A few days after Octavia's arrival he made her get out one of her riding skirts, and curtail it to a shortness demanded by the chaparral brakes.
With some misgivings she donned this and the pair of buckskin leggings he prescribed in addition, and, mounted upon a dancing pony, rode with him to view her posses- sions. He showed her everything -- the flocks of ewes, muttons and grazing lambs, the dipping vats, the shearing pens, the uncouth merino rams in their little pasture, the water-tanks I prepared against the summer drought -- giving account of his stewardship with a boyish enthus- siasm that never flagged.
Where was the old Teddy that she knew so well? This side of him was the same, and it was a side that pleased her; but this was all she ever saw of him now. Where was his sentimentality -- those old, varying moods of impetuous love-making, of fanciful, quixotic devotion, of heart-breaking gloom, of alternating, absurd tenderness and haughty dignity? His nature had been a sensitive one, his temperament bordering closely on the artistic. She knew that, besides being a follower of fashion and its fads and sports, he had cultivated tastes of a finer nature. He had written things, he had tampered with colours, he was something of a student in certain branches of art, and once she had been admitted to all his aspirations and thoughts. But now -- and she could not avoid the con- clusion -- Teddy had barricaded against her every side of himself except one -- the side that showed the manager of the Rancho de las Sombras and a jolly chum who had forgiven and forgotten. Queerly enough the words of Mr. Bannister's description of her property came into her mind -- 'all inclosed within a strong barbed-wire fence.'
'Teddy's fenced, too,' said Octavia to herself.
It was not difficult for her to reason out the cause of his fortifications. It had originated one night at the Hammersmiths' ball. It occurred at a time soon after she had decided to accept Colonel Beaupree and his million, which was no more than her looks and the entree she held to the inner circles were worth. Teddy had proposed with all his impetuosity and fire, and she looked him straight in the eyes, an said, coldly and finally: 'Never let me hear any such silly nonsense from you again.' 'You won't,' said Teddy, with an expression around his mouth, and -- now Teddy was inclosed within a strong barbed-wire fence.
It was on this first ride of inspection that Teddy was seized by the inspiration that suggested the name of Mother Goose's heroine, and he at once bestowed it upon Octavia. The idea, supported by both a similarity of names and identity of occupations, seemed to strike him as a peculiarly happy one, and he never tired of using it. The Mexicans on the ranch also took up the name, adding another syllable to accommodate their lingual incapacity for the final 'p,' gravely referring to her as 'La Madama Bo-Peepy.' Eventually it spread, and 'Madame Bo- Peep's ranch' was as often mentioned as the 'Rancho de las Sombras.'
Came the long, hot season from May to September, when work is scarce on the ranches. Octavia passed the days in a kind of lotus-eater's dream. Books, hammocks, correspondence with a few intimate friends, a renewed interest in her old water-colour box and easel -- these disposed of the sultry hours of daylight. The evenings were always sure to bring enjoyment. Best of all were the rapturous horseback rides with Teddy, when the moon gave light over the wind-swept leagues, chaperoned by the wheeling night-hawk and the startled owl. Often the Mexicans would come up from their shacks with their guitars and sing the weirdest of heart-breaking songs. There were long, cosy chats on the breezy gallery, and an interminable warfare of wits between Teddy and Mrs. MacIntyre, whose abundant Scotch shrewdness often more than overmatched the lighter humour in which she was lacking.
And the nights came, one after another, and were filed away by weeks and months -- nights soft and languorous and fragrant, that should have driven Strephon to Chloe over wires however barbed, that might have drawn Cupid himself to hunt, lasso in hand, among those amorous pastures -- but Teddy kept his fences up.
One July night Madame Bo-Peep and her ranch man- ager were sitting on the east gallerv. Teddy had been exhausting the science of prognostication as to the proba- bilities of a price of twenty-four cents for the autumn clip, and had then subsided into an anesthetic cloud of Havana smoke. Only as incompetent a judge as a woman would have failed to note long ago that at least a third of his salary must have gone up in the fumes of those imported Regalias.
'Teddy,' said Octavia, suddenly, and rather sharply, 'what are you working down here on a ranch for?'
'One hundred per,' said Teddy, glibly, 'and found.'
'I've a good mind to discharge you.'
'Can't do it,' said Teddy, with a grin.
'Why not?' demanded Octavia, with argumentative heat.
'Under contract. Terms of sale respect all unexpired contracts. Mine runs until 12 P. m., December thirty- first. You might get up at midnight on that date and fire me. if you try it sooner I'll be in a position to bring legal proceedings.'
Octavia seemed to be considering the prospects of litigation.
'But,' continued Teddy cheerfully, 'I've been think- ing of resigning anyway.'
Octavia's rocking-chair ceased its motion. There were centipedes in this country, she felt sure; and Indians, and vast, lonely, desolate, empty wastes; all within strong barbed-wire fence. There was a Van Dresser pride, but there was also a Van Dresser heart. She must know for certain whether or not he had forgotten.
'Ah, well, Teddy,' she said, with a fine assumption of polite interest, 'it's lonely down here; you're longing to get back to the old life -- to polo and lobsters and theatres and balls.'
'Never cared much for balls,' said Teddy virtuously.
'You're getting old, Teddy. Your memory is failing. Nobody ever knew you to miss a dance, unless it occurred on the same night with another one which you attended. And you showed such shocking bad taste, too, in dancing too often with the same partner. Let me see, what was that Forbes girl's name -- the one with wall eyes -- Mabel, wasn't it?'
'No; Adele. Mabel was the one with the bony elbows. That wasn't wall in Adele's eyes. It was soul. We used to talk sonnets together, and Verlaine. Just then I was trying to run a pipe from the Pierian spring.'
'You were on the floor with her,' said Octavia, unde- flected, 'five times at the Hammersmiths'.'
'Hammersmiths' what? ' questioned Teddy, vacuously.
'Ball -- ball,' said Octavia, viciously. 'What were we talking of?'
'Eyes, I thought,' said Teddy, after some reflection; 'and elbows.'
