“My dear, before that baby is twenty-five—that
was his father’s age—he’ll
have shot a man. Bet you on it!”
“I’ll take your bet!”
The retort came with such a ring of her voice that
he was startled. Before he could recover, she
went on: “Go out and get that baby for me,
Vance. I want it.”
He tossed his cigarette out of the window.
“Don’t drop into one of your headstrong
moods, sis. This is nonsense.”
“That’s why I want to do it. I’m
tired of playing the man. I’ve had enough
to fill my mind. I want something to fill my arms
and my heart.”
She drew up her hands with a peculiar gesture toward
her shallow, barren bosom, and then her brother found
himself silenced. At the same time he was a little
irritated, for there was an imputation in her speech
that she had been carrying the burden which his own
shoulders should have supported. Which was so
true that he could not answer, and therefore he cast
about for some way of stinging her.
“I thought you were going to escape the sentimental
period, Elizabeth. But sooner or later I suppose
a woman has to pass through it.”
A spot of color came in her sallow cheek.
“That’s sufficiently disagreeable, Vance.”
A sense of his cowardice made him rise to conceal
his confusion.
“I’m going to take you at your word, sis.
I’m going out to get that baby. I suppose
it can be bought—like a calf!”
He went deliberately to the door and laid his hand
on the knob. He had a rather vicious pleasure
in calling her bluff, but to his amazement she did
not call him back. He opened the door slowly.
Still she did not speak. He slammed it behind
him and stepped into the hall.
Twenty-four years made the face of Vance Cornish a
little better-fed, a little more blocky of cheek,
but he remained astonishingly young. At forty-nine
the lumpish promise of his youth was quite gone.
He was in a trim and solid middle age. His hair
was thinned above the forehead, but it gave him more
dignity. On the whole, he left an impression of
a man who has done things and who will do more before
he is through.
He shifted his feet from the top of the porch railing
and shrugged himself deeper into his chair. It
was marvelous how comfortable Vance could make himself.
He had one great power—the ability to sit
still through any given interval. Now he let
his eye drift quietly over the Cornish ranch.
It lay entirely within one grasp of the vision, spilling
across the valley from Sleep Mountain, on the lower
bosom of which the house stood, to Mount Discovery
on the north. Not that the glance of Vance Cornish
lurched across this bold distance. His gaze wandered
as slowly as a free buzzes across a clover field,
not knowing on which blossom to settle.
Below him, generously looped, Bear Creek tumbled out
of the southeast, and roved between noble borders
of silver spruce into the shadows of the Blue Mountains
of the north, half a dozen miles across and ten long
of grazing and farm land, rich, loamy bottom land
scattered with aspens.
