured her as she strove to dodge around the Wombold group.

“Wicked woman,” Dick reproved her in mock wrath; and, the next moment, joined her in persuading Dar Hyal to dance.

And Dar Hyal succumbed, flinging Asia and the Asiatics to the winds, along with his arms and legs, as he weirdly parodied the tango in what he declared to be the “blastic” culmination of modern dancing.

“And now, Red Cloud, sing Mr. Graham your Acorn Song,” Paula commanded Dick.

Forrest, his arm still about her, detaining her for the threatened punishment not yet inflicted, shook his head somberly.

“The Acorn Song!”Ernestine called from the piano; and the cry was taken up by Eddie Mason and the girls.

“Oh, do, Dick,” Paula pleaded.“Mr. Graham is the only one who hasn’t heard it.”

Dick shook his head.

“Then sing him your Goldfish Song.”

“I’ll sing him Mountain Lad’s song,” Dick bullied, a whimsical sparkle in his eyes.He stamped his feet, pranced, nickered a not bad imitation of Mountain Lad, tossed an imaginary mane, and cried:

“Hear me!I am Eros!I stamp upon the hills!”

“The Acorn Song,” Paula interrupted quickly and quietly, with just the hint of steel in her voice.

Dick obediently ceased his chant of Mountain Lad, but shook his head like a stubborn colt.

“I have a new song,” he said solemnly.“It is about you and me, Paula.I got it from the Nishinam.”

“The Nishinam are the extinct aborigines of this part of California,” Paula shot in a swift aside of explanation to Graham.

Dick danced half a dozen steps, stiff-legged, as Indians dance, slapped his thighs with his palms, and began a new chant, still retaining his hold on his wife.

“Me, I am Ai-kut, the first man of the Nishinam.Ai-kut is the short for Adam, and my father and my mother were the coyote and the moon.And this is Yo-to-to-wi, my wife.She is the first woman of the Nishinam.Her father and her mother were the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat.They were the best father and mother left after my father and mother.The coyote is very wise, the moon is very old; but who ever heard much of anything of credit to the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat?The Nishinam are always right.The mother of all women had to be a cat, a little, wizened, sad-faced, shrewd ring-tailed cat.”

Whereupon the song of the first man and woman was interrupted by protests from the women and acclamations from the men.

“This is Yo-to-to-wi, which is the short for Eve,” Dick chanted on, drawing Paula bruskly closer to his side with a semblance of savage roughness.“Yo-to-to-wi is not much to look at.But be not hard upon her.The fault is with the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat.Me, I am Ai-kut, the first man; but question not my taste.I was the first man, and this, I saw, was the first woman.Where there is but one choice, there is not much to choose.Adam was so circumstanced.He chose Eve.Yo-to-to-wi was the one woman in all the world for me, so I chose Yo-to-to-wi.”

And Evan Graham, listening, his eyes on that possessive, encircling arm of all his hostess’s fairness, felt an awareness of hurt, and arose unsummoned the thought, to be dismissed angrily, “Dick Forrest is lucky—­too lucky.”

“Me, I am Ai-kut,” Dick chanted on.“This is my dew of woman.She is my honey-dew of woman.I have lied to you.Her father and her mother were neither hopper nor cat.They were the Sierra dawn and the summer east wind of the mountains.Together they conspired, and from the air and earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love the leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed with the honey-dew.

“Yo-to-to-wi is my honey-dew woman.Hear me!I am Ai-kut.Yo-to-to-wi is my quail woman, my deer-woman, my lush-woman of all soft rain and fat soil.She was born of the thin starlight and the brittle dawn-light before the sun . . .

“And,” Forrest concluded, relapsing into his natural voice and enunciation, having reached the limit of extemporization,—­"and if you think old, sweet, blue-eyed Solomon has anything on me in singing the Song of Songs, just put your names down for the subscription edition of my Song of Songs.”

Chapter XI

It was Mrs. Mason who first asked that Paula play; but it was Terrence McFane and Aaron Hancock who evicted the rag-time group from the piano and sent Theodore Malken, a blushing ambassador, to escort Paula.

“‘Tis for the confounding of this pagan that I’m askin’ you to play ‘Reflections on the Water,’” Graham heard Terrence say to her.

“And ‘The Girl with Flaxen Hair,’ after, please,” begged Hancock, the indicted pagan.“It will aptly prove my disputation.This wild Celt has a bog-theory of music that predates the cave-man—­and he has the unadulterated stupidity to call himself ultra-modern.”

“Oh, Debussy!”Paula laughed.“Still wrangling over him, eh?I’ll try and get around to him.But I don’t know with what I’ll begin.”

Dar Hyal joined the three sages in seating Paula at the concert grand which, Graham decided, was none too great for the great room.But no sooner was she seated than the three sages slipped away to what were evidently their chosen listening places.The young poet stretched himself prone on a deep bearskin forty feet from the piano, his hands buried in his hair.Terrence and Aaron lolled into a cushioned embrasure of a window seat, sufficiently near to each other to nudge the points of their respective contentions as Paula might expound them.The girls were huddled in colored groups on wide couches or garlanded in twos and threes on and in the big koa-wood chairs.

Evan Graham half-started forward to take the honor of turning Paula’s music, but saw in time that Dar Hyal had already elected to himself that office.Graham glimpsed the scene with quiet curious glances.The grand piano, under a low arch at the far-end of the room, was cunningly raised and placed as on and in a sounding board.All jollity and banter had ceased.Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a way with her and was accepted as a player of parts.And from this he was perversely prepared for disappointment.

Ernestine leaned across from a chair to whisper to him:

“She can do anything she wants to do.And she doesn’t work . . .much.She studied under Leschetizky and Madame Carreno, you know, and she abides by their methods.She doesn’t play like a woman, either.Listen to that!”

Graham knew that he expected disappointment from her confident hands, even as she rippled them over the keys in little chords and runs with which he could not quarrel but which he had heard too often before from technically brilliant but musically mediocre performers.But whatever he might have fancied she would play, he was all unprepared for Rachmaninoff’s sheerly masculine Prelude, which he had heard only men play when decently played.

She took hold of the piano, with the first two ringing bars, masterfully, like a man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding wires, with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of maleness. And then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or leaped—­he could scarcely say which—­to the sureness and pureness and ineffable softness of the Andante following.

She played on, with the calm and power of anything but the little, almost girlish woman he glimpsed through half-closed lids across the ebony board of the enormous piano, which she commanded, as she commanded herself, as she commanded the composer.Her touch was definite, authoritative, was his judgment, as the Prelude faded away in dying chords hauntingly reminiscent of its full vigor that seemed still to linger in the air.

While Aaron and Terrence debated in excited whispers in the window seat, and while Dar Hyal sought other music at Paula’s direction, she glanced at Dick, who turned off bowl after bowl of mellow light till Paula sat in an oasis of soft glow that brought out the dull gold lights in her dress and hair.

Graham watched the lofty room grow loftier in the increasing shadows.Eighty feet in length, rising two stories and a half from masonry walls to tree-trunked roof, flung across with a flying gallery from the rail of which hung skins of wild animals, hand-woven blankets of Oaxaca and Ecuador, and tapas, woman-pounded and vegetable-dyed, from the islands of the South Pacific, Graham knew it for what it was—­a feast-hall of some medieval castle; and almost he felt a poignant sense of lack of the long spread table, with pewter below the salt and silver above the salt, and with huge hound-dogs scuffling beneath for bones.

Later, when Paula had played sufficient Debussy to equip Terrence and Aaron for fresh war, Graham talked with her about music for a few vivid moments.So well did she prove herself aware of the philosophy of music, that, ere he knew it, he was seduced into voicing his own pet theory.

“And so,” he concluded, “the true psychic factor of music took nearly three thousand years to impress itself on the Western mind.Debussy more nearly attains the idea-engendering and suggestive serenity—­say of the time of Pythagoras—­than any of his fore-runners—­”

Here, Paula put a pause in his summary by beckoning over Terrence and Aaron from their battlefield in the windowseat.

“Yes, and what of it?”Terrence was demanding, as they came up side by side.“I defy you, Aaron, I defy you, to get one thought out of Bergson on music that is more lucid than any thought he ever uttered in his ‘Philosophy of Laughter,’ which is not lucid at all.”

“Oh!—­listen!”Paula cried, with sparkling eyes.“We have a new prophet.Hear Mr. Graham.He’s worthy of your steel, of both your steel.He agrees with you that music is the refuge from blood and iron and the pounding of the table.That weak souls, and sensitive souls, and high-pitched souls flee from the crassness and the rawness of the world to the drug-dreams of the over-world of rhythm and vibration—­”

“Atavistic!”Aaron Hancock snorted.“The cave-men, the monkey-folk, and the ancestral bog-men of Terrence did that sort of thing—­”

“But wait,” Paula urged.“It’s his conclusions and methods and processes.Also, there he disagrees with you, Aaron, fundamentally.He quoted Pater’s ’that all art aspires toward music’—­”

“Pure prehuman and micro-organic chemistry,” Aaron broke in.“The reactions of cell-elements to the doggerel punch of the wave-lengths of sunlight, the foundation of all folk-songs and rag-times.Terrence completes his circle right there and stultifies all his windiness.Now listen to me, and I will present—­”

“But wait,” Paula pleaded.“Mr. Graham argues that English puritanism barred music, real music, for centuries....”

“True,” said Terrence.

“And that England had to win to its sensuous delight in rhythm through Milton and Shelley—­”

“Who was a metaphysician.”Aaron broke in.

“A lyrical metaphysician,” Terrence defined instantly.“That you must acknowledge, Aaron.”

“And Swinburne?”Aaron demanded, with a significance that tokened former arguments.

“He says Offenbach was the fore-runner of Arthur Sullivan,” Paula cried challengingly.“And that Auber was before Offenbach.And as for Wagner, ask him, just ask him—­”

And she slipped away, leaving Graham to his fate.He watched her, watched the perfect knee-lift of her draperies as she crossed to Mrs. Mason and set about arranging bridge quartets, while dimly he could hear Terrence beginning:

“It is agreed that music was the basis of inspiration of all the arts of the Greeks....”

Later, when the two sages were obliviously engrossed in a heated battle as to whether Berlioz or Beethoven had exposited in their compositions the deeper intellect, Graham managed his escape. Clearly, his goal was to find his hostess again. But she had joined two of the girls in the whispering, giggling seclusiveness of one of the big chairs, and, most of the company being deep in bridge, Graham found himself drifted into a group composed of Dick Forrest, Mr. Wombold, Dar Hyal, and the correspondent of the Breeders’ Gazette

“I’m sorry you won’t be able to run over with me,” Dick was saying to the correspondent.“It would mean only one more day.I’ll take you tomorrow.”

“Sorry,” was the reply. “But I must make Santa Rosa. Burbank has promised me practically a whole morning, and you know what that means. Yet I know the Gazette would be glad for an account of the experiment. Can’t you outline it? —­briefly, just briefly? Here’s Mr. Graham. It will interest him, I am sure.”

“More water-works?”Graham queried.

“No; an asinine attempt to make good farmers out of hopelessly poor ones,” Mr. Wombold answered.“I contend that any farmer to-day who has no land of his own, proves by his lack of it that he is an inefficient farmer.”

“On the contrary,” spoke up Dar Hyal, weaving his slender Asiatic fingers in the air to emphasize his remarks.“Quite on the contrary.Times have changed.Efficiency no longer implies the possession of capital.It is a splendid experiment, an heroic experiment.And it will succeed.”

“What is it, Dick?”Graham urged.“Tell us.”

“Oh, nothing, just a white chip on the table,” Forrest answered lightly.“Most likely it will never come to anything, although just the same I have my hopes—­”

“A white chip!”Wombold broke in.“Five thousand acres of prime valley land, all for a lot of failures to batten on, to farm, if you please, on salary, with food thrown in!”

“The food that is grown on the land only,” Dick corrected.“Now I will have to put it straight.I’ve set aside five thousand acres midway between here and the Sacramento River.”

“Think of the alfalfa it grew, and that you need,” Wombold again interrupted.

“My dredgers redeemed twice that acreage from the marshes in the past year,” Dick replied.“The thing is, I believe the West and the world must come to intensive farming.I want to do my share toward blazing the way.I’ve divided the five thousand acres into twenty-acre holdings.I believe each twenty acres should support, comfortably, not only a family, but pay at least six per cent.”

“When it is all allotted it will mean two hundred and fifty families,” the Gazette man calculated; “and, say five to the family, it will mean twelve hundred and fifty souls.”

“Not quite,” Dick corrected.“The last holding is occupied, and we have only a little over eleven hundred on the land.”He smiled whimsically.“But they promise, they promise.Several fat years and they’ll average six to the family.”

“Who is we?”Graham inquired.

“Oh, I have a committee of farm experts on it—­my own men, with the exception of Professor Lieb, whom the Federal Government has loaned me. The thing is: they must farm, with individual responsibility, according to the scientific methods embodied in our instructions. The land is uniform. Every holding is like a pea in the pod to every other holding. The results of each holding will speak in no uncertain terms. The failure of any farmer, through laziness or stupidity, measured by the average result of the entire two hundred and fifty farmers, will not be tolerated. Out the failures must go, convicted by the average of their fellows.

“It’s a fair deal.No farmer risks anything.With the food he may grow and he and his family may consume, plus a cash salary of a thousand a year, he is certain, good seasons and bad, stupid or intelligent, of at least a hundred dollars a month.The stupid and the inefficient will be bound to be eliminated by the intelligent and the efficient.That’s all.It will demonstrate intensive farming with a vengeance.And there is more than the certain salary guaranty.After the salary is paid, the adventure must yield six per cent, to me.If more than this is achieved, then the entire hundred per cent, of the additional achievement goes to the farmer.”

“Which means that each farmer with go in him will work nights to make good—­I see,” said the Gazette man. “And why not? Hundred-dollar jobs aren’t picked up for the asking. The average farmer in the United States doesn’t net fifty a month on his own land, especially when his wages of superintendence and of direct personal labor are subtracted. Of course able men will work their heads off to hold to such a proposition, and they’ll see to it that every member of the family does the same.”

“’Tis the one objection I have to this place,” Terrence McFane, who had just joined the group, announced.“Ever one hears but the one thing—­work.’Tis repulsive, the thought of the work, each on his twenty acres, toilin’ and moilin’, daylight till dark, and after dark—­ an’ for what?A bit of meat, a bit of bread, and, maybe, a bit of jam on the bread.An’ to what end?Is meat an’ bread an’ jam the end of it all, the meaning of life, the goal of existence?Surely the man will die, like a work horse dies, after a life of toil.And what end has been accomplished?Bread an’ meat an’ jam?Is that it?A full belly and shelter from the cold till one’s body drops apart in the dark moldiness of the grave?”

“But, Terrence, you, too, will die,” Dick Forrest retorted.

“But, oh, my glorious life of loafing,” came the instant answer.“The hours with the stars and the flowers, under the green trees with the whisperings of breezes in the grass.My books, my thinkers and their thoughts.Beauty, music, all the solaces of all the arts.What?When I fade into the dark I shall have well lived and received my wage for living.But these twenty-acre work-animals of two-legged men of yours!Daylight till dark, toil and moil, sweat on the shirts on the backs of them that dries only to crust, meat and bread in their bellies, roofs that don’t leak, a brood of youngsters to live after them, to live the same beast-lives of toil, to fill their bellies with the same meat and bread, to scratch their backs with the same sweaty shirts, and to go into the dark knowing only meat and bread, and, mayhap, a bit of jam.”

“But somebody must do the work that enables you to loaf,” Mr. Wombold spoke up indignantly.

“’Tis true, ’tis sad ’tis true,” Terrence replied lugubriously.Then his face beamed.“And I thank the good Lord for it, for the work-beasties that drag and drive the plows up and down the fields, for the bat-eyed miner-beasties that dig the coal and gold, for all the stupid peasant-beasties that keep my hands soft, and give power to fine fellows like Dick there, who smiles on me and shares the loot with me, and buys the latest books for me, and gives me a place at his board that is plenished by the two-legged work-beasties, and a place at his fire that is builded by the same beasties, and a shack and a bed in the jungle under the madroño trees where never work intrudes its monstrous head.”

Evan Graham was slow in getting ready for bed that night.He was unwontedly stirred both by the Big House and by the Little Lady who was its mistress.As he sat on the edge of the bed, half-undressed, and smoked out a pipe, he kept seeing her in memory, as he had seen her in the flesh the past twelve hours, in her varied moods and guises—­the woman who had talked music with him, and who had expounded music to him to his delight; who had enticed the sages into the discussion and abandoned him to arrange the bridge tables for her guests; who had nestled in the big chair as girlish as the two girls with her; who had, with a hint of steel, quelled her husband’s obstreperousness when he had threatened to sing Mountain Lad’s song; who, unafraid, had bestridden the half-drowning stallion in the swimming tank; and who, a few hours later, had dreamed into the dining room, distinctive in dress and person, to meet her many guests.

The Big House, with all its worthy marvels and bizarre novelties, competed with the figure of Paula Forrest in filling the content of his imagination.Once again, and yet again, many times, he saw the slender fingers of Dar Hyal weaving argument in the air, the black whiskers of Aaron Hancock enunciating Bergsonian dogmas, the frayed coat-cuffs of Terrence McFane articulating thanks to God for the two-legged work-beasties that enabled him to loaf at Dick Forrest’s board and under Dick Forrest’s madroño trees.

Graham knocked out his pipe, took a final sweeping survey of the strange room which was the last word in comfort, pressed off the lights, and found himself between cool sheets in the wakeful dark.Again he heard Paula Forrest laugh; again he sensed her in terms of silver and steel and strength; again, against the dark, he saw that inimitable knee-lift of her gown.The bright vision of it was almost an irk to him, so impossible was it for him to shake it from his eyes.Ever it returned and burned before him, a moving image of light and color that he knew to be subjective but that continually asserted the illusion of reality.

He saw stallion and rider sink beneath the water, and rise again, a flurry of foam and floundering of hoofs, and a woman’s face that laughed while she drowned her hair in the drowning mane of the beast.And the first ringing bars of the Prelude sounded in his ears as again he saw the same hands that had guided the stallion lift the piano to all Rachmaninoff’s pure splendor of sound.

And when Graham finally fell asleep, it was in the thick of marveling over the processes of evolution that could produce from primeval mire and dust the glowing, glorious flesh and spirit of woman.

Chapter XII

The next morning Graham learned further the ways of the Big House.Oh My had partly initiated him in particular things the preceding day and had learned that, after the waking cup of coffee, he preferred to breakfast at table, rather than in bed.Also, Oh My had warned him that breakfast at table was an irregular affair, anywhere between seven and nine, and that the breakfasters merely drifted in at their convenience.If he wanted a horse, or if he wanted a swim or a motor car, or any ranch medium or utility he desired, Oh My informed him, all he had to do was to call for it.

Arriving in the breakfast room at half past seven, Graham found himself just in time to say good-by to the Gazette man and the Idaho buyer, who, finishing, were just ready to catch the ranch machine that connected at Eldorado with the morning train for San Francisco. He sat alone, being perfectly invited by a perfect Chinese servant to order as he pleased, and found himself served with his first desire—­an ice-cold, sherried grapefruit, which, the table-boy proudly informed him, was “grown on the ranch.” Declining variously suggested breakfast foods, mushes, and porridges, Graham had just ordered his soft-boiled eggs and bacon, when Bert Wainwright drifted in with a casualness that Graham recognized as histrionic, when, five minutes later, in boudoir cap and delectable negligee, Ernestine Desten drifted in and expressed surprise at finding such a multitude of early risers.

Later, as the three of them were rising from table, they greeted Lute Desten and Rita Wainwright arriving.Over the billiard table with Bert, Graham learned that Dick Forrest never appeared for breakfast, that he worked in bed from terribly wee small hours, had coffee at six, and only on unusual occasions appeared to his guests before the twelve-thirty lunch.As for Paula Forrest, Bert explained, she was a poor sleeper, a late riser, lived behind a door without a knob in a spacious wing with a rare and secret patio that even he had seen but once, and only on infrequent occasion was she known to appear before twelve-thirty, and often not then.

“You see, she’s healthy and strong and all that,” he explained, “but she was born with insomnia.She never could sleep.She couldn’t sleep as a little baby even.But it’s never hurt her any, because she’s got a will, and won’t let it get on her nerves.She’s just about as tense as they make them, yet, instead of going wild when she can’t sleep, she just wills to relax, and she does relax.She calls them her `white nights,’ when she gets them.Maybe she’ll fall asleep at daybreak, or at nine or ten in the morning; and then she’ll sleep the rest of the clock around and get down to dinner as chipper as you please.”

“It’s constitutional, I fancy,” Graham suggested.

Bert nodded.

“It would be a handicap to nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand.But not to her.She puts up with it, and if she can’t sleep one time—­she should worry—­she just sleeps some other time and makes it up.”

More and other things Bert Wainwright told of his hostess, and Graham was not slow in gathering that the young man, despite the privileges of long acquaintance, stood a good deal in awe of her.

“I never saw anybody whose goat she couldn’t get if she went after it,” he confided.“Man or woman or servant, age, sex, and previous condition of servitude—­it’s all one when she gets on the high and mighty.And I don’t see how she does it.Maybe it’s just a kind of light that comes into her eyes, or some kind of an expression on her lips, or, I don’t know what—­anyway, she puts it across and nobody makes any mistake about it.”

“She has a ...a way with her,” Graham volunteered.

“That’s it!”Bert’s face beamed.“It’s a way she has.She just puts it over.Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don’t know why.Maybe she’s learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she’s learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting sour.The chances are she didn’t bat an eye all last night—­ excitement, you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such things.Now ordinary things that’d keep most women awake, like danger, or storm at sea, and such things, Dick says don’t faze her.She can sleep like a baby, he says, when the town she’s in is being bombarded or when the ship she’s in is trying to claw off a lee shore.She’s a wonder, and no mistake.You ought to play billiards with her—­the English game.She’ll go some.”

A little later, Graham, along with Bert, encountered the girls in the morning room, where, despite an hour of rag-time song and dancing and chatter, he was scarcely for a moment unaware of a loneliness, a lack, and a desire to see his hostess, in some fresh and unguessed mood and way, come in upon them through the open door.

Still later, mounted on Altadena and accompanied by Bert on a thoroughbred mare called Mollie, Graham made a two hours’ exploration of the dairy center of the ranch, and arrived back barely in time to keep an engagement with Ernestine in the tennis court.

He came to lunch with an eagerness for which his keen appetite could not entirely account; and he knew definite disappointment when his hostess did not appear.

“A white night,” Dick Forrest surmised for his guest’s benefit, and went into details additional to Bert’s of her constitutional inaptitude for normal sleep. “Do you know, we were married years before I ever saw her sleep. I knew she did sleep, but I never saw her. I’ve seen her go three days and nights without closing an eye and keep sweet and cheerful all the time, and when she did sleep, it was out of exhaustion. That was when the All Away went ashore in the Carolines and the whole population worked to get us off. It wasn’t the danger, for there wasn’t any. It was the noise. Also, it was the excitement. She was too busy living. And when it was almost all over, I actually saw her asleep for the first time in my life.”

A new guest had arrived that morning, a Donald Ware, whom Graham met at lunch.He seemed well acquainted with all, as if he had visited much in the Big House; and Graham gathered that, despite his youth, he was a violinist of note on the Pacific Coast.

“He has conceived a grand passion for Paula,” Ernestine told Graham as they passed out from the dining room.

Graham raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, but she doesn’t mind,” Ernestine laughed.“Every man that comes along does the same thing.She’s used to it.She has just a charming way of disregarding all their symptoms, and enjoys them, and gets the best out of them in consequence.It’s lots of fun to Dick.You’ll be doing the same before you’re here a week.If you don’t, we’ll all be surprised mightily.And if you don’t, most likely you’ll hurt Dick’s feelings.He’s come to expect it as a matter of course.And when a fond, proud huband gets a habit like that, it must hurt terribly to see his wife not appreciated.”

“Oh, well, if I am expected to, I suppose I must,” Graham sighed.“But just the same I hate to do whatever everybody does just because everybody does it.But if it’s the custom—­well, it’s the custom, that’s all.But it’s mighty hard on one with so many other nice girls around.”

There was a quizzical light in his long gray eyes that affected Ernestine so profoundly that she gazed into his eyes over long, became conscious of what she was doing, dropped her own eyes away, and flushed.

“Little Leo—­the boy poet you remember last night,” she rattled on in a patent attempt to escape from her confusion.“He’s madly in love with Paula, too.I’ve heard Aaron Hancock chaffing him about some sonnet cycle, and it isn’t difficult to guess the inspiration.And Terrence—­the Irishman, you know—­he’s mildly in love with her.They can’t help it, you see; and can you blame them?”

“She surely deserves it all,” Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even mildly be in love with the Little Lady.“She is most deserving of all men’s admiration,” he continued smoothly.“From the little I’ve seen of her she’s quite remarkable and most charming.”

“She’s my half-sister,” Ernestine vouchsafed, “although you wouldn’t dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins.She’s so different.She’s different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew—­ though she isn’t exactly a girl.She’s thirty-eight, you know—­”

“Pussy, pussy,” Graham whispered.

The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment, taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.

“Cat,” he censured in mock reproof.

“Oh!”she cried.“I never meant it that way.You will find we are very frank here.Everybody knows Paula’s age.She tells it herself.I’m eighteen—­so, there.And now, just for your meanness, how old are you?”

“As old as Dick,” he replied promptly.

“And he’s forty,” she laughed triumphantly.“Are you coming swimming?—­the water will be dreadfully cold.”

Graham shook his head.“I’m going riding with Dick.”

Her face fell with all the ingenuousness of eighteen.

“Oh,” she protested, “some of his eternal green manures, or hillside terracing, or water-pocketing.”

“But he said something about swimming at five.”

Her face brightened joyously.

“Then we’ll meet at the tank.It must be the same party.Paula said swimming at five.”

As they parted under a long arcade, where his way led to the tower room for a change into riding clothes, she stopped suddenly and called:

“Oh, Mr. Graham.”

He turned obediently.

“You really are not compelled to fall in love with Paula, you know.It was just my way of putting it.”

“I shall be very, very careful,” he said solemnly, although there was a twinkle in his eye as he concluded.

Nevertheless, as he went on to his room, he could not but admit to himself that the Paula Forrest charm, or the far fairy tentacles of it, had already reached him and were wrapping around him.He knew, right there, that he would prefer the engagement to ride to have been with her than with his old-time friend, Dick.

As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess.Only Dick was there, and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in the shade promised possibilities.But Dick and he rode away alone.Dick pointed out her horse, an alert bay thoroughbred, stallion at that, under a small Australian saddle with steel stirrups, and double-reined and single-bitted.

“I don’t know her plans,” he said.“She hasn’t shown up yet, but at any rate she’ll be swimming later.We’ll meet her then.”

Graham appreciated and enjoyed the ride, although more than once he found himself glancing at his wrist-watch to ascertain how far away five o’clock might yet be.Lambing time was at hand, and through home field after home field he rode with his host, now one and now the other dismounting to turn over onto its feet rotund and glorious Shropshire and Ramboullet-Merino ewes so hopelessly the product of man’s selection as to be unable to get off, of themselves, from their own broad backs, once they were down with their four legs helplessly sky-aspiring.

“I’ve really worked to make the American Merino,” Dick was saying; “to give it the developed leg, the strong back, the well-sprung rib, and the stamina.The old-country breed lacked the stamina.It was too much hand-reared and manicured.”

“You’re doing things, big things,” Graham assured him.“Think of shipping rams to Idaho!That speaks for itself.”

Dick Forrest’s eyes were sparkling, as he replied:

“Better than Idaho.Incredible as it may sound, and asking forgiveness for bragging, the great flocks to-day of Michigan and Ohio can trace back to my California-bred Ramboullet rams. Take Australia.Twelve years ago I sold three rams for three hundred each to a visiting squatter.After he took them back and demonstrated them he sold them for as many thousand each and ordered a shipload more from me.Australia will never be the worse for my having been.Down there they say that lucerne, artesian wells, refrigerator ships, and Forrest’s rams have tripled the wool and mutton production.”

Quite by chance, on the way back, meeting Mendenhall, the horse manager, they were deflected by him to a wide pasture, broken by wooded canyons and studded with oaks, to look over a herd of yearling Shires that was to be dispatched next morning to the upland pastures and feeding sheds of the Miramar Hills.There were nearly two hundred of them, rough-coated, beginning to shed, large-boned and large for their age.

“We don’t exactly crowd them,” Dick Forrest explained, “but Mr. Mendenhall sees to it that they never lack full nutrition from the time they are foaled.Up there in the hills, where they are going, they’ll balance their grass with grain.This makes them assemble every night at the feeding places and enables the feeders to keep track of them with a minimum of effort.I’ve shipped fifty stallions, two-year-olds, every year for the past five years, to Oregon alone.They’re sort of standardized, you know.The people up there know what they’re getting.They know my standard so well that they’ll buy unsight and unseen.”

“You must cull a lot, then,” Graham ventured.

“And you’ll see the culls draying on the streets of San Francisco,” Dick answered.

“Yes, and on the streets of Denver,” Mr. Mendenhall amplified, “and of Los Angeles, and—­why, two years ago, in the horse-famine, we shipped twenty carloads of four-year geldings to Chicago, that averaged seventeen hundred each.The lightest were sixteen, and there were matched pairs up to nineteen hundred.Lord, Lord, that was a year for horse-prices—­blue sky, and then some.”

As Mr. Mendenhall rode away, a man, on a slender-legged, head-tossing Palomina, rode up to them and was introduced to Graham as Mr. Hennessy, the ranch veterinary.

“I heard Mrs. Forrest was looking over the colts,” he explained to his employer, “and I rode across to give her a glance at The Fawn here.She’ll be riding her in less than a week.What horse is she on to-day?”

“The Fop,” Dick replied, as if expecting the comment that was prompt as the disapproving shake of Mr. Hennessy’s head.

“I can never become converted to women riding stallions,” muttered the veterinary.“The Fop is dangerous.Worse—­though I take my hat off to his record—­he’s malicious and vicious.She—­Mrs. Forrest ought to ride him with a muzzle—­but he’s a striker as well, and I don’t see how she can put cushions on his hoofs.”

“Oh, well,” Dick placated, “she has a bit that is a bit in his mouth, and she’s not afraid to use it—­”

“If he doesn’t fall over on her some day,” Mr. Hennessy grumbled. “Anyway, I’ll breathe easier when she takes to The Fawn here. Now she’s a lady’s mount—­all the spirit in the world, but nothing vicious. She’s a sweet mare, a sweet mare, and she’ll steady down from her friskiness. But she’ll always be a gay handful—­no riding academy proposition.”

“Let’s ride over,” Dick suggested.“Mrs. Forrest’ll have a gay handful in The Fop if she’s ridden him into that bunch of younglings.—­It’s her territory, you know,” he elucidated to Graham.“All the house horses and lighter stock is her affair.And she gets grand results.I can’t understand it, myself.It’s like a little girl straying into an experimental laboratory of high explosives and mixing the stuff around any old way and getting more powerful combinations than the graybeard chemists.”

The three men took a cross-ranch road for half a mile, turned up a wooded canyon where ran a spring-trickle of stream, and emerged on a wide rolling terrace rich in pasture.Graham’s first glimpse was of a background of many curious yearling and two-year-old colts, against which, in the middleground, he saw his hostess, on the back of the bright bay thoroughbred, The Fop, who, on hind legs, was striking his forefeet in the air and squealing shrilly.They reined in their mounts and watched.

“He’ll get her yet,” the veterinary muttered morosely.“That Fop isn’t safe.”

But at that moment Paula Forrest, unaware of her audience, with a sharp cry of command and a cavalier thrust of sharp spurs into The Fop’s silken sides, checked him down to four-footedness on the ground and a restless, champing quietness.

“Taking chances?”Dick mildly reproached her, as the three rode up.

“Oh, I can manage him,” she breathed between tight teeth, as, with ears back and vicious-gleaming eyes, The Fop bared his teeth in a bite that would have been perilously near to Graham’s leg had she not reined the brute abruptly away across the neck and driven both spurs solidly into his sides.

The Fop quivered, squealed, and for the moment stood still.

“It’s the old game, the white man’s game,” Dick laughed.“She’s not afraid of him, and he knows it.She outgames him, out-savages him, teaches him what savagery is in its intimate mood and tense.”

Three times, while they looked on, ready to whirl their own steeds away if he got out of hand, The Fop attempted to burst into rampage, and three times, solidly, with careful, delicate hand on the bitter bit, Paula Forrest dealt him double spurs in the ribs, till he stood, sweating, frothing, fretting, beaten, and in hand.

“It’s the way the white man has always done,” Dick moralized, while Graham suffered a fluttery, shivery sensation of admiration of the beast-conquering Little Lady.“He’s out-savaged the savage the world around,” Dick went on.“He’s out-endured him, out-filthed him, out-scalped him, out-tortured him, out-eaten him—­yes, out-eaten him.It’s a fair wager that the white man, in extremis, has eaten more of the genus homo, than the savage, in extremis, has eaten.”

“Good afternoon,” Paula greeted her guest, the ranch veterinary, and her husband.“I think I’ve got him now.Let’s look over the colts.Just keep an eye, Mr. Graham, on his mouth.He’s a dreadful snapper.Ride free from him, and you’ll save your leg for old age.”

Now that The Fop’s demonstration was over, the colts, startled into flight by some impish spirit amongst them, galloped and frisked away over the green turf, until, curious again, they circled back, halted at gaze, and then, led by one particularly saucy chestnut filly, drew up in half a circle before the riders, with alert pricking ears.

Graham scarcely saw the colts at first.He was seeing his protean hostess in a new role.Would her proteanness never end?he wondered, as he glanced over the magnificent, sweating, mastered creature she bestrode.Mountain Lad, despite his hugeness, was a mild-mannered pet beside this squealing, biting, striking Fop who advertised all the spirited viciousness of the most spirited vicious thoroughbred.

“Look at her,” Paula whispered to Dick, in order not to alarm the saucy chestnut filly.“Isn’t she wonderful!That’s what I’ve been working for.”Paula turned to Evan.“Always they have some fault, some miss, at the best an approximation rather than an achievement.But she’s an achievement.Look at her.She’s as near right as I shall probably ever get.Her sire is Big Chief, if you know our racing register.He sold for sixty thousand when he was a cripple.We borrowed the use of him.She was his only get of the season.But look at her!She’s got his chest and lungs.I had my choices—­mares eligible for the register.Her dam wasn’t eligible, but I chose her.She was an obstinate old maid, but she was the one mare for Big Chief.This is her first foal and she was eighteen years old when she bred.But I knew it was there.All I had to do was to look at Big Chief and her, and it just had to be there.”

“The dam was only half thoroughbred,” Dick explained.

“But with a lot of Morgan on the other side,” Paula added instantly, “and a streak along the back of mustang.This shall be called Nymph, even if she has no place in the books.She’ll be my first unimpeachable perfect saddle horse—­I know it—­the kind I like—­my dream come true at last.”

“A hoss has four legs, one on each corner,” Mr. Hennessy uttered profoundly.

“And from five to seven gaits,” Graham took up lightly,

“And yet I don’t care for those many-gaited Kentuckians,” Paula said quickly, “—­except for park work.But for California, rough roads, mountain trails, and all the rest, give me the fast walk, the fox trot, the long trot that covers the ground, and the not too-long, ground-covering gallop.Of course, the close-coupled, easy canter; but I scarcely call that a gait—­it’s no more than the long lope reduced to the adjustment of wind or rough ground.”

“She’s a beauty,” Dick admired, his eyes warm in contemplation of the saucy chestnut filly, who was daringly close and alertly sniffing of the subdued Fop’s tremulous and nostril-dilated muzzle.

“I prefer my own horses to be near thoroughbred rather than all thoroughbred,” Paula proclaimed.“The running horse has its place on the track, but it’s too specialized for mere human use.”

“Nicely coupled,” Mr. Hennessy said, indicating the Nymph.“Short enough for good running and long enough for the long trot.I’ll admit I didn’t have any faith in the combination; but you’ve got a grand animal out of it just the same.”

“I didn’t have horses when I was a young girl,” Paula said to Graham; “and the fact that I can now not only have them but breed them and mold them to my heart’s desire is always too good to be true.Sometimes I can’t believe it myself, and have to ride out and look them over to make sure.”

She turned her head and raised her eyes gratefully to Forrest; and Graham watched them look into each other’s eyes for a long half-minute.Forrest’s pleasure in his wife’s pleasure, in her young enthusiasm and joy of life, was clear to Graham’s observation.“Lucky devil,” was Graham’s thought, not because of his host’s vast ranch and the success and achievement of it, but because of the possession of a wonder-woman who could look unabashed and appreciative into his eyes as the Little Lady had looked.

Graham was meditating, with skepticism, Ernestine’s information that Paula Forrest was thirty-eight, when she turned to the colts and pointed her riding whip at a black yearling nibbling at the spring green.

“Look at that level rump, Dick,” she said, “and those trotting feet and pasterns.”And, to Graham: “Rather different from Nymph’s long wrists, aren’t they?But they’re just what I was after.”She laughed a little, with just a shade of annoyance.“The dam was a bright sorrel—­ almost like a fresh-minted twenty-dollar piece—­and I did so want a pair out of her, of the same color, for my own trap.Well, I can’t say that I exactly got them, although I bred her to a splendid, sorrel trotting horse.And this is my reward, this black—­and, wait till we get to the brood mares and you’ll see the other, a full brother and mahogany brown.I’m so disappointed.”

She singled out a pair of dark bays, feeding together: “Those are two of Guy Dillon’s get—­brother, you know, to Lou Dillon.They’re out of different mares, not quite the same bay, but aren’t they splendidly matched?And they both have Guy Dillon’s coat.”

She moved her subdued steed on, skirting the flank of the herd quietly in order not to alarm it; but a number of colts took flight.

“Look at them!”she cried.“Five, there, are hackneys.Look at the lift of their fore-legs as they run.”

“I’ll be terribly disappointed if you don’t get a prize-winning four-in-hand out of them,” Dick praised, and brought again the flash of grateful eyes that hurt Graham as he noted it.

“Two are out of heavier mares—­see that one in the middle and the one on the far left—­and there’s the other three to pick from for the leaders.Same sire, five different dams, and a matched and balanced four, out of five choices, all in the same season, is a stroke of luck, isn’t it?”

She turned quickly to Mr. Hennessy: “I can begin to see the ones that will have to sell for polo ponies—­among the two-year-olds.You can pick them.”

“If Mr. Mendenhall doesn’t sell that strawberry roan for a clean fifteen hundred, it’ll be because polo has gone out of fashion,” the veterinary approved, with waxing enthusiasm.“I’ve had my eye on them.That pale sorrel, there.You remember his set-back.Give him an extra year and he’ll—­look at his coupling!—­watch him turn!—­a cow-skin?—­ he’ll turn on a silver dollar!Give him a year to make up, and he’ll stand a show for the international.Listen to me.I’ve had my faith in him from the beginning.Cut out that Burlingame crowd.When he’s ripe, ship him straight East.”

Paula nodded and listened to Mr. Hennessy’s judgment, her eyes kindling with his in the warmth of the sight of the abounding young life for which she was responsible.

“It always hurts, though,” she confessed to Graham, “selling such beauties to have them knocked out on the field so quickly.”

Her sheer absorption in the animals robbed her speech of any hint of affectation or show—­so much so, that Dick was impelled to praise her judgment to Evan.

“I can dig through a whole library of horse practice, and muddle and mull over the Mendelian Law until I’m dizzy, like the clod that I am; but she is the genius.She doesn’t have to study law.She just knows it in some witch-like, intuitional way.All she has to do is size up a bunch of mares with her eyes, and feel them over a little with her hands, and hunt around till she finds the right sires, and get pretty nearly what she wants in the result—­except color, eh, Paul?”he teased.

She showed her laughing teeth in the laugh at her expense, in which Mr. Hennessy joined, and Dick continued: “Look at that filly there.We all knew Paula was wrong.But look at it!She bred a rickety old thoroughbred, that we wanted to put out of her old age, to a standard stallion; got a filly; bred it back with a thoroughbred; bred its filly foal with the same standard again; knocked all our prognostications into a cocked hat, and—­well, look at it, a world-beater polo pony.There is one thing we have to take off our hats to her for: she doesn’t let any woman sentimentality interfere with her culling.Oh, she’s cold-blooded enough.She’s as remorseless as any man when it comes to throwing out the undesirables and selecting for what she wants.But she hasn’t mastered color yet.There’s where her genius falls down, eh, Paul?You’ll have to put up with Duddy and Fuddy for a while longer for your trap.By the way, how is Duddy?”

“He’s come around,” she answered, “thanks to Mr. Hennessy.”

“Nothing serious,” the veterinarian added.“He was just off his feed a trifle.It was more a scare of the stableman than anything else.”

Chapter XIII

From the colt pasture to the swimming tank Graham talked with his hostess and rode as nearly beside her as The Fop’s wickedness permitted, while Dick and Hennessy, on ahead, were deep in ranch business.

“Insomnia has been a handicap all my life,” she said, while she tickled The Fop with a spur in order to check a threatened belligerence.“But I early learned to keep the irritation of it off my nerves and the weight of it off my mind.In fact, I early came to make a function of it and actually to derive enjoyment from it.It was the only way to master a thing I knew would persist as long as I persisted.Have you—­of course you have—­learned to win through an undertow?”

“Yes, by never fighting it,” Graham answered, his eyes on the spray of color in her cheeks and the tiny beads of sweat that arose from her continuous struggle with the high-strung creature she rode.Thirty-eight!He wondered if Ernestine had lied.Paula Forrest did not look twenty-eight.Her skin was the skin of a girl, with all the delicate, fine-pored and thin transparency of the skin of a girl.

“Exactly,” she went on.“By not fighting the undertow.By yielding to its down-drag and out-drag, and working with it to reach air again.Dick taught me that trick.So with my insomnia.If it is excitement from immediate events that holds me back from the City of Sleep, I yield to it and come quicker to unconsciousness from out the entangling currents.I invite my soul to live over again, from the same and different angles, the things that keep me from unconsciousness.

“Take the swimming of Mountain Lad yesterday.I lived it over last night as I had lived it in reality.Then I lived it as a spectator—­as the girls saw it, as you saw it, as the cowboy saw it, and, most of all, as my husband saw it.Then I made up a picture of it, many pictures of it, from all angles, and painted them, and framed them, and hung them, and then, a spectator, looked at them as if for the first time.And I made myself many kinds of spectators, from crabbed old maids and lean pantaloons to girls in boarding school and Greek boys of thousands of years ago.

“After that I put it to music.I played it on the piano, and guessed the playing of it on full orchestras and blaring bands.I chanted it, I sang it-epic, lyric, comic; and, after a weary long while, of course I slept in the midst of it, and knew not that I slept until I awoke at twelve to-day.The last time I had heard the clock strike was six.Six unbroken hours is a capital prize for me in the sleep lottery.”

As she finished, Mr. Hennessy rode away on a cross path, and Dick Forrest dropped back to squire his wife on the other side.

“Will you sport a bet, Evan?”he queried.

“I’d like to hear the terms of it first,” was the answer.

“Cigars against cigars that you can’t catch Paula in the tank inside ten minutes—­no, inside five, for I remember you’re some swimmer.”

“Oh, give him a chance, Dick,” Paula cried generously.“Ten minutes will worry him.”

“But you don’t know him,” Dicked argued.“And you don’t value my cigars.I tell you he is a swimmer.He’s drowned kanakas, and you know what that means.”

“Perhaps I should reconsider.Maybe he’ll slash a killing crawl-stroke at me before I’ve really started.Tell me his history and prizes.”

“I’ll just tell you one thing.They still talk of it in the Marquesas.It was the big hurricane of 1892.He did forty miles in forty-five hours, and only he and one other landed on the land.And they were all kanakas.He was the only white man; yet he out-endured and drowned the last kanaka of them—­”

“I thought you said there was one other?”Paula interrupted.

“She was a woman,” Dick answered.“He drowned the last kanaka.”

“And the woman was then a white woman?”Paula insisted.

Graham looked quickly at her, and although she had asked the question of her husband, her head turned to the turn of his head, so that he found her eyes meeting his straightly and squarely in interrogation.Graham held her gaze with equal straightness as he answered: “She was a kanaka.”

“A queen, if you please,” Dick took up.“A queen out of the ancient chief stock.She was Queen of Huahoa.”

“Was it the chief stock that enabled her to out-endure the native men?”Paula asked.“Or did you help her?”

“I rather think we helped each other toward the end,” Graham replied.“We were both out of our heads for short spells and long spells.Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, that was all in.We made the land at sunset—­that is, a wall of iron coast, with the surf bursting sky-high.She took hold of me and clawed me in the water to get some sense in me.You see, I wanted to go in, which would have meant finish.

“She got me to understand that she knew where she was; that the current set westerly along shore and in two hours would drift us abreast of a spot where we could land.I swear I either slept or was unconscious most of those two hours; and I swear she was in one state or the other when I chanced to come to and noted the absence of the roar of the surf.Then it was my turn to claw and maul her back to consciousness.It was three hours more before we made the sand.We slept where we crawled out of the water.Next morning’s sun burnt us awake, and we crept into the shade of some wild bananas, found fresh water, and went to sleep again.Next I awoke it was night.I took another drink, and slept through till morning.She was still asleep when the bunch of kanakas, hunting wild goats from the next valley, found us.”

“I’ll wager, for a man who drowned a whole kanaka crew, it was you who did the helping,” Dick commented.

“She must have been forever grateful,” Paula challenged, her eyes directly on Graham’s.“Don’t tell me she wasn’t young, wasn’t beautiful, wasn’t a golden brown young goddess.”

“Her mother was the Queen of Huahoa,” Graham answered. “Her father was a Greek scholar and an English gentleman. They were dead at the time of the swim, and Nomare was queen herself. She was young. She was beautiful as any woman anywhere in the world may be beautiful. Thanks to her father’s skin, she as not golden brown. She was tawny golden. But you’ve heard the story undoubtedly—­”

He broke off with a look of question to Dick, who shook his head.

Calls and cries and splashings of water from beyond a screen of trees warned them that they were near the tank.

“You’ll have to tell me the rest of the story some time,” Paula said.

“Dick knows it.I can’t see why he hasn’t told you.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Perhaps because he’s never had the time or the provocation.”

“God wot, it’s had wide circulation,” Graham laughed.“For know that I was once morganatic—­or whatever you call it—­king of the cannibal isles, or of a paradise of a Polynesian isle at any rate.—­’By a purple wave on an opal beach in the hush of the Mahim woods,’” he hummed carelessly, in conclusion, and swung off from his horse.

“‘The white moth to the closing vine, the bee to the opening clover,’” she hummed another line of the song, while The Fop nearly got his teeth into her leg and she straightened him out with the spur, and waited for Dick to help her off and tie him.

“Cigars!—­I’m in on that!—­you can’t catch her!”Bert Wainwright called from the top of the high dive forty feet above.“Wait a minute!I’m coming!”

And come he did, in a swan dive that was almost professional and that brought handclapping approval from the girls.

“A sweet dive, balanced beautifully,” Graham told him as he emerged from the tank.

Bert tried to appear unconscious of the praise, failed, and, to pass it off, plunged into the wager.

“I don’t know what kind of a swimmer you are, Graham,” he said, “but I just want in with Dick on the cigars.”

“Me, too; me, too!”chorused Ernestine, and Lute, and Rita.

“Boxes of candy, gloves, or any truck you care to risk,” Ernestine added.

“But I don’t know Mrs. Forrest’s records, either,” Graham protested, after having taken on the bets.“However, if in five minutes—­”

“Ten minutes,” Paula said, “and to start from opposite ends of the tank.Is that fair?Any touch is a catch.”Graham looked his hostess over with secret approval.She was clad, not in the single white silk slip she evidently wore only for girl parties, but in a coquettish imitation of the prevailing fashion mode, a suit of changeable light blue and green silk—­almost the color of the pool; the skirt slightly above the knees whose roundedness he recognized; with long stockings to match, and tiny bathing shoes bound on with crossed ribbons.On her head was a jaunty swimming cap no jauntier than herself when she urged the ten minutes in place of five.

Rita Wainwright held the watch, while Graham walked down to the other end of the hundred-and-fifty-foot tank.

“Paula, you’ll be caught if you take any chances,” Dick warned.“Evan Graham is a real fish man.”

“I guess Paula’ll show him a few, even without the pipe,” Bert bragged loyally.“And I’ll bet she can out-dive him.”

“There you lose,” Dick answered.“I saw the rock he dived from at Huahoa.That was after his time, and after the death of Queen Nomare.He was only a youngster—­twenty-two; he had to be to do it.It was off the peak of the Pau-wi Rock—­one hundred and twenty-eight feet by triangulation.And he couldn’t do it legitimately or technically with a swan-dive, because he had to clear two lower ledges while he was in the air.The upper ledge of the two, by their own traditions, was the highest the best of the kanakas had ever dared since their traditions began.Well, he did it.He became tradition.As long as the kanakas of Huahoa survive he will remain tradition—­Get ready, Rita.Start on the full minute.”

“It’s almost a shame to play tricks on so reputable a swimmer,” Paula confided to them, as she faced her guest down the length of the tank and while both waited the signal.

“He may get you before you can turn the trick,” Dick warned again.And then, to Bert, with just a shade of anxiety: “Is it working all right?Because if it isn’t, Paula will have a bad five seconds getting out of it.”

“All O.K.,” Bert assured.“I went in myself.The pipe is working.There’s plenty of air.”

“Ready!”Rita called.“Go!”

Graham ran toward their end like a foot-racer, while Paula darted up the high dive.By the time she had gained the top platform, his hands and feet were on the lower rungs.When he was half-way up she threatened a dive, compelling him to cease from climbing and to get out on the twenty-foot platform ready to follow her to the water.Whereupon she laughed down at him and did not dive.“Time is passing—­ the precious seconds are ticking off,” Ernestine chanted.

When he started to climb, Paula again chased him to the half-way platform with a threat to dive.But not many seconds did Graham waste.His next start was determined, and Paula, poised for her dive, could not send him scuttling back.He raced upward to gain the thirty-foot platform before she should dive, and she was too wise to linger.Out into space she launched, head back, arms bent, hands close to chest, legs straight and close together, her body balanced horizontally on the air as it fell outward and downward.

“Oh you Annette Kellerman!”Bert Wamwright’s admiring cry floated up.

Graham ceased pursuit to watch the completion of the dive, and saw his hostess, a few feet above the water, bend her head forward, straighten out her arms and lock the hands to form the arch before her head, and, so shifting the balance of her body, change it from the horizontal to the perfect, water-cleaving angle.

The moment she entered the water, he swung out on the thirty-foot platform and waited.From this height he could make out her body beneath the surface swimming a full stroke straight for the far end of the tank.Not till then did he dive.He was confident that he could outspeed her, and his dive, far and flat, entered him in the water twenty feet beyond her entrance.

But at the instant he was in, Dick dipped two flat rocks into the water and struck them together.This was the signal for Paula to change her course.Graham heard the concussion and wondered.He broke surface in the full swing of the crawl and went down the tank to the far end at a killing pace.He pulled himself out and watched the surface of the tank.A burst of handclapping from the girls drew his eyes to the Little Lady drawing herself out of the tank at the other end.

Again he ran down the side of the tank, and again she climbed the scaffold.But this time his wind and endurance enabled him to cut down her lead, so that she was driven to the twenty-foot platform.She took no time for posturing or swanning, but tilted immediately off in a stiff dive, angling toward the west side of the tank.Almost they were in the air at the same time.In the water and under it, he could feel against his face and arms the agitation left by her progress; but she led into the deep shadow thrown by the low afternoon sun, where the water was so dark he could see nothing.

When he touched the side of the tank he came up.She was not in sight.He drew himself out, panting, and stood ready to dive in at the first sign of her.But there were no signs.

“Seven minutes!”Rita called.“And a half! ...Eight!...And a half!”

And no Paula Forrest broke surface.Graham refused to be alarmed because he could see no alarm on the faces of the others.

“I lose,” he announced at Rita’s “Nine minutes!”

“She’s been under over two minutes, and you’re all too blessed calm about it to get me excited,” he said.“I’ve still a minute—­maybe I don’t lose,” he added quickly, as he stepped off feet first into the tank.

As he went down he turned over and explored the cement wall of tank with his hands.Midway, possibly ten feet under the surface he estimated, his hands encountered an opening in the wall.He felt about, learned it Was unscreened, and boldly entered.Almost before he was in, he found he could come up; but he came up slowly, breaking surface in pitchy blackness and feeling about him without splashing.

His fingers touched a cool smooth arm that shrank convulsively at contact while the possessor of it cried sharply with the startle of fright.He held on tightly and began to laugh, and Paula laughed with him.A line from “The First Chanty” flashed into his consciousness—­ “Hearing her laugh in the gloom greatly I loved her.”

“You did frighten me when you touched me,” she said.“You came without a sound, and I was a thousand miles away, dreaming...”

“What?”Graham asked.

“Well, honestly, I had just got an idea for a gown—­a dusty, musty, mulberry-wine velvet, with long, close lines, and heavy, tarnished gold borders and cords and things. And the only jewelery a ring—­one enormous pigeon-blood ruby that Dick gave me years ago when we sailed the All Away.”

“Is there anything you don’t do?”he laughed.

She joined with him, and their mirth sounded strangely hollow in the pent and echoing dark.

“Who told you?”she next asked.

“No one.After you had been under two minutes I knew it had to be something like this, and I came exploring.”

“It was Dick’s idea.He had it built into the tank afterward.You will find him full of whimsies.He delighted in scaring old ladies into fits by stepping off into the tank with their sons or grandsons and hiding away in here.But after one or two nearly died of shock—­old ladies, I mean—­he put me up, as to-day, to fooling hardier persons like yourself.—­Oh, he had another accident.There was a Miss Coghlan, friend of Ernestine, a little seminary girl.They artfully stood her right beside the pipe that leads out, and Dick went off the high dive and swam in here to the inside end of the pipe.After several minutes, by the time she was in collapse over his drowning, he spoke up the pipe to her in most horrible, sepulchral tones.And right there Miss Coghlan fainted dead away.”

“She must have been a weak sister,” Graham commented; while he struggled with a wanton desire for a match so that he could strike it and see how Paula Forrest looked paddling there beside him to keep afloat.

“She had a fair measure of excuse,” Paula answered.“She was a young thing—­eighteen; and she had a sort of school-girl infatuation for Dick.They all get it.You see, he’s such a boy when he’s playing that they can’t realize that he’s a hard-bitten, hard-working, deep-thinking, mature, elderly benedict.The embarrassing thing was that the little girl, when she was first revived and before she could gather her wits, exposed all her secret heart.Dick’s face was a study while she babbled her—­”

“Well?—­going to stay there all night?”Bert Wainwright’s voice came down the pipe, sounding megaphonically close.

“Heavens!”Graham sighed with relief; for he had startled and clutched Paula’s arm.“That’s the time I got my fright.The little maiden is avenged.Also, at last, I know what a lead-pipe cinch is.”

“And it’s time we started for the outer world,” she suggested.“It’s not the coziest gossiping place in the world.Shall I go first?”

“By all means—­and I’ll be right behind; although it’s a pity the water isn’t phosphorescent.Then I could follow your incandescent heel like that chap Byron wrote about—­don’t you remember?”

He heard her appreciative gurgle in the dark, and then her: “Well, I’m going now.”

Unable to see the slightest glimmer, nevertheless, from the few sounds she made he knew she had turned over and gone down head first, and he was not beyond visioning with inner sight the graceful way in which she had done it—­an anything but graceful feat as the average swimming woman accomplishes it.

“Somebody gave it away to you,” was Bert’s prompt accusal, when Graham rose to the surface of the tank and climbed out.

“And you were the scoundrel who rapped stone under water,” Graham challenged.“If I’d lost I’d have protested the bet.It was a crooked game, a conspiracy, and competent counsel, I am confident, would declare it a felony.It’s a case for the district attorney.”

“But you won,” Ernestine cried.

“I certainly did, and, therefore, I shall not prosecute you, nor any one of your crooked gang—­if the bets are paid promptly.Let me see—­ you owe me a box of cigars—­”

“One cigar, sir!”

“A box! A box!” “Cross tag!” Paula cried. “Let’s play cross-tag! —­ You’re it!”

Suiting action to word, she tagged Graham on the shoulder and plunged into the tank.Before he could follow, Bert seized him, whirled him in a circle, was himself tagged, and tagged Dick before he could escape.And while Dick pursued his wife through the tank and Bert and Graham sought a chance to cross, the girls fled up the scaffold and stood in an enticing row on the fifteen-foot diving platform.

Chapter XIV.

An indifferent swimmer, Donald Ware had avoided the afternoon sport in the tank; but after dinner, somewhat to the irritation of Graham, the violinist monopolized Paula at the piano. New guests, with the casual expectedness of the Big House, had drifted in—­a lawyer, by name Adolph Well, who had come to confer with Dick over some big water-right suit; Jeremy Braxton, straight from Mexico, Dick’s general superintendent of the Harvest Group, which bonanza, according to Jeremy Braxton, was as “unpetering” as ever; Edwin O’Hay, a red-headed Irish musical and dramatic critic; and Chauncey Bishop, editor and owner of the San Francisco Dispatch, and a member of Dick’s class and frat, as Graham gleaned.

Dick had started a boisterous gambling game which he called “Horrible Fives,” wherein, although excitement ran high and players plunged, the limit was ten cents, and, on a lucky coup, the transient banker might win or lose as high as ninety cents, such coup requiring at least ten minutes to play out.This game went on at a big table at the far end of the room, accompanied by much owing and borrowing of small sums and an incessant clamor for change.

With nine players, the game was crowded, and Graham, rather than draw cards, casually and occasionally backed Ernestine’s cards, the while he glanced down the long room at the violinist and Paula Forrest absorbed in Beethoven Symphonies and Delibes’ Ballets.Jeremy Braxton was demanding raising the limit to twenty cents, and Dick, the heaviest loser, as he averred, to the tune of four dollars and sixty cents, was plaintively suggesting the starting of a “kitty” in order that some one should pay for the lights and the sweeping out of the place in the morning, when Graham, with a profound sigh at the loss of his last bet—­a nickel which he had had to pay double—­announced to Ernestine that he was going to take a turn around the room to change his luck.

“I prophesied you would,” she told him under her breath.

“What?”he asked.

She glanced significantly in Paula’s direction.

“Just for that I simply must go down there now,” he retorted.

“Can’t dast decline a dare,” she taunted.

“If it were a dare I wouldn’t dare do it.”

“In which case I dare you,” she took up.

He shook his head: “I had already made up my mind to go right down there to that one spot and cut that fiddler out of the running.You can’t dare me out of it at this late stage.Besides, there’s Mr. O’Hay waiting for you to make your bet.”

Ernestine rashly laid ten cents, and scarcely knew whether she won or lost, so intent was she on watching Graham go down the room, although she did know that Bert Wainwright had not been unobservant of her gaze and its direction.On the other hand, neither she nor Bert, nor any other at the table, knew that Dick’s quick-glancing eyes, sparkling with merriment while his lips chaffed absurdities that made them all laugh, had missed no portion of the side play.

Ernestine, but little taller than Paula, although hinting of a plus roundness to come, was a sun-healthy, clear blonde, her skin sprayed with the almost transparent flush of maidenhood at eighteen.To the eye, it seemed almost that one could see through the pink daintiness of fingers, hand, wrist, and forearm, neck and cheek.And to this delicious transparency of rose and pink, was added a warmth of tone that did not escape Dick’s eyes as he glimpsed her watch Evan Graham move down the length of room.Dick knew and classified her wild imagined dream or guess, though the terms of it were beyond his divination.

What she saw was what she imagined was the princely walk of Graham, the high, light, blooded carriage of his head, the delightful carelessness of the gold-burnt, sun-sanded hair that made her fingers ache to be into with caresses she for the first time knew were possible of her fingers.

Nor did Paula, during an interval of discussion with the violinist in which she did not desist from stating her criticism of O’Hay’s latest criticism of Harold Bauer, fail to see and keep her eyes on Graham’s progress.She, too, noted with pleasure his grace of movement, the high, light poise of head, the careless hair, the clear bronze of the smooth cheeks, the splendid forehead, the long gray eyes with the hint of drooping lids and boyish sullenness that fled before the smile with which he greeted her.

She had observed that smile often since her first meeting with him.It was an irresistible smile, a smile that lighted the eyes with the radiance of good fellowship and that crinkled the corners into tiny, genial lines.It was provocative of smiles, for she found herself smiling a silent greeting in return as she continued stating to Ware her grievance against O’Hay’s too-complacent praise of Bauer.

But her engagement was tacitly with Donald Ware at the piano, and with no more than passing speech, she was off and away in a series of Hungarian dances that made Graham marvel anew as he loafed and smoked in a window-seat.

He marveled at the proteanness of her, at visions of those nimble fingers guiding and checking The Fop, swimming and paddling in submarine crypts, and, falling in swan-like flight through forty feet of air, locking just above the water to make the diver’s head-protecting arch of arm.

In decency, he lingered but few minutes, returned to the gamblers, and put the entire table in a roar with a well-acted Yiddisher’s chagrin and passion at losing entire nickels every few minutes to the fortunate and chesty mine superintendent from Mexico.

Later, when the game of Horrible Fives broke up, Bert and Lute Desten spoiled the Adagio from Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique by exaggeratedly ragging to it in what Dick immediately named “The Loving Slow-Drag,” till Paula broke down in a gale of laughter and ceased from playing.

New groupings occurred.A bridge table formed with Weil, Rita, Bishop, and Dick.Donald Ware was driven from his monopoly of Paula by the young people under the leadership of Jeremy Braxton; while Graham and O’Hay paired off in a window-seat and O’Hay talked shop.

After a time, in which all at the piano had sung Hawaiian hulas, Paula sang alone to her own accompaniment.She sang several German love-songs in succession, although it was merely for the group about her and not for the room; and Evan Graham, almost to his delight, decided that at last he had found a weakness in her.She might be a magnificent pianist, horsewoman, diver, and swimmer, but it was patent, despite her singing throat, that she was not a magnificent singer.This conclusion he was quickly compelled to modify.A singer she was, a consummate singer.Weakness was only comparative after all.She lacked the magnificent voice.It was a sweet voice, a rich voice, with the same warm-fibered thrill of her laugh; but the volume so essential to the great voice was not there.Ear and voice seemed effortlessly true, and in her singing were feeling, artistry, training, intelligence.But volume—­it was scarcely a fair average, was his judgment.

But quality—­there he halted.It was a woman’s voice.It was haunted with richness of sex.In it resided all the temperament in the world—­ with all the restraint of discipline, was the next step of his analysis.He had to admire the way she refused to exceed the limitations of her voice.In this she achieved triumphs.

And, while he nodded absently to O’Hay’s lecturette on the state of the—­opera, Graham fell to wondering if Paula Forrest, thus so completely the mistress of her temperament, might not be equally mistress of her temperament in the deeper, passional ways.There was a challenge there—­based on curiosity, he conceded, but only partly so based; and, over and beyond, and, deeper and far beneath, a challenge to a man made in the immemorial image of man.

It was a challenge that bade him pause, and even look up and down the great room and to the tree-trunked roof far above, and to the flying gallery hung with the spoils of the world, and to Dick Forrest, master of all this material achievement and husband of the woman, playing bridge, just as he worked, with all his heart, his laughter ringing loud as he caught Rita in renig.For Graham had the courage not to shun the ultimate connotations.Behind the challenge in his speculations lurked the woman.Paula Forrest was splendidly, deliciously woman, all woman, unusually woman.From the blow between the eyes of his first striking sight of her, swimming the great stallion in the pool, she had continued to witch-ride his man’s imagination.He was anything but unused to women; and his general attitude was that of being tired of the mediocre sameness of them.To chance upon the unusual woman was like finding the great pearl in a lagoon fished out by a generation of divers.

“Glad to see you’re still alive,” Paula laughed to him, a little later.

She was prepared to depart with Lute for bed.A second bridge quartet had been arranged—­Ernestine, Bert, Jeremy Braxton, and Graham; while O’Hay and Bishop were already deep in a bout of two-handed pinochle.

“He’s really a charming Irishman when he keeps off his one string,” Paula went on.

“Which, I think I am fair, is music,” Graham said.

“And on music he is insufferable,” Lute observed.“It’s the only thing he doesn’t know the least thing about.He drives one frantic.”

“Never mind,” Paula soothed, in gurgling tones.“You will all be avenged.Dick just whispered to me to get the philosophers up to-morrow night.You know how they talk music.A musical critic is their awful prey.”

“Terrence said the other night that there was no closed season on musical critics,” Lute contributed.

“Terrence and Aaron will drive him to drink,” Paula laughed her joy of anticipation.“And Dar Hyal, alone, with his blastic theory of art, can specially apply it to music to the confutation of all the first words and the last.He doesn’t believe a thing he says about blastism, any more than was he serious when he danced the other evening.It’s his bit of fun.He’s such a deep philosopher that he has to get his fun somehow.”

“And if O’Hay ever locks horns with Terrence,” Lute prophesied, “I can see Terrence tucking arm in arm with him, leading him down to the stag room, and heating the argument with the absentest-minded variety of drinks that ever O’Hay accomplished.”

“Which means a very sick O’Hay next day,” Paula continued her gurgles of anticipation.

“I’ll tell him to do it!”exclaimed Lute.

“You mustn’t think we’re all bad,” Paula protested to Graham.“It’s just the spirit of the house.Dick likes it.He’s always playing jokes himself.He relaxes that way.I’ll wager, right now, it was Dick’s suggestion, to Lute, and for Lute to carry out, for Terrence to get O’Hay into the stag room.Now, ’fess up, Lute.”

“Well, I will say,” Lute answered with meticulous circumspection, “that the idea was not entirely original with me.”

At this point, Ernestine joined them and appropriated Graham with:

“We’re all waiting for you.We’ve cut, and you and I are partners.Besides, Paula’s making her sleep noise.So say good night, and let her go.”

Paula had left for bed at ten o’clock.Not till one did the bridge break up.Dick, his arm about Ernestine in brotherly fashion, said good night to Graham where one of the divided ways led to the watch tower, and continued on with his pretty sister-in-law toward her quarters.

“Just a tip, Ernestine,” he said at parting, his gray eyes frankly and genially on hers, but his voice sufficiently serious to warn her.

“What have I been doing now?”she pouted laughingly.

“Nothing...as yet.But don’t get started, or you’ll be laying up a sore heart for yourself.You’re only a kid yet—­eighteen; and a darned nice, likable kid at that.Enough to make ’most any man sit up and take notice.But Evan Graham is not ’most any man—­”

“Oh, I can take care of myself,” she blurted out in a fling of quick resentment.

“But listen to me just the same.There comes a time in the affairs of a girl when the love-bee gets a buzzing with a very loud hum in her pretty noddle.Then is the time she mustn’t make a mistake and start in loving the wrong man.You haven’t fallen in love with Evan Graham yet, and all you have to do is just not to fall in love with him.He’s not for you, nor for any young thing.He’s an oldster, an ancient, and possibly has forgotten more about love, romantic love, and young things, than you’ll ever learn in a dozen lives.If he ever marries again—­”

“Again!”Ernestine broke in.

“Why, he’s been a widower, my dear, for over fifteen years.”

“Then what of it?”she demanded defiantly.

“Just this,” Dick continued quietly.“He’s lived the young-thing romance, and lived it wonderfully; and, from the fact that in fifteen years he has not married again, means—­”

“That he’s never recovered from his loss?”Ernestine interpolated.“But that’s no proof—­”

“—­Means that he’s got over his apprenticeship to wild young romance,” Dick held on steadily.“All you have to do is look at him and realize that he has not lacked opportunities, and that, on occasion, some very fine women, real wise women, mature women, have given him foot-races that tested his wind and endurance.But so far they’ve not succeeded in catching him.And as for young things, you know how filled the world is with them for a man like him.Think it over, and just keep your heart-thoughts away from him.If you don’t let your heart start to warm toward him, it will save your heart from a grievous chill later on.”

He took one of her hands in his, and drew her against him, an arm soothingly about her shoulder.For several minutes of silence Dick idly speculated on what her thoughts might be.

“You know, we hard-bitten old fellows—­” he began half-apologetically, half-humorously.

But she made a restless movement of distaste, and cried out:

“Are the only ones worth while!The young men are all youngsters, and that’s what’s the matter with them.They’re full of life, and coltish spirits, and dance, and song.But they’re not serious.They’re not big.They’re not—­oh, they don’t give a girl that sense of all-wiseness, of proven strength, of, of...well, of manhood.”

“I understand,” Dick murmured.“But please do not forget to glance at the other side of the shield.You glowing young creatures of women must affect the old fellows in precisely similar ways.They may look on you as toys, playthings, delightful things to whom to teach a few fine foolishnesses, but not as comrades, not as equals, not as sharers—­full sharers.Life is something to be learned.They have learned it...some of it.But young things like you, Ernestine, have you learned any of it yet?”

“Tell me,” she asked abruptly, almost tragically, “about this wild young romance, about this young thing when he was young, fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen?”Dick replied promptly.“Eighteen.They were married three years before she died.In fact—­figure it out for yourself—­they were actually married, by a Church of England dominie, and living in wedlock, about the same moment that you were squalling your first post-birth squalls in this world.”

“Yes, yes—­go on,” she urged nervously.“What was she like?”

“She was a resplendent, golden-brown, or tan-golden half-caste, a Polynesian queen whose mother had been a queen before her, whose father was an Oxford man, an English gentleman, and a real scholar. Her name was Nomare. She was Queen of Huahoa. She was barbaric. He was young enough to out-barbaric her. There was nothing sordid in their marriage. He was no penniless adventurer. She brought him her island kingdom and forty thousand subjects. He brought to that island his fortune—­and it was no inconsiderable fortune. He built a palace that no South Sea island ever possessed before or will ever possess again. It was the real thing, grass-thatched, hand-hewn beams that were lashed with cocoanut sennit, and all the rest. It was rooted in the island; it sprouted out of the island; it belonged, although he fetched Hopkins out from New York to plan it.

“Heavens!they had their own royal yacht, their mountain house, their canoe house—­the last a veritable palace in itself.I know.I have been at great feasts in it—­though it was after their time.Nomare was dead, and no one knew where Graham was, and a king of collateral line was the ruler.

“I told you he out-barbaricked her.Their dinner service was gold.—­ Oh, what’s the use in telling any more.He was only a boy.She was half-English, half-Polynesian, and a really and truly queen.They were flowers of their races.They were a pair of wonderful children.They lived a fairy tale.And...well, Ernestine, the years have passed, and Evan Graham has passed from the realm of the young thing.It will be a remarkable woman that will ever infatuate him now.Besides, he’s practically broke.Though he didn’t wastrel his money.As much misfortune, and more, than anything else.”

“Paula would be more his kind,” Ernestine said meditatively.

“Yes, indeed,” Dick agreed.“Paula, or any woman as remarkable as Paula, would attract him a thousand times more than all the sweet, young, lovely things like you in the world.We oldsters have our standards, you know.”

“And I’ll have to put up with the youngsters,” Ernestine sighed.

“In the meantime, yes,” he chuckled.“Remembering, always, that you, too, in time, may grow into the remarkable, mature woman, who can outfoot a man like Evan in a foot-race of love for possession.”

“But I shall be married long before that,” she pouted.

“Which will be your good fortune, my dear.And, now, good night.And you are not angry with me?”

She smiled pathetically and shook her head, put up her lips to be kissed, then said as they parted:

“I promise not to be angry if you will only show me the way that in the end will lead me to ancient graybeards like you and Graham.”

Dick Forrest, turning off lights as he went, penetrated the library, and, while selecting half a dozen reference volumes on mechanics and physics, smiled as if pleased with himself at recollection of the interview with his sister-in-law.He was confident that he had spoken in time and not a moment too soon.But, half way up the book-concealed spiral staircase that led to his work room, a remark of Ernestine, echoing in his consciousness, made him stop from very suddenness to lean his shoulder against the wall.—­"Paula would be more his kind."

“Silly ass!”he laughed aloud, continuing on his way.“And married a dozen years!”

Nor did he think again about it, until, in bed, on his sleeping porch, he took a glance at his barometers and thermometers, and prepared to settle down to the solution of the electrical speculation that had been puzzling him.Then it was, as he peered across the great court to his wife’s dark wing and dark sleeping porch to see if she were still waking, that Ernestine’s remark again echoed.He dismissed it with a “Silly ass!”of scorn, lighted a cigarette, and began running, with trained eye, the indexes of the books and marking the pages sought with matches.