He came in exuberantly, and as she ran toward him he tossed into the air a handful of clinking gold coins. They fell around her and scattered rolling on the floor. “Trust your Uncle Dudley to put one over!” he cried. “Pick ’em up! They’re yours!”
“Oh, my dear, my dear!” she gasped, between laughter and the tears that now she could no longer control. Her arms were around his neck, and she did not mind his laughing at her, though she controlled herself quickly before his amusement could change to annoyance. “I knew you’d do it!” she said.
It was a long time before she remembered the money. Then, gathering it up, she was astonished to find nearly a hundred dollars. He laughed at her again when she asked him how he had got it. It was all right. He’d got it, hadn’t he? But he told her not to pay for her meals in the dining-room, to sign the checks instead, and from this she deduced that his business difficulties were not yet entirely overcome. She put the money in her purse, resolving to save it.
She discovered that he now owned a large green automobile. Apparently he had bought it in Bakersfield, for it had been some months since he had sold the gray one. In the afternoon they drove out to the oil leases, and she sat in the machine while the salesmen scattered to look for land-buyers.
The novelty of the scene was sufficient occupation for her. Low hills of yellow sand, shimmering in glassy heat-waves, were covered with innumerable derricks, which in the distance looked like a weird forest without leaf or shade and near at hand suggested to her grotesque creatures animated by unnatural life, their long necks moving up and down with a chugging sound. There were huddles of little houses, patchworks of boards and canvas, and now and then she saw faded women in calico dresses, or a child sitting half naked and gasping in the hot shadows. She felt that she was in a foreign land, and the far level desert stretching into a haze of blue on the eastern skyline seemed like a sea between her and all that she had known.
The salesmen were morose when they returned to the machine, and Bert’s enthusiasm was forced. “There’s millions of dollars a year pouring out of these wells,” he declared. “We’re going to get ours, boys, believe me!” But they did not respond, and Helen felt an increasing tension while they drove back to town through a blue twilight. She thought with relief of the gold pieces in her purse.
After supper Bert sent her to their room, and she lay in her nightgown on sheets that were hot to the touch, and panted while she read of Ripley Farmland Acres. The literature was reassuring; it seemed to her that anyone would buy land so good on such astonishingly low terms. But her uneasiness increased like an intolerable tightening of the nerves, and her enforced inaction in this crisis that she did not understand tortured her. It occurred to her that she was still able to telegraph, and until she dismissed the thought as unfair to Bert she was tantalized by a wild idea of once more having some control of her fate.
It was nearly midnight when he came in, and she saw that any questions would drive him into a fury of irritated nerves. In the morning, she thought, he would be in a more approachable mood. But when she awakened in the dawn he was gone.
She did not see him until nearly noon. After sitting for some time in the lobby and exploring as much of the sleepy town as she could without losing sight of the hotel entrance to which he might come, she had returned to the row of chairs beside it and was sitting there when he appeared in the green automobile.
She ran to the curb. He was flushed, his eyes were very bright, and while he introduced her to a man and woman in the tonneau, she heard in his voice the note she had learned to meet with instant alertness. He told her smoothly that Mr. and Mrs. Andrews were interested in Ripley Farmland Acres; he was driving them over to look at the proposition. She leaned across a pile of luggage to shake hands with them and talked engagingly to the woman, but she did not miss Bert’s slightest movement or change of expression.
When he asked her to get his driving gloves she knew that he would follow her, and on the stairs she gripped the banister with a hand whose quivering she could not stop. She was not afraid of Bert in this mood, but she knew that it threatened an explosion of nervous temper as sufficient atmospheric tension threatens lightening. He was at the door of their room before she had closed it.
“Where’s that money?”
“Right here.” She hesitated, opening her purse. “Bert—it’s all we have, isn’t it?”
“What difference does that make? It isn’t all I’m going to have.”
“Listen just a minute. Did that woman tell you she was going to buy land?”
“Good Lord, do I have to stand here and talk? They’re waiting. Give me that money.”
“But Bert. She’s taking another hat with her. She’s got it in a bag, and she’s got two suitcases, and she—the way she looks—I believe she’s just going somewhere and getting you to take her in the machine. And—please let me finish—if it’s all the money we have don’t you think—”
She knew that his outburst of anger was her own fault. He was nervous and overwrought; she should have soothed him, agreed with him in anything, in everything. But there had been no time. Shaken as she was by his words, she clung to her opinion, even tried to express it again. She felt that their last hold on security was the money in her purse, and she
