The Prairie Mother Part 13

"Talking to the most charming woman I've encountered west of the Great Lakes," he said with an ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile.

But I didn't intend him to draw a herring across the trail.

"I'd be obliged if you'd be sincere," I told him, sitting up a little straighter on Paddy.

"I am sincere," he protested, putting away his pipe.

"But the things you're saying are the things the right sort of person refrains from expressing, even when he happens to be the victim of their operation."

"Yes, that's quite true, in drawing-rooms," he airily amended. "But this is G.o.d's open and untrammeled prairie."

"Where crudeness is king," I added.

"Where candor is worth more than convention," he corrected, with rather a wistful look in his eye. "And where we mortals ought to be at least as urbane as that really wonderful robin-egg sky up there with the chinook arch across it."

He wasn't flippant any more, and I had a sense of triumph in forcing his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I merely inquired where his home happened to be.

"I've just come from up North!" he said. And that, I promptly realized, was an evasive way of answering an honest question, especially as there was a California license-number on the front of his car.

"And what's your business?" I inquired, deciding to try him out with still one more honest question.

"I'm a windmill man," he told me, as he waded in toward his dejected-looking automobile and lifted up its hood. I took him literally, for there wasn't anything, at the time, to make me think of Cervantes. But I'd already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they weren't the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by his own petard.

"Then you're just the man I'm looking for," I told him. He stopped for a moment to look up from the bit of heavy rubber-hose he was winding with a stretch of rubber that looked as though it had been cut from an inner tube.

"Words such as those are honey to my ears," he said as he went on with his work. And I saw it was necessary to yank him down to earth again.

"I've a broken-down windmill over on my ranch," I told him. "And if you're what you say you are, you ought to be able to put it in running order for me."

"Then you've a ranch?" he observed, stopping in his work.

"A ranch and a husband and three children," I told him with the well-paraded air of a tabby-cat who's dragged her last mouse into the drawing-room. But my announcement didn't produce the effect I'd counted on. All I could see on the face of the windmill man was a sort of mild perplexity.

"That only deepens the mystery," he observed, apparently as much to himself as to me.

"What mystery?" I asked.

"You!" he retorted.

"What's wrong with me?" I demanded.

"You're so absurdly alive and audacious and sensitive and youthful-hearted, dear madam! For the life of me I can't quite fit you into the narrow little frame you mention."

"Is it so narrow?" I inquired, wondering why I wasn't much more indignant at him. But instead of answering that question, he asked me another.

"Why hasn't this husband of yours fixed the windmill?" he casually asked over his shoulder, as he resumed his tinkering on the car-engine.

"My husband's work keeps him away from home," I explained, promptly on the defensive.

"I thought so," he announced, with the expression of a man who's had a pet hypothesis unexpectedly confirmed.

"Then what made you think so?" I demanded, with a feeling that he was in some way being subtler than I could quite comprehend.

"Instinct--if you care to call it that," he said as he stooped low over his engine. He seemed offensively busy there for a considerable length of time. I could see that he was not what in the old days I'd have called a window-dresser. And I rather liked that pretense of candor in his make-up, just as I cottoned to that melodious drawl of his, not altogether unlike Lady Alicia's, with its untoward suggestion of power and privilege. He was a man with a mind of his own; there was no denying that. I was even compelled to remind myself that with all his coolness and suavity he was still a car-thief, or perhaps something worse. And I had no intention of sitting there and watching him pitch shut-out ball.

"What are you going to do about it?" I asked, after he'd finished his job of bailing ditch-water into his car-radiator with a little collapsible canvas bucket.

He climbed into his driving-seat, mud to the knees, before he answered me.

"I'm going to get Hyacinthe out of this hole," was what he said. "And then I'm going to fix that windmill!"

"On what terms?" I inquired.

"What's the matter with a month's board and keep?" he suggested.

It rather took my breath away, but I tried not to betray the fact. He _was_ a refugee, after all, and only too anxious to go into hiding for a few weeks.

"Can you milk?" I demanded, deciding to keep him in his place, from the start. And he sadly acknowledged that he wasn't able to milk.

Windmill men seldom were, he casually a.s.serted.

"Then you'll have to make yourself handy, in other ways," I proclaimed as he sat appraising me from his deep-padded car-seat.

"All right," he said, as though the whole thing were settled, on the spot. But it wasn't so simple as it seemed.

"How about this car?" I demanded. His eye met mine; and I made note of the fact that he was compelled to look away.

"I suppose we'll have to hide it somewhere," he finally acknowledged.

"And how'll you hide a car of that size on the open prairie?" I inquired.

"Couldn't we bury it?" he asked with child-like simplicity.

"It's pretty well that way now, isn't it? But I saw it three miles off," I reminded him.

"Couldn't we pile a load of prairie-hay over it?" he suggested next, with the natural cunning of the criminal. "Then they'd never suspect."

"Suspect what?" I asked.

"Suspect where we got it," he explained.

"Kindly do not include me in any of your activities of this nature," I said with all the dignity that Paddy would permit of, for he was getting restless by this time.

"But you've included yourself in the secret," he tried to argue, with a show of injured feelings. "And surely, after you've wormed that out of me, you're not going to deliver a poor devil over to--"

"You can have perfect confidence in me," I interrupted, trying to be stately but only succeeding, I'm afraid, in being stiff. And he nodded and laughed in a companionable and _laisser-faire_ sort of way as he started his engine and took command of the wheel.

Then began a battle which I had to watch from a distance because Paddy evinced no love for that purring and whining thing of steel as it rumbled and roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its flying heels. It made the muskeg look like a gargantuan cake-batter, in which it seemed to float as dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a ca.n.a.l-lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and reversed, and writhed forward, and reversed again. He even waved at me, in a grim sort of gaiety, as he rested his engine and then went back to the struggle. He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he was able to impart a slight rocking movement to the car. And again the big motor roared and churned up the mud and again Paddy took to prancing and pirouetting like a two-year-old. But this time the spinning rear wheels appeared to get a trace of traction, flimsy as it was, for the throbbing gray ma.s.s moved forward a little, subsided again, and once more nosed a few inches ahead. Then the engine whined in a still higher key, and slowly but surely that mud-covered ma.s.s emerged from the swale that had sought to engulf and possess it, emerged slowly and awkwardly, like a dinosauros emerging from its primeval ooze.

The man in the car stepped down from his driving-seat, once he was sure of firm ground under his wheels again, and walked slowly and wistfully about his resurrected devil-wagon.