Lord Apache

He looked sharply up from the Guide. 'What do you mean by that?'

She took a deep breath. 'Please—I don't want to be unpleasant about anything. I haven't the stomach for it anymore. I—I just came to tell you I was sorry for your loss.'

'Go to Prescott!' he flared. 'Give yourself up!' He paced the dirt floor. 'What foolish talk!'

'But what else is there for me? You are going back to England, and I—'

'I tried to help you!' he cried. 'Damn it, Phoebe, your happiness means much to me! I had all the arrangements made! George Dunaway was in love with you! George is a good man, an honest man, and a good provider, too, I daresay. But no! You had to knock everything into a cocked hat with your stubbornness, your willfulness, your headstrong ways!'

'Stubborn? Headstrong?' She rose quickly; her eyes flashed blue sparks, and under the shabby niching her breasts heaved. 'Mr. Jack Drumm, if ever there was a person stubborn and headstrong—pigheaded and obstinate and unseeing—it's you!' Her eyes dimmed with sudden tears. 'Call me stubborn! Why, you take the blue ribbon for pure mulishness!'

He shook a schoolmasterly finger. 'I devoted a great deal of trouble and thought to relieving your condition —'

'My condition!' Her voice was incredulous. 'You sound like I was a mare with the glanders!'

'To relieving your condition,' he insisted. 'And when I had everything satisfactorily laid out—'

Angry, she raised clenched fists high in a hopeless gesture. 'Stop it, I tell you! Stop it! Don't go on talking about me in that damned cold way!'

Women's tears unnerved him. Cornelia had used them artfully and effectively. Disconcerted, he paused.

'Listen!' Phoebe begged. 'Listen to me!' She paid no attention to the great tears rolling down her cheeks, stitching their way into her bosom. 'Maybe you're just stupid, or maybe it's your English ways that make you unable to show any affection, any love, and regard for others. You're like a damned icicle! So you force me to say something—something I would rather my tongue would rot out than say! Listen to me! Mr. John Peter Christian Drumm, I do not love George Dunaway! Do you understand that? I do not love him. I love someone else!'

Feeling faint and feverish, he goggled at her.

'I love you!' Phoebe cried. 'There, I said it! And I am ashamed to have thrown away my love on a heartless and unfeeling Englishman!' Wiping her eyes with the soiled hem of her skirt, she fled.

He stared at the open doorway. Love him? Phoebe Larkin love him? It was impossible. He shook his head. He was much older than she. Besides—he was already engaged to Cornelia Newton-Barrett, and she knew that. In addition, Phoebe was an aggressive kind of female—strange and unpredictable. His own methodical and logical Drumm ways would never accommodate her spirit, her impulsiveness, her rashness. Cornelia Newton-Barrett was much more suited to his phlegmatic temperament. He could never imagine Cornelia acting as Phoebe Larkin had just done.

Someone seemed to be covertly watching him. Suspicious, he wheeled, and found himself staring into the cracked mirror on the wall. A bearded and shaken countenance stared back wildly at him. The beard, the woolen poncho, the coarse manta shirt—these things had by now become homely and familiar. But his face was somehow different. It betrayed powerful and unfamiliar emotion.

Stepping forward, he looked questioningly into the mirror. Love him? Impossible! How could anyone love a figure like that? Yet— what was this experience he had just undergone? Love? Did he love her—Phoebe Larkin? He shook his head. It could hardly be love. When he came to marry Cornelia, he supposed love would then come. They would be comfortable together, they would have children to carry on the Drumm name, they would like each other very much, know each other's thoughts, they would grow old and gray together and finally lie side by side in the Drumm plot at Salisbury. That was love, real English love—the genuine article.

'Sir?'

He started, stepped away from the mirror. 'Come in, Eggie.'

The valet brought basin and razor, along with a woolen suit and fresh linens, long packed away.

'Are you ready for me, Mr. Jack? You seem a little—'

Jack waved a hand in a dismissing gesture.

'Miss Larkin and I were just—just talking.'

Still shaken by the experience, he sat down and stroked the beard in a final gesture that was almost affectionate.

'You may proceed,' he said, 'when you are ready.'

They were all sorry to see Jack Drumm leave. Sprankle wrung his hand, Mrs. Sloat baked him oatmeal cookies from her own family receipt, Ike Coogan brought a stone jug of homemade corn whiskey.

'You've changed a lot,' Ike observed.

Under the thicket of beard the scar on Jack's lip had healed surprisingly well. Now that he was clean-shaven, it showed only a little. Though the stiff collar and bowler hat felt strange, he was already becoming used to them.

'Well,' he smiled, 'I guess it's a long time since you saw me in clothes like this.'

The old man shook his head. 'It ain't that. It's something inside.'

'What do you mean?'

Ike shrugged. 'It'll come out.'

Uncle Roscoe was getting ready to go prospecting again in the Mazatzals. 'Apaches don't skeer me none! After all, a feller can turn up his toes just onct!' He nodded toward the rugged ridges. 'It might as well be up there as here.' Extending a horny fist, he shook hands. 'You been good to me, Mr. Drumm, and I won't never forget it. When I find the Gypsy Dancer, I'll send you a hatful of nuggets!'

Charlie and his wife and children came too, solemn-faced and dressed in their best white calzones, with a garland to hang around Ostin Drumm's neck. By now, Charlie had a little English.

'You come back—sometime?'

Jack shook his head. 'I'm afraid not, Charlie. But I'll miss you and your woman and the children.'

He could not stand to speak intimately to Phoebe Larkin. She avoided him also, until the final leavetaking. When he called them all together to say his farewells, she came in a freshly laundered white dress with a red sash Charlie's wife had given her. The titian hair was combed high in the Grecian style, tied with a ribbon. She wore a pair of the rawhide Mexican huaraches and her face was pale, the eyes betraying recent weeping. She stood silently with the others—the Sloats, the Sprankles, Charlie's family, Uncle Roscoe—around the spring wagon. Charlie would drive the party into Prescott, thence to Bear Spring, where Jack and Eggleston and Mrs. Glore would take the eastbound Atlantic and Pacific cars.

'Speech!' someone shouted. Others took up the call.

Embarrassed, Jack allowed himself to be pushed up on the wagon. Clearing his throat, he pulled at the unaccustomed cravat.

'I'm really not much of a speechmaker. But I want you all to know I'm sorry to leave this place. The Arizona Territory is a rough and cruel place sometimes—sand, wind, cactus, Apaches. But the roughness is tempered for the man who looks beyond those surface things. And to make up for the hard times, too, there are the people of Arizona. They—you—are the salt of the earth, and I'll miss—'

Phoebe Larkin was staring at him with those great round blue eyes; for a moment he faltered.

'I'll miss each and every one of you. And after I've left, I hope you'll think of me as often as I think of you. The North Atlantic is stormy this time of year, and in Hampshire, in England, where I come from, it's cold and rainy and miserable. But there'll always be a warm place in my heart for the A.T., and for you old friends.'

At the end his voice became a little hoarse, and cracked. Perhaps he had contracted an inflammation of the throat from the chill winter nights of Rancho Terco. But Ben Sprankle led a chorus of hip-hip-hoorays, Charlie's children lit Mexican firecrackers, and Uncle Roscoe tootled on a mouth-harp, while Sloat danced a jig. Beulah Glore,