Peak and Prairie. Fuller Anna
the view of the Peak, stood a tall, well-dressed young woman, patting one of the dogs, while the others leaped, barking, about her.
Somewhat mystified by this apparition, Stanwood approached, and said; "Good-evening, madam."
"Good-evening," came the reply, in a rather agitated voice. "I'm Elizabeth."
"The deuce you are!"
Struck, not by the unfatherly, but by the ungentlemanly nature of his response, Stanwood promptly gathered himself together, to meet the situation.
"Pray come in and take a seat," he said; and then, falling into the prairie speech: "Where are you stopping?"
The tall young lady, who had entered, but who had not taken the proffered seat, looked at him a moment, and then she came toward him with a swift, impulsive movement, and said: "Why, papa, I don't believe you know me! I'm Elizabeth!"
"Yes, yes, oh, yes! I understand. But I thought perhaps you were paying a visit somewhere—some school friend, you know, or—or—yes—some school friend."
The girl was looking at him half bewildered, half solicitous. It was not the reception she had anticipated at the end of her two-thousand-mile journey. But then, this was not the man she had expected to see—this gaunt, ill-clad figure, with the worn, hollow-eyed face, and the gray hair. Why, her father was only fifty years old, yet the lines she saw were lines of age and suffering. Suddenly all her feeling of perplexity and chagrin and wounded pride was merged in a profound tenderness. She drew nearer, extending both her hands, placed them gently upon his shoulders and said: "Will you please to give me a kiss?"
Stanwood, much abashed, bent his head toward the blooming young face, and imprinted a perfunctory kiss upon the waiting lips. This unaccustomed exercise completed his discomfiture. For the first time in his life he felt himself unequal to a social emergency.
A curious sensation went over Elizabeth. Somehow she felt as if she had been kissed by a total stranger. She drew back and picked up her small belongings. For a moment Stanwood thought she was going.
"Don't you get your mail out here any more?" she asked.
"Not very regularly," he replied, guiltily conscious of possessing two or three illegible letters from his daughter which he had not yet had the enterprise to decipher.
"Then you did not expect me?"
"Well, no, I can't say I did. But"—with a praiseworthy if not altogether successful effort—"I am very glad to see you, my dear."
The first half of this speech was so much more convincing than the last, that the girl felt an unpleasant stricture about her throat, and knew herself to be on the verge of tears.
"I could go back," she said, with a pathetic little air of dignity. "Perhaps you would not have any place to put me if I should stay."
"Oh, yes; I can put you in the museum"—and he looked at her with the first glimmer of appreciation, feeling that she would be a creditable addition to his collection of curiosities.
Elizabeth met his look with one of quick comprehension, and then she broke into a laugh which saved the day. It was a pleasant laugh in itself, and furthermore, if she had not laughed just at that juncture she would surely have disgraced herself forever by a burst of tears.
Cy Willows, meanwhile, believing that "the gal and her pa" would rather not be observed at their first meeting, had discreetly busied himself with the two neat trunks which his passenger had brought.
"Hullo, Jake!" he remarked, as the ranchman appeared at the door; "this is a great day for you, ain't it?"
The two men took hold of one of the trunks together, and carried it into the museum. When the door opened, Willows almost dropped his end from sheer amazement. He stood in the middle of the room, staring from Venus to altar-cloth, from altar-cloth to censer.
"Gosh!" he remarked at last. "Your gal's struck it rich!"
The "gal" took it more quietly. To her, the master of this fine apartment was not Jake Stanwood, the needy ranchman, but Jacob Stanwood, Esq., gentleman and scholar, to the manor born. She stepped to the window, and looked out across the shimmering plain to the rugged peaks and the warm blue slopes of "the range," and a sigh of admiration escaped her.
"Oh, papa!" she cried, "how beautiful it is!"
"And I'll be durned if 't wa' n't the mountings the gal was looking at all the time!" Cy Willows declared, when reporting upon the astonishing situation at the ranch.
Stanwood himself was somewhat impressed by the girl's attitude. The museum had come to seem to his long unaccustomed mind a very splendid apartment indeed. When, a few minutes later, Elizabeth joined him in the rudely furnished living-room of the cabin, he felt something very like chagrin at her first observation.
"Oh, papa!" she cried. "I'm so glad the rest of it is a real ranch house! I've always wanted to see just how a real ranchman lives!"
He thought ruefully that she would soon learn, to her cost, how a very poverty-stricken ranchman lived. His examination of the larder had not been encouraging.
"I am afraid we shall have rather poor pickings for supper, my dear," he said apologetically. He called her "my dear" from the first; it seemed more non-committal and impersonal than the use of her name. He had not called a young lady by her first name for fifteen years.
"I have my dinner in the middle of the day," he went on, "and I seem to have run short of provisions this evening."
"I suppose you have a man-cook," she remarked, quite ignoring his apology.
"Yes," he replied grimly. "I have the honor to fill that office myself."
"Why; isn't there anybody else about the place?"
"No. I'm 'out of help' just now, as old Madam Gallup used to say. I don't suppose you remember old Madam Gallup."
"Oh, yes, I do! Mama used to have her to dinner every Sunday. She looked like a duchess, but when she died people said she died of starvation. That was the year after you went away," she added thoughtfully.
It seemed very odd to hear this tall young woman say "mama," and to realize that it was that other Elizabeth that she was laying claim to. Why, the girl seemed almost as much of a woman as her mother. Fifteen years! A long time to be sure. He ought to have known better than to have slipped into reminiscences at the very outset. Uncomfortable things, always—uncomfortable things!
He would not let her help him get the supper, and with a subtle perception of the irritation which he was at such pains to conceal, she forbore to press the point, and went, instead, and sat in the doorway, looking dreamily across the prairie.
Stanwood noted her choice of a seat, with a curious mixture of jealousy and satisfaction. He should be obliged either to give up his seat, or to share it for awhile; but then it was gratifying to know that the girl had a heart for that view.
And the girl sat there wondering vaguely why she was not homesick. Everything had been different from her anticipations. No one to meet her at Springtown; no letter, no message at the hotel. She had had some difficulty in learning how to reach Cameron City, and when, at last, she had found herself in the forlorn little prairie train, steaming eastward across the strange yellow expanse, unbroken by the smallest landmark, she had been assailed by strange doubts and questionings. At Cameron City, again, no longed-for, familiar face had appeared among the loungers at the station, and the situation and her part in it seemed most uncomfortable. When, however, she had made known her identity, and word was passed that this was "Jake Stanwood's gal," there were prompt offers of help, and she had soon secured the services of Cy Willows and his "team."
As she sat in the doorway, watching the glowing light, the sun dropped behind the Peak. She remembered how Cy had said he "hadn't never heard Jake Stanwood speak of havin' a gal of his own." The shadow of the great mountain had fallen upon the plain, and a chill, half imaginary, half real, possessed itself of her. Was she homesick after all? She stood up and stepped out