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The Chatelaine Of Burnt Ridge
by
The vaquero raised his shoulders, half in disappointed expectation of some other command. “And your brother, senora, he has not himself arrived.”
A light shadow of impatience crossed her face. “No,” she said, bluntly. “Come, be quick.”
She turned towards the house as the man moved away. Already a gaunt-looking old man had appeared in the porch, and was awaiting her with his hand shadowing his angry, suspicious eyes, and his lips moving querulously.
“Of course, you’ve got to stand out there and give orders and ‘tend to your own business afore you think o’ speaking to your own flesh and blood,” he said aggrievedly. “That’s all YOU care!”
“There was a sick man lying in the road, and I’ve sent Miguel to look after him,” returned the girl, with a certain contemptuous resignation.
“Oh, yes!” struck in another voice, which seemed to belong to the female of the first speaker’s species, and to be its equal in age and temper, “and I reckon you saw a jay bird on a tree, or a squirrel on the fence, and either of ’em was more important to you than your own brother.”
“Steve didn’t come by the stage, and didn’t send any message,” continued the young girl, with the same coldly resigned manner. “No one had any news of him, and, as I told you before, I didn’t expect any.”
“Why don’t you say right out you didn’t WANT any?” said the old man, sneeringly. “Much you inquired! No; I orter hev gone myself, and I would if I was master here, instead of me and your mother bein’ the dust of the yearth beneath your feet.”
The young girl entered the house, followed by the old man, passing an old woman seated by the window, who seemed to be nursing her resentment and a large Bible which she held clasped against her shawled bosom at the same moment. Going to the wall, she hung up her large hat and slightly shook the red dust from her skirts as she continued her explanation, in the same deep voice, with a certain monotony of logic and possibly of purpose and practice also.
“You and mother know as well as I do, father, that Stephen is no more to be depended upon than the wind that blows. It’s three years since he has been promising to come, and even getting money to come, and yet he has never showed his face, though he has been a dozen times within five miles of this house. He doesn’t come because he doesn’t want to come. As to YOUR going over to the stage-office, I went there myself at the last moment to save you the mortification of asking questions of strangers that they know have been a dozen times answered already.”
There was such a ring of absolute truthfulness, albeit worn by repetition, in the young girl’s deep honest voice that for one instant her two more emotional relatives quailed before it; but only for a moment.
“That’s right!” shrilled the old woman. “Go on and abuse your own brother. It’s only the fear you have that he’ll make his fortune yet and shame you before the father and mother you despise.”
The young girl remained standing by the window, motionless and apparently passive, as if receiving an accepted and usual punishment. But here the elder woman gave way to sobs and some incoherent snuffling, at which the younger went away. Whether she recognized in her mother’s tears the ordinary deliquescence of emotion, or whether, as a woman herself, she knew that this mere feminine conventionality could not possibly be directed at her, and that the actual conflict between them had ceased, she passed slowly on to an inner hall, leaving the male victim, her unfortunate father, to succumb, as he always did sooner or later, to their influence. Crossing the hall, which was decorated with a few elk horns, Indian trophies, and mountain pelts, she entered another room, and closed the door behind her with a gesture of relief.