Play the Game! Part 19

"Skipper, after all these years, leaving me for a darn' tea!"

"Jimsy, dear," she scolded him, "you know that it's the very least I can do, now isn't it--honestly? Think how lovely she's been to us, and how much it means to her, having people here. And we've got all our lives ahead of us, Jimsy! Be good! And besides"--she colored a little and hesitated--"it's--not kind to Cartie." Then, at the sobering of his face, "You know he--cares for me, Jimsy, and I don't believe it's just cricket for us to--to sort of wave our happiness in his face all the time."

He sighed crossly. "But--good Lord, Skipper,--he's got to get used to it!"

"Of course,--but need we--rub it in, just now?" The fact was that Honor was anxious. Carter was pallid, haggard, morose. The brief flare of composure with which he had greeted her was gone; he showed visibly and unpleasantly what he was suffering at the sight of their vivid and hearty happiness. Mrs. King had commented pityingly on it to Honor and it was simply not in the girl to go on adding to his misery. She began to be very firm with Jimsy about their long walks or rides alone; she accepted all Mrs. King's invitations and plans for them; she included Carter whenever it was possible. These restrictions had naturally the result of making Jimsy the more ardent in their scant privacy, and Honor, amazingly free from coquetry though she was, must have sensed it.

Perhaps the truth was that she had in her, after all, something of Mildred Lorimer's feeling for values and conventions; having flown from Florence to Cordoba to her lover she was reclaiming a little of her aloofness and cool ladyhood by this discipline. But she was entirely honest in her wish to spare Carter so far as possible. Once, when Jimsy was briefly away with his Yaqui henchman she asked Carter to walk with her, but he decided for the dim _sala;_ the heat which seemed to invigorate and vitalize Jimsy left him limp and spent.

He brushed her generalities roughly aside. "Are you happy, Honor?"

She lifted her candid eyes to his bleak young face. "Yes, Cartie.

Happier than ever before--and I've been happy all my life."

He was silent for a moment as if sorting out and considering the things he might say to her. "Well, you have a marvelous effect on Jimsy. I don't believe he's taken a drop since you've been here."

"He hasn't touched a drop since he came to Mexico, Carter,--Mr. King told me that, and Jimsy told me himself!" Honor was a little declamatory in her pride and he raised his eyebrows.

"Really?" He limped over to the table where the smoking things were and the decanter of whiskey and siphon of soda. "Let me have a look...." He picked up the decanter and held it to the light. "The last time I looked at it, it came just to the top of the design here,--and it does yet.

Yes, it's just where it was."

"Carter! I call that spying!"

He turned back to her without temper. "I call it looking after my friend," he said gently. "I don't suppose you've let him tell you very much about what happened at college?"

"No, Carter. What's the use of it, now? He wrote it all to me, but the letter must have pa.s.sed me. It's a closed chapter now."

"I hope to G.o.d it will stay closed," he said, haggardly. "But I'm afraid, Honor; I'm horribly afraid for you."

"I'm not afraid, Carter,--for myself or for Jimsy." She got up and walked to the window; she was aware that she hated the dimness of the _sala_; she wanted the honest heat of the sun. "Look!" she said, gladly.

Carter limped slowly to join her. Jimsy King was swinging toward them through the brazen three o'clock glare, his Yaqui Juan by his side. They were a sightly and eye-filling pair. They might have been done in bronze for studies of Yesterday and To-day. "_Look_!" said Honor again. "Oh, Carter, do you think any--any horrible dead trait--any clammy dead hand--can reach up out of the grave to pull him down?"

Carter was silent.

A high and cleanly anger rose in the girl. "Carter, I don't want to hurt you,--oh, I know I hurt you all the time, in one way, and I can't help that,--I don't want to be unkind, but--are you sure it isn't because you--care--for me that you have this hopeless feeling about Jimsy?" She faced him squarely and made him meet her eyes. "Carter! Tell me."

His unhappy gaze struggled with her level look and slipped away. "Of course I want you myself, Honor. I want you--horribly, unbearably, but I do honestly feel it's wrong for you to marry Jimsy King."

"But, Carter--see how nearly his father won out! Every one says that if his mother had lived--And his Uncle Richard! He's absolutely free from it, now. And the very look of Jimsy is enough to show you----"

But Carter had turned and was staring moodily at the decanter. "It comes so suddenly, Honor ... with such frightful unexpectedness. Remember, when we were youngsters, the World's Biggest Snake, 'Samson,'--exhibited in a vacant store on Main Street, and how keen we all were about him?"

Honor kindled to the memory. "I adored him. He had a head like a nice setter's and he wasn't cold or slimy a bit!"

"Remember what the man told us about his hunger? How he'd go three months without anything, and then devour twenty live rabbits and chickens and cats?"

She nodded, frowning. "I know. It was awful."

"But the point was the suddenness. They never knew when the hunger would seize him. The fellow said that it came like a flash. He was gentle as a lamb for weeks on end--and then it came. He'd pounce on the keeper's pet rabbit--his dog--the man himself if he were within reach. He was an utterly changed creature; he was just--an _appet.i.te_." He stood staring somberly at the decanter. "That's the way it comes, Honor."

It seemed to be getting dimmer and dimmer in the _sala_. Honor found herself wis.h.i.+ng with all her heart for her stepfather. Stephen Lorimer would know how to answer; how to parry,--to combat this thing. She felt her own weapons clumsy and blunt, but such as they were she would use them.

"But it isn't coming ever again, Carter! I tell you it isn't coming! And I want you to stop saying and thinking that it is! Now I'm going to Jimsy!"

In the wide out-of-doors, under the unbelievably blue sky and the stinging sun, with Jimsy and Yaqui Juan, life was sound and whole again.

The Indian, tall as a pine, looked at her with eyes of respectful adoration and smiled his slow, melancholy smile, as she swung off with the boy, down the path which led to the old well.

"Juan approves of me, doesn't he?" said Honor, contentedly.

"Of course; you're my woman!" She loved his happy impudence. "Aren't you, Skipper?" They had pa.s.sed the twist in the path--the path which was like a moist green tunnel through the tropic jungle--which hid them from the house and she halted and went swiftly into his arms.

"Yes, Jimsy! _Yes!_ And--I've been stingy and mean to you but I won't be, any more. Carter must just--stand things."

"_Skipper!_" He wasn't facile with words, Jimsy King, but he was able to make himself clear.

"Jimsy, isn't it wonderful--the all-rightness of everything? Being together again, and----"

"Going to be together always! And my job waiting! Isn't the old boy a wonder? I saw him, just now. He says he's heard from Mexico City and it's O. K. to start Thursday. They're going to send the escort."

"In two days," said Honor, blissfully, "we'll be on our way home! Jimsy, in two days!"

But in two days dizzyingly, terrifyingly much had happened. The pleasant little comedy of life at _El Pozo_ had changed to melodrama, crude and strident. They had been attacked by a band of _insurrectos_, a wing of Villa's hectic army, presumably; the _peons_, with the exception of the house servants and Yaqui Juan, had gone gleefully over to the enemy; Richard King had been wounded in his hot-headed defense of his _hacienda_, shot through the shoulder, and was running a temperature; the telephone wires were cut; infinitely worse than all, the besiegers had taken possession of the well and they were entirely without water.

There had been, of course, the usual supply in the house at the time of the attack and it had been made to last as long as was humanly possible, the lion's share going to the wounded man, but they had arrived, now, at the point of actual suffering. His role of helpless inaction was an intolerable one for Jimsy King to play. To know that--less than a quarter of a mile away, down the moist green path through the tropic verdure--was the well; to see Honor's dry lips and strained eyes, Carter's deathly pallor, to hear his uncle, out of his head, mercifully, most of the time, begging for water, meant a constant battle with himself not to rush out, to make one frantic try at least, but he knew that the deeper courage of patient waiting was required of him. They could only conjecture what the invaders meant to do,--whether they intended to have them die of thirst, whether they meant to rush the house when it suited their pleasure--raggedly fortified and guarded by Jimsy and Carter and the half dozen of the faithful. Jimsy had talked the latter probability over steadily with Honor and she understood.

"Jimsy," she managed not to let her teeth chatter, "it's like a play or--or a Wild West tale, isn't it? Like a 'Frank Merriwell'--remember when you used to adore those things?"

"No, Skipper, it's not like a 'Frank Merriwell'; he could always _do_ something...." Jimsy's strong teeth ground together.

"Yes--'Blooey, blooey! Fifteen more redskins bit the dust!'"

"Skipper, you _wonder_! You brick!"

"Jimsy, I--there's no use talking about things that may never happen, because _of course_ help will get here, but if it should not--if they should rush us, and we couldn't keep them out"--her hoa.r.s.e voice faltered but her eyes held his--"you won't--you wouldn't let them--take me, Jimsy?"

"No, Skipper."

"Promise, Jimsy?"

"Promise, Skipper. 'Cross my heart!'" The old good foolish words of the old safe days, here, now, in this hideous and garish present!

With that pledge she was visibly able to give herself to a livelier hope. "But of course Yaqui Juan got through to the Grants' _hacienda_!

Can you imagine him failing us, Jimsy?"

He shook his head. "He'll make it if any man living could." The Indian had slipped through the _insurrectos_ in the first hour, as soon as it had been known that the wires were cut. Unless the Grants, too, were besieged, they would be able to telephone for help for _El Pozo_, and if they were likewise in duress, Yaqui Juan would go on to the next _rancho_,--on and on until he could set the wheels of rescue in motion.

"I wish to G.o.d I had his job. _Doing something_----"

Carter came into the _sala_. He was terrifyingly white but with an admirable composure. "Steady, old boy," he said, putting his frail hand on Jimsy's shoulder. "Sit tight! We depend on you. And you're doing"--he looked at the decanter, as if measuring its contents with his eye--"gloriously, splendidly, old son! I know the strain you're under.

You're a bigger man even than I thought you were, Jimsy."