The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“And by the way,” Dick’s voice went on, “you’ve been over the reports on the Big Miramar?… Very good. Discount them. I disagree with them flatly. The water is there. I haven’t a doubt we’ll find a fairly shallow artesian supply. Send up the boring outfit at once and start prospecting. The soil’s ungodly rich, and if we don’t make that dry hole ten times as valuable in the next five years…”

Paula sighed, and turned back down the spiral to the library.

Red Cloud the incorrigible, always planting his acorns – was her thought. There he was, with his love-world crashing around him[553], calmly considering dams and well-borings so that he might, in the years to come, plant more acorns.

Nor was Dick ever to know that Paula had come so near to him with her need and gone away. Again, not aimlessly, but to run through for the last time the notes of the scribble pad by his bed, he was out on his sleeping porch. His house was in order. There was nothing left but to sign up the morning’s dictation, answer several telegrams, then would come lunch and the hunting in the Sycamore hills. Oh, he would do it well. The Outlaw would bear the blame. And he would have an eye-witness, either Froelig or Martinez. But not both of them. One pair of eyes would be enough to satisfy when the martingale parted and the mare reared and toppled backward upon him into the brush. And from that screen of brush, swiftly linking accident to catastrophe, the witness would hear the rifle go off.

Martinez was more emotional than the sculptor and would therefore make a more satisfactory witness, Dick decided. Him would he maneuver to have with him in the narrow trail when the Outlaw should be made the scapegoat. Martinez was no horseman. All the better.[554] It would be well, Dick judged, to make the Outlaw act up in real devilishness for a minute or two before the culmination. It would give verisimilitude[555]. Also, it would excite Martinez’s horse, and, therefore, excite Martinez so that he would not see occurrences too clearly.

He clenched his hands with sudden hurt. The Little Lady was mad, she must be mad; on no other ground could he understand such arrant cruelty, listening to her voice and Graham’s from the open windows of the music room as they sang together the “Gypsy Trail.”

Nor did he unclench his hands during all the time they sang. And they sang the mad, reckless song clear through to its mad reckless end. And he continued to stand, listening to her laugh herself merrily away from Graham and on across the house to her wing, from the porches of which she continued to laugh as she teased and chided Oh Dear for fancied derelictions.

From far off came the dim but unmistakable trumpeting of Mountain Lad. King Polo asserted his lordly self, and the harems of mares and heifers sent back their answering calls. Dick listened to all the whinnying and nickering and bawling of sex, and sighed aloud: “Well, the land is better for my having been. It is a good thought to take to bed.[556]”

Chapter XXXI

A ring of his bed ’phone made Dick sit on the bed to take up the receiver. As he listened, he looked out across the patio to Paula’s porches. Bonbright was explaining that it was a call from Chauncey Bishop who was at Eldorado in a machine. Chauncey Bishop, editor and owner of the San Francisco Dispatch, was sufficiently important a person, in Bonbright’s mind, as well as old friend of Dick’s, to be connected directly to him.

“You can get here for lunch,” Dick told the newspaper owner. “And, say, suppose you put up for the night[557]… Never mind your special writers. We’re going hunting mountain lions this afternoon, and there’s sure to be a kill. Got them located… Who? What’s she write?… What of it? She can stick around the ranch and get half a dozen columns out of any of half a dozen subjects, while the writer chap can get the dope on lion-hunting… Sure, sure. I’ll put him on a horse a child can ride.”

The more the merrier[558], especially newspaper chaps, Dick grinned to himself – and grandfather Jonathan Forrest would have nothing on him when it came to pulling off a successful finish.

But how could Paula have been so wantonly cruel as to sing the “Gypsy Trail” so immediately afterward? Dick asked himself, as, receiver near to ear, he could distantly hear Chauncey Bishop persuading his writer man to the hunting.

“All right then, come a running,” Dick told Bishop in conclusion. “I’m giving orders now for the horses, and you can have that bay you rode last time.”

Scarcely had he hung up, when the bell rang again. This time it was Paula.