The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa

The Gatlings threaded the trail like so many plodding ants and saw enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card racks of the world.

From up on the first level of the first shelf of the wagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad Wheelis, the wagon-train boss, addressing his front span. The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twist about in the traces and, with six ’cello-shaped heads stretched over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyss swimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate its outspread glories while they got their wind back. It became evident that Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped down through the spicy dry air.

“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up, you scenery-lovin’ so-and-soes!”

There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and then fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound appreciation. “How prodigal nature is out in these Western wilds!” she said.

“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter, Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her mother’s were.

“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly that the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation should be invoked in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such picturesque types everywhere!”

“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” said Mr. Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his gestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an average height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at all, so long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”

“Mong père, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured Miss Gatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in his native haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”

Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the one in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that a foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked through his glasses in the same quarter where his daughter looked. His forehead drew into wrinkles.

Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots and her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawn snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a large sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have been the lichened tombs for a couple of Babylon’s kings.

“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your souls, if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’re putting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday noon, you’ll remember, we darn’ near starved. For you, the beckon and the lure of the wonderland. But for me and my girlish gastric juices—chow and lots of it!”

Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off his cap as though to make more room for additional furrows forming on his brow.

“Mmph!” he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly from her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her attention—that mmphing sound was. Lacking vowels though it did, its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled ears.

“What’s wrong, dear?” she asked. “Still sore from all that dreadful horseback riding?”

“It’s that girl,” he told her; “that Shirley of ours. She’s the one I’m worried about.”

“Why, goodness gracious!” she cried. “What’s wrong with Shirley?”

“Look at her. That’s all I ask—just look at her.”

Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than one, squinted at the withdrawing figure.

“Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life,” she protested, still peering. “Why, only last Monday—or was it Tuesday; no, Monday—I remember distinctly now it was Monday because that was the day we got caught in the snowstorm coming through Swift Current Pass—only last Monday you were saying yourself how well and rosy she was looking.”

“I don’t mean that—she’s a bunch of limber young whalebones. Look where she’s going! That’s what I mean. Look what she’s doing!”

“Why, what is she doing that’s out of the way, I’d like to know?” demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive for her young.

“She’s doing what she’s been doing every chance she got these last four-five days, that’s what.” Mr. Gatling was manifesting an attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing with their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the subject rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these roundabout tactics to obtain confirmation for his suspicions before he ever voiced them. “Got eyes in your head, haven’t you? All right then, use ’em.”

“Hector Gatling, for a sane man you do get the queerest notions in your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn’t the child a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three guides packing up? You know she’s been trying to learn to make that pearl knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call it. What possible harm can there be in her learning how to tie a pearl knot?”

“Diamond hitch, diamond hitch,” he corrected her testily. “Not pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You’d better try to remember it, too—diamonds and hitches usually figure in the thing that I’ve got on my mind. And, if you’ll be so kind as to observe her closely, you’ll see that it isn’t those three guides she’s so interested in. It’s one guide out of the three. And it’s getting serious, or I’m all wrong. Now then, do you get my drift, or must I make plans and specifications?”

“Oh!” The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow but with incredulity too, and now she was fluttering her feathers in alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed knickerbockers and a Boy Scout’s shirt may be said to have any feathers to flutter. “Oh, Hector, you don’t mean it! You can’t mean it! A child who’s traveled and seen the world! A child who’s had every advantage that wealth and social position and all could give her! A child who’s a member of the Junior League! A child who’s—who Hector, you’re crazy. Hector, you know it’s utterly impossible—utterly! It’s preposterous!” Womanlike, she debated against a growing private dread. Then, still being womanlike, she pressed the opposing side for proof to destroy her counter-argument: “Hector, you’ve seen something—you’ve overheard something. Tell me this minute what it was you overheard!”

“I’ve overheard nothing. Think I’m going snooping around eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I’ve never done any of that on her yet and I’m too old to begin now and too fat. But I’ve seen a-plenty.”

“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen it myself first what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh, pshaw!” But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked conviction.

“I’ve had the feeling for longer than these last few days,” continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand on it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was this Wild Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and she’d get over it, soon as the attack had run its course. First loading up with all that Indian junk, then saying she felt as though she never wanted to do anything but be natural and stay out here and rough it for the rest of her life, and now here all of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than usual. That’s the worst symptom yet—that slang is.

“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she had, she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went mooning around sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and romanticking and everything. All of you but the strong-minded ones did and I guess they must have mushed-up some too, on the sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did—you mushed-up.” His tone was accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with ancient offenses which not even the passage of the years might condone. “But now it’s different with them. They get slangier and flippier and they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that’s what Miss Shirley is doing right now this very minute, or else I’m the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”