Heart's Kindred. Gale Zona
one two,” repeated the Inger. “Bein’ your absinthe has run out.”
Presently he strolled up the street toward the hotel, where the evening’s interest centred. He glanced indifferently into the saloons, nodded a greeting when he wished, but more often ignored one. At a corner a beggar, attracted to the little place from some limbo where news of the wedding had filtered, held out his cap.
“It’s my thirty-third birthday to-day, pal,” he said. “It’ll bring you good luck to cough up somethin’ on me, see if it don’t.”
The Inger stopped with simulated interest. The man – a thin, degenerate creature, with a wrinkled smile – approached him hopefully. Abruptly the Inger’s powerful arm shot out, caught him below the waist, lifted him squirming in the air, and laid him carefully in the gutter.
“What you need is rest,” he said, with perfect gentleness, and left him there.
The hotel where the wedding was to be celebrated had light in every window. Here Bunchy’s preparations had been prodigal. Blankets and skins lined the walls and covered the floor of the office where a fire was roaring and the card tables were in readiness. Shouting and imprecation, chiefly from women, came from the kitchen, where the wedding supper was in preparation. In the hotel desk was Bunchy himself, engaged in somewhat delayed attention to his nails. His hair, still wet from its brushing, ran away from his temples, lifting the corners of his forehead so that it seemed to be smiling. He had a large face, and a little tight mouth, with raw-looking, shiny lips. There was something pathetic in his careful black clothes and his uncomfortable collar and his plaid cravat.
“How much would you sink to back out?” was the Inger’s salutation.
Bunchy grinned sheepishly.
“How much did it cost you?” he inquired.
“Done it for nothing,” the Inger declared. “I ain’t the charmer you are, Bunchy. Never was.”
The groom leaned nearer the light, minutely examining a black, cracked finger.
“She ain’t goin’ to be very much in the way,” said he, confidentially.
“What?” asked the Inger, attentively.
Bunchy shook his head, pursing the tight, raw lips.
“Not her,” he said. “She believes anything you tell her – the whole works. There won’t never be no kickin’ from her about me not loafin’ home.”
“Well,” said the Inger, still with minute attention, “what you gettin’ married for, then?”
“Huh?” said Bunchy, an obstinate finger between his lips.
“I thought,” explained the Inger, “that a fellow got married for to have a home. Far as I can see, though,” he added with an air of great intellectual candor, “home is hell.”
Bunchy threw back his head and looked at him. Curiously, when he laughed, his little tight mouth revealed no teeth. His answer was deliberate, detailed, unspeakable.
For a minute the Inger looked at him, quietly, himself wondering at the surge of something hot through all his veins. In his slow swing round the end of the desk where Bunchy stood, there was no hint of what he meant to do. Bunchy did not even look up from the fat forefinger which he scrupulously pruned. Nor was there anything passionate in the Inger’s voice when he spoke.
“You ain’t got the time to-night,” he said, “but when you get back from your honeymoon, look me up and —remember this!”
The last words came with a rush, as the Inger lifted his hand, and with his open palm, struck Bunchy full in the face. He struck harder than he had intended, and the blood spurted. Even as he caught the ugly look of wrath and amazement in that face, the Inger tore the handkerchief knotted about his own neck and wiped the blood from Bunchy’s chin.
“No call to splash on the weddin’-finery,” the Inger said, with compunction. “Any time’ll do to bleed. She’s Jem Moor’s girl – you hound!” he blazed out again, and flung toward the door.
Bunchy, having recovered his speech, gave vent to it long and variously. All that he said was worse than the observation which had caused his trouble. In the doorway, the Inger halted and turned, and listened. He seemed to be seeing Bunchy for the first time. And yet he had heard all this from the man scores of times before, and for that matter, from all the men of Inch. But this was about Jem Moor’s girl.
As he passed into the street, he wondered at himself. Though she had been a familiar figure ever since he had lived near Inch, he had spoken to the girl no more than twice: once when he had come riding into town from the camp, warm with the knowledge, not yet quite certainty, that the Flag-pole was to pan out, Lory Moor had crossed his path singing, a great coil of clothes-line over one bare arm, the other hand fastening her hair. The Inger, inwardly exultant with life and his lot, had called out to her in the manner of his kind:
“Hello, sweetie! What you got for me this morning?”
Without lowering her brown arm, she had looked up at him, and he had been startled by the sheer ripe loveliness of her. While he stared, wholly unprepared for her sudden movement, a twist of wrist and a fling of hand had let out the length of rope, and it fell in a neat lasso about his neck.
“This!” she said and laughed. He had never forgotten her laugh. Once or twice afterward he had ineffectually tried to mock its scale, softly, in his throat.
“Done,” cried the Inger, “and by the Lord Harry, now you take me along with you!”
At this her laughter had doubled, and realizing that, in her obvious advantage, his command was absurd, he had laughed with her. For a few paces she had run before him, over the sand and mesquite, and he had liked to see the sun falling on her brown neck and thick hair, and her tight, torn sleeves. And as he looked and looked, suddenly he pricked at his horse, thundered down on her, leaned sideways in his saddle, and with one arm swept her up before him.
She did not cry out, but her laughter was suddenly silenced, and she looked in his face, swiftly and searchingly, as if to read it through. She disdained to cling to him, and sat erect, but her body was in his arm, and with his free hand he gathered in the rope and held it bunched on his mare’s neck. Then they galloped. They were a quarter of a mile from the town, and they took a great circle about it. When she saw what he meant to do, her tenseness relaxed, and she sat at ease, but still she did not speak nor did he. The Inger threw back his head, and felt the ground leave his horse’s hoofs, and felt the sky come near. He swam in the sun and the sands blurred, and there was nothing but the girl and the gallop of his horse. And then suddenly, as they bore toward the town, he had been intoxicated to see her throw out her arms, toss them out and up, and laugh again.
Had not the appraisers been waiting at the hotel for him, the Inger might have turned to the desert with her. As it was, at the edge of the settlement, where she suddenly and imperiously pointed, he set her down, ducking from the loop of rope and tossing it to her when she had dismounted.
“You took me along with you all right,” he reminded her.
She laughed and ran away.
“What have you got for me now?” the Inger called after her.
“This!” she said, and threw a kiss somewhere in the air.
There followed days of anxiety when the men at the mine doubted, and the appraisers hung fire, and pretended to less than they knew. In the midst of it, the Inger had ridden away to the desert and camped for three days, and had returned to find them cursing him out and making an estimate of millions. Riding in after dark to send the message to his father, still grub-staking to the north, the Inger for the second time had seen Lory Moor. She was in the crowd which he was breasting, outside a motion picture house. She was in tawdry pink, with a flame of rose in her hat, and she was with Bunchy. His hands were upon her and he was saying something in her ear from one corner of his mouth. She was not listening, the Inger thought as he passed her. She did not see him, and for this he felt vaguely thankful – as if he had come on her in some shame. A day or two after this Jem had told him that she was to marry