“‘Yes,’ he said; ‘I know.’ So I thought he had heard, that she had written to him. But then I thought how she must have been too sick to write, and that that fool mother of hers anyway . . .” The proprietress was watching Jarrod. “Because she wouldn’t have to write him.”
“Wouldn’t have to?”
“He knew she was sick. He knew it. She didn’t have to write him. Now you’ll laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. How did he know?”
“He knew. Because I knew he knew; and so when he didn’t go on back to Saint Louis, I knew that she would come. And so in August they did come. Louise had grown a lot taller, thinner, and that afternoon I saw them standing together for the first time. She was almost as tall as he was. That was when I first saw that Louise was a woman. And now Alvina worrying about that horse that Louise says she’s going to ride.”
“It’s already killed one man,” Jarrod said.
“Automobiles have killed more than that. But you ride in an automobile, yourself. You came in one. It never hurt her when she swam that river, did it?”
“But this is different. How do you know it won’t hurt her?”
“I just know.”
“How know?”
“You go out there where you can see that bench. Don’t bother him; just go and look at him. Then you’ll know too.”
“Well, I’d want a little more assurance than that,” Jarrod said.
He had returned to Mrs. King. With Louise he had had one interview, brief, violent, bitter. That was the night before; to-day she had disappeared. “Yet he is still sitting there on that bench,” Jarrod thought. “She’s not even with him. They don’t even seem to have to be together: he can tell all the way from Mississippi to Saint Louis when she is sick. Well, I know who’s in the blind spot now.”
Mrs. King was in her room. “It seems that my worst competitor is that horse,” Jarrod said.
“Can’t you see he is making her ride it for the same reason he made her swim that snake-filled river? To show that he can, to humiliate me?”
“What can I do?” Jarrod said. “I tried to talk to her last night. But you saw where I got.”
“If I were a man, I shouldn’t have to ask what to do. If I saw the girl I was engaged to being ruined, ruined by a man, any man, and a man I never saw before and don’t even know who he is — old or not old; heart or no heart . . .”
“I’ll talk to her again.”
“Talk?” Mrs. King said. “Talk? Do you think I sent you that message to hurry down here just to talk to her?”
“You wait, now,” Jarrod said. “It’ll be all right. I’ll attend to this.”
He had to do a good bit of waiting, himself. It was nearly noon when Louise entered the empty lobby where he sat. He rose. “Well?”
They looked at each other. “Well?”
“Are you still going to ride that horse this afternoon?” Jarrod asked.
“I thought we settled this last night. But you’re still meddling. I didn’t send for you to come down here.”
“But I’m here. I never thought, though, that I was being sent for to compete with a horse.” She watched him, her eyes hard. “With worse than a horse. With a damned dead man. A man that’s been dead for twenty years; he says so himself, they tell me. And he ought to know, being a doctor, a heart specialist.
I suppose you keep him alive by scaring him — like strychnine, Florence Nightingale.” She watched him, her face quite still, quite cold. “I’m not jealous,” he went on. “Not of that bird. But when I see him making you ride that horse that has already killed . . .” He looked down at her cold face. “Don’t you want to marry me, Louise?”
She ceased to look at him. “It’s because we are young yet. We have so much time, all the rest of time. And maybe next year even, this very day next year, with everything pretty and warm and green, and he will be . . .
You don’t understand. I didn’t at first, when he first told me how it was to live day after day with a match box full of dynamite caps in your breast pocket. Then he told me one day, when I was big enough to understand, how there is nothing in the world but living, being alive, knowing you are alive. And to be afraid is to know you are alive, but to do what you are afraid of, then you live.
He says it’s better even to be afraid than to be dead. He told me all that while he was still afraid, before he gave up the being afraid and he knew he was alive without living. And now he has even given that up, and now he is just afraid. So what can I do?”
“Yes. And I can wait, because I haven’t got a match box of dynamite caps in my shirt. Or a box of conjuring powder, either.”
“I don’t expect you to see. I didn’t send for you. I didn’t want to get you mixed up in it.”
“You never thought of that when you took my ring. Besides, you had already got me mixed up in it, the first night I ever saw you. You never minded then. So now I know a lot I didn’t know before. And what does he think about that ring, by the way?”
She didn’t answer. She was not looking at him; neither was her face averted. After a time he said, “I see. He doesn’t know about the ring. You never showed it to him.” Still she didn’t answer, looking neither at him nor away. “All right,” he said “I’ll give you one more chance.”
She looked at him. “One more chance for what?” Then she said, “Oh. The ring. You want it back.” He watched her, erect, expressionless, while she drew from inside her dress a slender cord on which was suspended the ring and a second object which he recognized in the flicking movement which broke the cord, to be the tiny metal rabbit of which the proprietress had told him.
Then it was gone, and her hand flicked again, and something struck him a hard, stinging blow on the cheek. She was already running toward the stairs. After a time he stooped and picked up the ring from the floor.
He looked about the lobby. “They’re all down at the spring,” he thought, holding the ring on his palm. “That’s what people come here for: to drink water.”
They were there, clotting in the marquee above the well, with their bright shawls and magazines.
As he approached, Mrs. King came quickly out of the group, carrying one of the stained tumblers in her hand. “Yes?” she said. “Yes?” Jarrod extended his hand on which the ring lay. Mrs. King looked down at the ring, her face cold, quiet, outraged. “Sometimes I wonder if she can be my daughter. What will you do now?”
Jarrod, too, looked down at the ring, his face also cold, still. “At first I thought I just had to compete with a horse,” he said. “But it seems there is more going on here than I knew of, than I was told of.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Mrs. King said. “Have you been listening to that fool Lily Cranston, to these other old fools here?”
“Not to learn any more than everybody else seems to have known all the time. But then, I’m only the man she was engaged to marry.” He looked down at the ring. “What do you think I had better do now?”
“If you’re a man that has to stop to ask advice from a woman in a case like this, then you’d better take the advice and take your ring and go on back to Nebraska or Kansas or wherever it is.”
“Oklahoma,” Jarrod said sullenly. He closed his hand on the ring. “He’ll be on that bench,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t he?” Mrs. King said. “He has no one to fear here.”
But Jarrod was already moving away. “You go on to Louise,” he said. “I’ll attend to this.”
Mrs. King watched him go on down the path. Then she turned herself and flung the stained tumbler into an oleander bush and went to the hotel, walking fast, and mounted the stairs. Louise was in her room, dressing. “So you gave Hubert back his ring,” Mrs. King said.
“That man will be pleased now. You will have no secret from him now, if the ring ever was a secret. Since you don’t seem to have any private affairs where he is concerned; don’t appear to desire any—”
“Stop,” Louise said. “You can’t talk to me like that.”
“Ah. He would be proud of that, too, to have heard that from his pupil.”
“He wouldn’t let me down. But you let me down. He wouldn’t let me down.” She stood thin and taut, her hands clenched at her sides. Suddenly she began to cry, her face lifted, the tears rolling down her cheeks. “I worry and I worry and I don’t know what to do. And now you let me down, my own mother.”
Mrs. King sat on the bed. Louise stood in her underthings, the garments she had removed scattered here and there, on the bed and on the chairs. On the table beside the bed lay the little metal rabbit; Mrs. King looked at it for a moment. “Don’t you want to marry Hubert?” she said.
“Didn’t I promise
