The Sick a Bed Lady Part 27

Inertly she blinked her big brown eyes for an instant. Then suddenly her hands went groping out to the arms of her chair. Her face was horror-stricken. "Why didn't he tell me, himself?"

"Because I asked him to let me tell you," said Guthrie quietly.

"When did he tell you?" she persisted.

"Just before I came up on the piazza," said Guthrie.

"How did he tell you?" she demanded.

"How did he tell me?" mused Guthrie wretchedly. After all, underneath his occasional whimsicality he was distinctly literal-minded. "How did he tell me? Why I saw them all powwowing together in the corral, and Andrews looked up sort of queer and said: 'Say, Guthrie, that little Psychology friend of yours has got typhoid fever. What in thunder are we going to do?"

The strained lines around Esther Davidson's mouth relaxed for a second.

"Well, what in thunder am I going to do?" she joked heroically. But the effort at flippancy was evidently quite too much for her. In another instant her head pitched forward against the piazza railing and her voice, when she spoke again, was almost indistinguishable.

"And you knew all this an hour ago!" she accused him incoherently. "Knew my predicament--knew my inevitable weakness and fear and mortification--knew me a stranger among strangers. And yet you came up here to jolly me inconsequently--about a million foolish things!"

"It was because at the end of the hour I hoped to be something to you that would quite prevent your feeling a 'stranger among strangers,'"

said Guthrie very quietly. "I have asked you to marry me this afternoon, you must remember."

The young woman's lip curled tremulously. "You astonish me!" she scoffed. "I had always understood that men did not marry very easily.

Quick to love, slow to marry, is supposed to be your most striking characteristic--and here are you asking marriage of me, and you haven't even loved me yet!"

"You women do not seem to marry any too easily," smiled Guthrie gazing nervously from his open watch to the furthest corner of the corral, where the preacher's raw-boned pony, nose in air, was stubbornly refusing to take his bit.

"Indeed we do marry--perfectly easily--when we once love," retorted the woman contentiously! "It's the love part of it that we are reluctant about!"

"But I haven't asked you to love me," protested the man with much patience. "I merely asked you to marry me."

The woman's jaw dropped. "Out of sympathy for my emergency, out of mistaken chivalry, you're asking me to marry you, and not even pretending that you love me?" she asked in astonishment.

"I haven't had time to love you yet. I've only known you such a little while," said the man quite simply. Almost sternly he rose and began to pace up and down the narrow confines of the little piazza. "All I know is," he a.s.serted, "that the very first moment you stepped off the train at Laramie, I knew you were the woman whom I was--going to love--sometime."

Very softly he slid back into the rustic seat he had just vacated, and taking the woman's small clenched hands in his began to smooth out her fingers like poor crumpled ribbons.

"Now, Little Psychology Teacher," he said, "I want you to listen very, very carefully to everything I say. Do you like me all right?"

"Y--e--s."

"Better than you like Andrews or Ellis or even the old Judge?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Ever since we all started out together on the Trail you've just sort of naturally fallen to my lot, haven't you? Whenever you needed your pony's girth tightened, or whenever you wanted a drink of water, or whenever the big canyons scared you, or whenever the camp fire smoked you, you've just sort of naturally turned to me, haven't you? And it would be fair enough, wouldn't it, to say that at least I've never made any situation worse for you? So that if anything ugly or awkward were going to happen--perhaps you really would rather have me around than any one else?"

"Yes--surely."

"Maybe even, when we've been watching Ellis and his Missis riding ahead, all hand in hand and smile in smile, you've wondered a bit, woman-like, how it would seem, for instance, to be riding along hand in hand and smile in smile with me?"

"P-o-s-s-i-b-l-y."

"Never had any special curiosity about how it would seem to go hand and hand with--Andrews?"

"Foolis.h.!.+"

"Hooray!" cried Guthrie. "That's all that I really needed to know! Oh, don't feel bashful about it. It surely is an absolutely impersonal compliment on your part. It isn't even you that I'm under obligations to for the kindness, but Nature with a great big capital 'N.' Somehow I always have had an idea that you women instinctively do divide all mankind into three cla.s.ses: first, Those Whom You Couldn't Possibly Love; second, Those Whom You Could Possibly Love, and third, the One Man of the World Whom You Actually Do Love. And unless this mysterious Nature with a capital 'N' has already qualified a man for the second cla.s.s, G.o.d himself can't promote that man into the third cla.s.s. So it seems to me that every fellow could save himself an awful lot of misunderstanding and wasted time if he'd do just what I've done--make a distinctly preliminary proposal to his lady; not 'Do you love me?' which might take her fifteen years to decide, but: 'Could you love me?' which any woman can tell the first time she sees you. And if she can't possibly love you, that settles everything neatly then and there, but if she can possibly, why, with Nature once on his side, a man's a craven who can't put up a mighty good sc.r.a.p for his coveted prize. Doesn't this all make sense to you?"

Cannily the young woman lifted her eyes to his and fathomed him mutely for an instant. Then:

"Perfectly good 'sense' but no feeling," she answered dully.

"It's only 'sense' that I'm trying to make," acknowledged Guthrie. "Now look here, you Little Teacher Person, I'm going to talk to you just as bluntly as I would to another fellow. You are in a hole--the deuce of a hole! You have got typhoid fever, and it may run ten days and it may run ten weeks! And you are two thousand miles from home--among strangers!

And no matter how glad I personally may be that you did push on and join us, sick or well, from every practical standpoint, of course, it surely was heedless and ill-considered of you to start off in poor health on a trip like this and run the risk of forcing perfectly unconcerned strangers to pay for it all. Personally, you seem so much to belong to me already that it gives me goose-flesh to think of your having to put yourself under obligations to any purely conscientious person. Mrs.

Ellis, of course, will insist, out of common humanity, upon giving up her trip and staying behind with you, but Mrs. Ellis, Little Teacher, is on her honeymoon, and Ellis couldn't stay behind--it's his party--he'd have to go on with his people--and you'd never be able to compensate anybody for a broken honeymoon, and the Judge's youngster couldn't nurse a sick kitten, and the two women teachers from New York have been planning seven years for this trip, they told me, and we couldn't decently take it away from them. But you and I, Little Psychology Lady, are not strangers to each other. Hanlon's Mary here at the ranch house, rough as she is, has at least the serving hands of a woman, and Andrews belongs naturally to the tribe which is consecrated to inconveniences, and both can be compensated accordingly. And I would have married you, anyway, before another year was out! Yes, I would!"

Apparently ignoring everything that he had said, she turned her face scowlingly toward the sound of hammering that issued suddenly through the piazza door.

"Oh, Glory!" she complained. "Are they making my coffin already?"

With a little laugh, Guthrie relinquished her limp fingers, and jumping up, took another swift turn along the piazza, stopping only to bang the door shut again. When he faced her once more the twinkle was all gone from his eyes.

"You're quite right, what you said about men," he resumed with desperate seriousness. "We are a heap sight quicker in our susceptibilities than in our mentalities! Therefore, no sane man ever does marry till his brain has caught up with his emotions! But sometimes, you know, something happens that hustles a man's brain along a bit, and this time my brain seems fairly to have jumped to its destination and clean-beaten even the emotions in the race. In cool, positive judgment I tell you I want to marry you this afternoon."

"You've confessed yourself, haven't you, that you've no severer ideal for marriage than that a man should be generous enough to give your personality, no matter how capricious, a chance to breathe? Haven't I qualified sufficiently as that amiable man? More than that, I'm free to love you; I'm certainly keen to serve you; I'm reasonably well able to provide for you, and you naturally have a right to know that I've led a decent life. It's ten good years now since I was thirty and first found nerve enough to break away from the stifling business life I hated and get out into the open, where there's surely less money but infinitely more air. And in ten years I've certainly found considerable chance to fulfil a few of the items in my own little 'List of Necessities.' I've seen Asia and I've seen Africa, and I've written the book I've always wanted to write on North American mountain structures.

"But there's a lot more that I crave to do. Maybe I've got a bit of a 'capricious personality' myself! Maybe I also have been hunting for the mate who would give my personality a chance to breathe. Certainly I've never wanted any home yet, except when the right time came, the arms of the right woman. And I guess you must be she, because you're the first woman I've ever seen whom I'd trust to help me just as hard to play my chosen games as I'd help her to play hers! I tell you--I want--very much--to marry you this afternoon."

"Why do you dally with me so? Isn't it your own argument that there's only just one day in the love-life of a man and woman when the question and the answer mate exactly, and the books are balanced perfectly even for the new start together? Demand and supply, debit and credit, hunger and food? You, wild for help, and I wild to help you! What difference does it make what you call it? Isn't this our day?"

"For a man who's usually as silent as you are, don't you think you're talking a good deal, considering how sick you said I was?" asked the young woman, not unmirthfully.

Guthrie's square jaws snapped together like a trap. "I was merely trying to detain you," he mumbled, "until Hanlon had finished knocking the windows out of your room. We're going to give you all the air you can breathe, anyway."

A little sullenly he started for the stairs. Then just at the door he turned unexpectedly and his face was all smiles again.

"Little Psychology Teacher," he said, "I have made you a formal, definite offer of marriage. And in just about ten minutes from now I am coming back for my answer."

When he did return a trifle sooner than he had intended, he met her in the narrow upper hallway, with hands outstretched, groping her way unsteadily toward her room. As though her equilibrium was altogether disturbed by his sudden advent, she reeled back against the wall.

"Mr. Donas Guthrie," she said, "I'm feeling pretty wobbly! Mr. Donas Guthrie," she said, "I guess I'm pretty sick."

"It's a cruel long way down the hall," suggested Guthrie. "Wouldn't you like me to carry you?"

"Yes--I--would," sighed the Little Psychology Teacher.

Even to Guthrie's apprehensive mind, her weight proved most astonis.h.i.+ngly light. The small head drooping limply back from the slender neck seemed actually the only heavy thing about her, yet there were apparently only two ideas in that head.

"I'm afraid of Hanlon's Mary, and I don't like Dr.