“I mean, we can go to your home now. We can start by the stage tonight. Your mother can see us married. We can come back and finish in the mountains instead of beginning in them. It’ll be just merely shifting, yu’ see.”
He could scarcely bring himself to say this at all; yet he said it almost as if he were urging it. It implied a renunciation that he could hardly bear to think of. To put off his wedding day, the bliss upon whose threshold he stood after his three years of faithful battle for it, and that wedding journey he had arranged: for there were the mountains in sight, the woods and canyons where he had planned to go with her after the bishop had joined them; the solitudes where only the wild animals would be, besides themselves. His horses, his tent, his rifle, his rod, all were waiting ready in the town for their start tomorrow. He had provided many dainty things to make her comfortable. Well, he could wait a little more, having waited three years. It would not be what his heart most desired: there would be the “public eye and the talking of tongues”—but he could wait. The hour would come when he could be alone with his bride at last. And so he spoke as if he urged it.
“Never!” she cried. “Never, never!”
She pushed it from her. She would not brook such sacrifice on his part. Were they not going to her mother in four weeks? If her family had warmly accepted him—but they had not; and in any case, it had gone too far, it was too late. She told her lover that she would not hear him, that if he said any more she would gallop into town separately from him. And for his sake she would hide deep from him this loneliness of hers, and the hurt that he had given her in refusing to share with her his trouble with Trampas, when others must know of it.
Accordingly, they descended the hill slowly together, lingering to spin out these last miles long. Many rides had taught their horses to go side by side, and so they went now: the girl sweet and thoughtful in her sedate gray habit; and the man in his leathern chaps and cartridge belt and flannel shirt, looking gravely into the distance with the level gaze of the frontier.
Having read his sweetheart’s mind very plainly, the lover now broke his dearest custom. It was his code never to speak ill of any man to any woman. Men’s quarrels were not for women’s ears. In his scheme, good women were to know only a fragment of men’s lives. He had lived many outlaw years, and his wide knowledge of evil made innocence doubly precious to him. But today he must depart from his code, having read her mind well. He would speak evil of one man to one woman, because his reticence had hurt her—and was she not far from her mother, and very lonely, do what he could? She should know the story of his quarrel in language as light and casual as he could veil it with.
He made an oblique start. He did not say to her: “I’ll tell you about this. You saw me get ready for Trampas because I have been ready for him any time these five years.” He began far off from the point with that rooted caution of his—that caution which is shared by the primal savage and the perfected diplomat.
“There’s cert’nly a right smart o’ difference between men and women,” he observed.
“You’re quite sure?” she retorted.
“Ain’t it fortunate?—that there’s both, I mean.”
“I don’t know about fortunate. Machinery could probably do all the heavy work for us without your help.”
“And who’d invent the machinery?”
She laughed. “We shouldn’t need the huge, noisy things you do. Our world would be a gentle one.”
“Oh, my gracious!”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, my gracious! Get along, Monte! A gentle world all full of ladies!”
“Do you call men gentle?” inquired Molly.
“Now it’s a funny thing about that. Have yu’ ever noticed a joke about fathers-in-law? There’s just as many fathers—as mothers-in-law; but which side are your jokes?”
Molly was not vanquished. “That’s because the men write the comic papers,” said she.
“Hear that, Monte? The men write ’em. Well, if the ladies wrote a comic paper, I expect that might be gentle.”
She gave up this battle in mirth; and he resumed:—
“But don’t you really reckon it’s uncommon to meet a father-in-law flouncin’ around the house? As for gentle—Once I had to sleep in a room next a ladies’ temperance meetin’. Oh, heavens! Well, I couldn’t change my room, and the hotel man, he apologized to me next mawnin’. Said it didn’t surprise him the husbands drank some.”
Here the Virginian broke down over his own fantastic inventions, and gave a joyous chuckle in company with his sweetheart. “Yes, there’s a big heap o’ difference between men and women,” he said. “Take that fello’ and myself, now.”
“Trampas?” said Molly, quickly serious. She looked along the road ahead, and discerned the figure of Trampas still visible on its way to town.
The Virginian did not wish her to be serious—more than could be helped. “Why, yes,” he replied, with a waving gesture at Trampas. “Take him and me. He don’t think much o’ me! How could he? And I expect he’ll never. But yu’ saw just now how it was between us. We were not a bit like a temperance meetin’.”
She could not help laughing at the twist he gave to his voice. And she felt happiness warming her; for in the Virginian’s tone about Trampas was something now that no longer excluded her. Thus he began his gradual recital, in a cadence always easy, and more and more musical with the native accent of the South. With the light turn he gave it, its pure ugliness melted into charm.
“No, he don’t think anything of me. Once a man in
