Across the Mesa. Helen Bagg
the winning system.”
“It’s all very well for you to make fun of things you don’t know any more about than a baby, Jim Adams.” Mrs. Van’s scorn was intense. “If you’d read that article I showed you in the magazine about the man that talked to his mother-in-law by the Ouija——”
“Mother-in-law? Great guns, is that the best the thing can do?”
The reply was cut short by the entrance of the train gang, hot and hungry, clamoring for food.
“How’s Conejo?”
“Sand-storm. Windy as a parson. Say, you fellows eat up all the pie?” Conversation was suspended while the demands of hunger were satisfied, and Scott distributed the mail which the late comers had brought.
“From Bob?” Hard looked up from his Boston paper as Scott grunted over his letter. Scott nodded and then as the others looked their curiosity, he read the brief note aloud.
“Dear Scotty:
“Have just had a summons from the directors to go East at once; guess they’re uneasy about something they’ve heard and want first-hand information. Emma and I are starting for Chicago to-morrow. Open all mail and wire anything important.
“Bob.”
“Just what I said they’d ought to do,” breathed Mrs. Van, happily. “Well, that girl’s got a good husband—I’ll say she has.”
“Directors would be a heap more uneasy if they knew what we know,” remarked Williams, sententiously. “Hear anything more about the Chihuahua troops bein’ ordered in, Johnson?”
“Nope,” replied the engineer, his mouth full of pie. “Everybody crawled into their holes in Conejo. Didn’t you never see a sand-storm, Jack?”
“I wish I’d known he was going to Chicago. I’d have asked him to look in on my girl,” said Jimmy, folding up his letter. “I don’t like the way she writes—all jazz and picture shows. Some cuss is trying to cut me out with her.”
“More likely she’s heard about you and the little Mexican over to Conejo,” remarked the fireman, unsympathetically.
“If you’d had her address she sure would have,” replied Adams, promptly. “That Mexican girl——”
“Yes, we remember her. She was a looker but she used too much powder—they all do.” Hard’s voice was judicial. “She always reminded me of a chocolate cake caught out in a snow-storm.”
“Hush up!” Mrs. Van’s voice was tragic. “Do you want Dolores to get mad and quit? They’ve got their feelings same as we have. I guess I’ve got to catch a deaf and dumb one if I want to keep her on this place!”
Marc Scott sat in his place, a pile of letters before him, when the others had gone, and Mrs. Van was helping Dolores with the dishes.
“Say, Mrs. Van, when you get through with those dishes come outside a minute; I want to talk to you,” he said as he threw open the door.
The shack boasted no veranda, but there were three small steps. Scott seated himself on the top one and rolled a cigarette. The air was chilly. The sun had sunk behind the mountains and outlined their rugged shapes with golden lines against the purple. Everything was very still—there was not a sound except for the faint strains of the victrola, which Jimmy Adams always played for an hour after supper. A few figures moved about in and out of the other cabins; not many—for the working force was light these days. A light in the store showed that Williams was keeping open house as usual.
The door opened and Mrs. Van came out and sat beside him on the step.
“Well?” she said, quietly, “what’s the matter?”
“I’m in the deuce of a mess,” replied Scott.
“You mean Indians?”
“Worse than that—it’s a woman, Mrs. Van.”
“A woman!” Mrs. Van was plainly shocked. “My land, Marc Scott, you ain’t been foolin’ with that heathen in the kitchen?”
Scott chuckled. “Listen, Mrs. Van, I oughtn’t to string you like that—it is a woman, though. You heard me read that letter of Bob’s?”
“Yes.”
“He said to read the mail.”
“Well, haven’t you?”
“Yes, and the first one I tumbled into feet foremost was a confidential one from his sister. She says she’s coming down here. She thinks he’s here.”
“What? You mean here? Athens?”
“That’s what she says. The letter’s been lying over at Conejo since Tuesday and the chances are she’s there by this time.”
“But——”
“Oh, that ain’t the worst. It was a confidential letter. She said——” Scott paused in embarrassment.
“I’m not telling you this for fun, Mrs. Van Zandt, but because I don’t know what to do. You’re a lady——”
“Oh, go on, what’s the matter with you? I guess if you know it it ain’t going to hurt me. Has she run off with somebody, or has her Pa lost his money, or what?”
“I’ll show you.” Scott fished out Polly’s letter apologetically. “I stopped reading it directly I saw it was confidential,” he continued, “but I got this much at one swallow.”
“Dear Bob:
“I know it’s awfully nervy of me to drop in on you and Emma right at the beginning of your honeymoon, but I am coming just the same. Joyce Henderson has behaved atrociously to me.”
“That’s all I read,” concluded Scott, penitently. “Joyce Henderson is the fellow she’s engaged to—Bob told me that. I had to look at the end to see if she said when she was coming, and by George, if she started when she said she was going to, she ought to be in Conejo right now.”
“Now!!”
“What we’re going to do with her, I don’t know, do you?”
“She and the wedding couple have just crossed each other!”
“Looks like it. Look here, Mrs. Van, what am I going to do? If I don’t look her up, God knows what’ll happen to her over in Conejo, unless she has sense enough to go to the Morgans. If I do, she’s going to raise merry heck because I read that letter about the fellow jilting her. Now I thought maybe if you’d let on that you read it—a girl wouldn’t mind another woman’s knowing a thing like that as much as she would a man.”
Mrs. Van Zandt surveyed Scott pityingly.
“It always seems so queer to me that a man can have so much muscle and so little horse sense,” she said at length.
“But——”
“There ain’t any use my explaining; you wouldn’t get me,” she went on, impatiently. “But here’s something even you can understand. I’d look nice opening the boss’s mail, wouldn’t I? Now you’ve read the worst of it you might as well dip into it far enough to find out just when she’s coming. Somebody’ll have to drive over to Conejo for her as long as the machine’s busted.”
“I’ve read all I’m going to,” said Scott, doggedly. “You can do the finding out.”
Mrs. Van Zandt grunted, arranged a pair of eyeglasses which sat uneasily on a nose ill adapted to them, and glanced at the letter. She gave a sigh of relief.
“She says she’s going straight to the Morgans’ when she gets to Conejo. Bob’s told her about them. Prob’ly Morgan’ll run her over in his car. She ain’t very definite