Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

H >> Harry Leon Wilson >> Somewhere in Red Gap




"Well, they had girls at that eating-house. Of course no one ever
noticed 'em much, being too famished and busy. You only knew in a
general way that females was passing the food along. But Angus actually
did notice Ellabelle, though it must have been at the end of the meal,
mebbe when she was pouring the third cup. Ellabelle was never right
pretty to my notion, but she had some figure and kind of a sad dignity,
and her brown hair lacked the towers and minarets and golden domes that
the other girls built with their own or theirs by right of purchase. And
she seems to have noticed Angus from the very first. Angus saw that when
she wasn't passing the fried chicken or the hot biscuits along, even for
half a minute, she'd pick up a book from the window sill and glance
studiously at its pages. He saw the book was called 'Lucile.' And he
looked her over some more--between mouthfuls, of course--the
neat-fitting black dress revealing every line of her lithe young figure,
like these magazine stories say, the starched white apron and the look
of sad dignity that had probably come of fresh drummers trying to teach
her how to take a joke, and the smooth brown hair--he'd probably got
wise to the other kind back in the social centres of Ohio--and all at
once he saw there was something about her. He couldn't tell what it was,
but he knew it was there. He heard one of the over-haired ones call her
Ellabelle, and he committed the name to memory.

"He also remembered the book she was reading. He come back with a copy
he'd bought at Spokane and kept it on his bureau. Not that he read it
much. It was harder to get into than 'Peck's Bad Boy,' which was his
favourite reading just then.

"Pretty soon another load of steers is ready--my sakes, what scrubby
runts we sent off the range in them days compared to now!--and Angus
pleads to go, so Lysander John makes a place for him and, coming back,
here's Ellabelle handing the hot things along same as ever, with
'Lucile' at hand for idle moments. This time Angus again made certain
there was something about her. He cross-examined her, I suppose, between
the last ham and eggs and the first hot cakes. Her folks was corn
farmers over in Iowa and she'd gone to high school and had meant to be a
teacher, but took this job because with her it was anything to get out
of Iowa, which she spoke of in a warm, harsh way.

"Angus nearly lost the train that time, making certain there was
something about her. He told her to be sure and stay there till he
showed up again. He told me about her when he got back. 'There's
something about her,' he says. 'I suspect it's her eyes, though it might
be something else.'

"Me? I suspected there was something about her, too; only I thought it
was just that North Platte breakfast and his appetite. No meal can ever
be like breakfast to them that's two-fisted, and Angus was. He'd think
there was something about any girl, I says to myself, seeing her through
the romantic golden haze of them North Platte breakfast victuals. Of
course I didn't suggest any such base notion to Angus, knowing how
little good it does to talk sense to a man when he thinks there's
something about a girl. He tried to read 'Lucile' again, but couldn't
seem to strike any funny parts.

"Next time he went to Omaha, a month later, he took his other suit and
his new boots. 'I shall fling caution to the winds and seal my fate,' he
says. 'There's something about her, and some depraved scoundrel might
find it out.' 'All right, go ahead and seal,' I says. 'You can't expect
us to be shipping steers every month just to give you twenty minutes
with a North Platte waiter girl.' 'Will she think me impetuous?' says
he. 'Better that than have her think you ain't,' I warns him. 'Men have
been turned down for ten million reasons, and being impetuous is about
the only one that was never numbered among them. It will be strange
o'clock when that happens.' 'She's different,' says Angus. 'Of course,'
I says. 'We're all different. That's what makes us so much alike.' 'You
might know,' says he doubtfully.

"He proved I did, on the trip back. He marched up to Ellabelle's end of
the table in his other suit and his new boots and a startling necktie
he'd bought at a place near the stockyards in South Omaha, and proposed
honourable marriage to her, probably after the first bite of sausage and
while she was setting his coffee down. 'And you've only twenty minutes,'
he says, 'so hurry and pack your grip. We'll be wed when we get off the
train.' 'You're too impetuous,' says Ellabelle, looking more than ever
as if there was something about her. 'There, I was afraid I'd be,' says
Angus, quitting on some steak and breaking out into scarlet rash. 'What
did you think I am?' demands Ellabelle. 'Did you think I would answer
your beck and call or your lightest nod as if I were your slave or
something? Little you know me,' she says, tossing her head indignantly.
'I apologize bitterly,' says Angus. 'The very idea is monstrous,' says
she. 'Twenty minutes--and with all my packing! You will wait over till
the four-thirty-two this afternoon,' she goes on, very stern and
nervous, 'or all is over between us.' 'I'll wait as long as that for
you,' says Angus, going to the steak again. 'Are the other meals here as
good as breakfast?' 'There's one up the street,' says Ellabelle; 'a
Presbyterian.' 'I would prefer a Presbyterian,' says Angus. 'Are those
fried oysters I see up there?'

"That was about the way of it, I gathered later. Anyway, Angus brought
her back, eating on the way a whole wicker suitcase full of lunch that
she put up. And she seemed a good, capable girl, all right. She told me
there was something about Angus. She'd seen that from the first. Even
so, she said, she hadn't let him sweep her off her feet like he had
meant to, but had forced him to give her time to do her packing and
consider the grave step she was taking for better or worse, like every
true, serious-minded woman ought to.

"Angus now said he couldn't afford to fritter away any more time in the
cattle business, having a wife to support in the style she had been
accustomed to, so he would go to work at his trade. He picked out
Wallace, just over in Idaho, as a young and growing town where he could
do well. He rented a nice four-room cottage there, with an icebox out on
the back porch and a hammock in the front yard, and begun to paper and
paint and grain and kalsomine and made good money from the start.
Ellabelle was a crackajack housekeeper and had plenty of time to lie out
in the hammock and read 'Lucile' of afternoons.

"By and by Angus had some money saved up, and what should he do with
bits of it now and then but grubstake old Snowstorm Hickey, who'd been
scratching mountainsides all his life and never found a thing and likely
never would--a grouchy old hardshell with white hair and whiskers
whirling about his head in such quantities that a body just naturally
called him Snowstorm without thinking. It made him highly indignant,
but he never would get the things cut. Well, and what does this old
snow-scene-in-the-Alps do after about a year but mush along up the canon
past Mullan and find a high-grade proposition so rich it was scandalous!
They didn't know how rich at first, of course, but Angus got assays and
they looked so good they must be a mistake, so they sunk a shaft and
drifted in a tunnel, and the assays got better, and people with money
was pretty soon taking notice.

"One day Snowstorm come grouching down to Angus and tells about a
capitalist that had brought two experts with him and nosed over the
workings for three days. Snowstorm was awful dejected. He had hated the
capitalist right off. 'He wears a gold watch chain and silk underclothes
like one of these fly city dames,' says Snowstorm, who was a knowing old
scoundrel, 'and he says his syndicate on the reports of these two
thieving experts will pay twelve hundred for it and not a cent more.
What do you think of that for nerve?'

"'Is that all?' says Angus, working away at his job in the new
International Hotel at Wallace. Graining a door in the dining-room he
was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little
curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was
at first before it was painted at all. 'Well,' he says, 'I suspected
from the assays that we might get a bit more, but if he had experts
with him you better let him have it for twelve hundred. After all,
twelve hundred dollars is a good bit of money.'

"'Twelve hundred thousand,' says Snowstorm, still grouchy.

"'Oh,' says Angus. 'In that case don't let him have it. If the shark
offers that it'll be worth more. I'll go into the mining business myself
as soon as I've done this door and the wainscoting and give them their
varnish.'

"He did so. He had the International finished in three more days, turned
down a job in the new bank building cold, and went into the mining
business just like he'd do anything else--slow and sure, yet impetuous
here and there. It wasn't a hard proposition, the stuff being there
nearly from the grass roots, and the money soon come a-plenty. Snowstorm
not only got things trimmed up but had 'em dyed black as a crow's wing
and retired to a life of sinful ease in Spokane, eating bacon and beans
and cocoanut custard pie three times a day till the doctors found out
what a lot of expensive things he had the matter with him.

"Angus not only kept on the job but branched out into other mines that
he bought up, and pretty soon he quit counting his money. You know what
that would mean to most of his race. It fazed him a mite at first. He
tried faithfully to act like a crazy fool with his money, experimenting
with revelry and champagne for breakfast, and buying up the Sans Soosy
dance hall every Saturday night for his friends and admirers. But he
wasn't gaited to go on that track long. Even Ellabelle wasn't worried
the least bit, and in fact she thought something of the kind was due his
position. And she was busy herself buying the things that are champagne
to a woman, only they're kept on the outside. That was when Angus told
her if she was going in for diamonds at all to get enough so she could
appear to be wasteful and contemptuous of them. Two thousand she give
for one little diamond circlet to pin her napkin up on her chest with.
It was her own idea.

"Then Angus for a time complicated his amateur debauchery with fast
horses. He got him a pair of matched pacing stallions that would go
anywhere, he said. And he frequently put them there when he had the main
chandelier lighted. In driving them over a watering-trough one night an
accident of some sort happened. Angus didn't come to till after his leg
was set and the stitches in--eight in one place, six in another, and so
on; I wonder why they're always so careful to count the stitches in a
person that way--and he wished to know if his new side-bar buggy was
safe and they told him it wasn't, and he wanted to know where his team
was, but nobody knew that for three days, so he says to the doctors and
Ellabelle: 'Hereafter I suspect I shall take only soft drinks like beer
and sherry. Champagne has a bonnier look but it's too enterprising. I
might get into trouble some time.' And he's done so to this day. Oh,
I've seen him take a sip or two of champagne to some one's health, or
as much Scotch whiskey in a tumbler of water as you could dribble from a
medium-boilered fountain pen. But that's a high riot with him. He'll eat
one of these corned peaches in brandy, and mebbe take a cream pitcher of
beer on his oatmeal of a morning when his stomach don't feel just right,
but he's never been a willing performer since that experiment in
hurdling.

"When he could walk again him and Ellabelle moved to the International
Hotel, where she wouldn't have to cook or split kindling and could make
a brutal display of diamonds at every meal, and we went down to see
them. That was when Angus give Lysander John the scarfpin he'd sent
clear to New York for--a big gold bull's head with ruby eyes and in its
mouth a nugget of platinum set with three diamonds. Of course Lysander
John never dast wear it except when Angus was going to see it.

"Then along comes Angus, Junior, though poor Ellabelle thinks for
several days that he's Elwin. We'd gone down so I could be with her.

"'Elwin is the name I have chosen for my son,' says she to Angus the
third day.

"'Not so,' says Angus, slumping down his one eyebrow clear across in a
firm manner. 'You're too late. My son is already named. I named him
Angus the night before he was born.'

"'How could you do that when you didn't know the sex?' demands Ellabelle
with a frightened air of triumph.

"'I did it, didn't I?' says Angus. 'Then why ask how I could?' And he
curved the eyebrow up one side and down the other in a fighting way.

"Ellabelle had been wedded wife of Angus long enough to know when the
Scotch curse was on him. 'Very well,' she says, though turning her face
to the wall. Angus straightened the eyebrow. 'Like we might have two
now, one of each kind,' says he quite soft, 'you'd name your daughter as
you liked, with perhaps no more than a bit of a suggestion from me, to
be taken or not by you, unless we'd contend amiably about it for a
length of time till we had it settled right as it should be. But a
son--my son--why, look at the chest on him already, projecting outward
like a clock shelf--and you would name him--but no matter! I was
forehanded, thank God.' Oh, you saw plainly that in case a girl ever
come along Ellabelle would have the privilege of naming it anything in
the world she wanted to that Angus thought suitable.

"So that was settled reasonably, and Angus went on showing what to do
with your mine instead of selling it to a shark, and the baby fatted up,
being stall-fed, and Ellabelle got out into the world again, with more
money than ever to spend, but fewer things to buy, because in Wallace
she couldn't think of any more. Trust her, though! First the
International Hotel wasn't good enough. Angus said they'd have a
mansion, the biggest in Wallace, only without slippery hardwood floors,
because he felt brittle after his accident. Ellabelle says Wallace
itself ain't big enough for the mansion that ought to be a home to his
only son. She was learning how to get to Angus without seeming to. He
thought there might be something in that, still he didn't like to trust
the child away from him, and he had to stick there for a while.

"So Ellabelle's health broke down. Yes, sir, she got to be a total
wreck. Of course the fool doctor in Wallace couldn't find it out. She
tried him and he told her she was strong as a horse and ought to be
doing a tub of washing that very minute. Which was no way to talk to the
wife of a rich mining man, so he lost quite a piece of money by it.
Ellabelle then went to Spokane and consulted a specialist. That's the
difference. You only see a doctor, but a specialist you consult. This
one confirmed her fears about herself in a very gentlemanly way and
reaped his reward on the spot. Ellabelle's came after she had convinced
Angus that even if she did have such a good appetite it wasn't a normal
one, but it was, in fact, one of her worst symptoms and threatened her
with a complete nervous breakdown. After about a year of this, when
Angus had horned his way into a few more mines--he said he might as well
have a bunch of them since he couldn't be there on the spot anyway--they
went to New York City. Angus had never been there except to pass from a
Clyde liner to Jersey City, and they do say that when he heard the
rates, exclusive of board, at the one Ellabelle had picked out from
reading the papers, he timidly asked her if they hadn't ought to go to
the other hotel. She told him there wasn't any other--not for them. She
told him further it was part of her mission to broaden his horizon, and
she firmly meant to do it if God would only vouchsafe her a remnant of
her once magnificent vitality.

"She didn't have to work so hard either. Angus begun to get a broader
horizon in just a few days, corrupting every waiter he came in contact
with, and there was a report round the hotel the summer I was there that
a hat-boy had actually tried to reason with him, thinking he was a
foreigner making mistakes with his money by giving up a dollar bill
every time for having his hat snatched from him. As a matter of fact,
Angus can't believe to this day that dollar bills are money. He feels
apologetic when he gives 'em away. All the same I never believed that
report about the hat-boy till someone explained to me that he wasn't
allowed to keep his loot, not only having clothes made special without
pockets but being searched to the hide every night like them poor
unfortunate Zulus that toil in the diamond mines of Africa. Of course I
could see then that this boy had become merely enraged like a wild-cat
at having a dollar crowded onto him for some one else every time a head
waiter grovelled Angus out of the restaurant.

"The novelty of that life wore off after about a year, even with side
trips to resorts where the prices were sufficiently outrageous to charm
Ellabelle. She'd begun right off to broaden her own horizon. After only
one week in New York she put her diamond napkin pincher to doing other
work, and after six months she dressed about as well as them prominent
society ladies that drift round the corridors of this hotel waiting for
parties that never seem on time, and looking none too austere while they
wait.

"So Ellabelle, having in the meantime taken up art and literature and
gone to lectures where the professor would show sights and scenes in
foreign lands with his magic lantern, begun to feel the call of the Old
World. She'd got far beyond 'Lucile'--though 'Peck's Bad Boy' was still
the favourite of Angus when he got time for any serious reading--- and
was coming to loathe the crudities of our so-called American
civilization. So she said. She begun to let out to Angus that they
wasn't doing right by the little one, bringing him up in a hole like New
York City where he'd catch the American accent--though God knows where
she ever noticed that danger there!--and it was only fair to the child
to get him to England or Paris or some such place where he could have
decent advantages. I gather that Angus let out a holler at first so that
Ellabelle had to consult another specialist and have little Angus
consult one, too. They both said: 'Certainly, don't delay another day if
you value the child's life or your own,' and of course Angus had to give
in. I reckon that was the last real fight he ever put up till the time
I'm going to tell you about.

"They went to England and bought a castle that had never known the
profane touch of a plumber, having been built in the time of the first
earl or something, and after that they had to get another castle in
France, account of little Angus having a weak throat that Ellabelle got
another gentlemanly specialist to find out about him; and so it went,
with Ellabelle hovering on the very edge of a nervous breakdown, and
taking up art and literature at different spots where fashion gathered,
going to Italy and India's coral strand to study the dead past, and so
forth, and learning to address her inferiors in a refined and hostile
manner, with little Angus having a maid and a governess and something
new the matter with him every time Ellabelle felt the need of a change.

"At first Angus used to make two trips back every year, then he cut them
down to one, and at last he'd only come every two or three years, having
his hirelings come to him instead. He'd branched out a lot, even at that
distance, getting into copper and such, and being president of banks and
trusts here and there and equitable cooperative companies and all such
things that help to keep the lower classes trimmed proper. For a whole
lot of years I didn't see either of 'em. I sort of lost track of the
outfit, except as I'd see the name of Angus heading a new board of
directors after the reorganization, or renting the north half of
Scotland for the sage-hen and coyote shooting, or whatever the game is
there. Of course it took genius to do this with Angus, and I've never
denied that Ellabelle has it. I bet there wasn't a day in all them years
that Angus didn't believe himself to be a stubborn, domineering brute,
riding roughshod over the poor little wreck of a woman. If he didn't it
wasn't for want of his wife accusing him of it in so many words--and
perhaps a few more.

"I guess she got to feeling so sure of herself she let her work coarsen
up. Anyway, when little Angus come to be eighteen his pa shocked her one
day by saying he must go back home to some good college. 'You mean
England,' says Ellabelle, they being at the time on some other foreign
domains.

"'I do not,' says Angus, 'nor Sweden nor Japan nor East Africa. I mean
the United States.' 'You're jesting,' says she. 'You wrong me cruelly,'
says Angus. 'The lad's eighteen and threatening to be a foreigner.
Should he stay here longer it would set in his blood.' 'Remember his
weak throat,' says Ellabelle. 'I did,' says Angus. 'To save you trouble
I sent for a specialist to look him over. He says the lad has never a
flaw in his throat. We'll go soon.'

"Of course it was dirty work on the part of Angus, getting to the
specialist first, but she saw she had to take it. She knew it was like
the time they agreed on his name--she could see the Scotch blood leaping
in his veins. So she gave in with never a mutter that Angus could hear.
That's part of the genius of Ellabelle, knowing when she can and when
she positively cannot, and making no foolish struggle in the latter
event.

"Back they come to New York and young Angus went to the swellest college
Ellabelle could learn about, and they had a town house and a country
house and Ellabelle prepared to dazzle New York society, having met
frayed ends of it in her years abroad. But she couldn't seem to put it
over. Lots of male and female society foreigners that she'd met would
come and put up with her and linger on in the most friendly manner, but
Ellabelle never fools herself so very much. She knew she wasn't making
the least dent in New York itself. She got uncomfortable there. I bet
she had that feeling you get when you're riding your horse over soft
ground and all at once he begins to bog down.

"Anyway, they come West after a year or so, where Angus had more drag
and Ellabelle could feel more important. Not back to Wallace, of course.
Ellabelle had forgotten the name of that town, and also they come over a
road that misses the thriving little town of North Platte by several
hundred miles. And pretty soon they got into this darned swell little
suburb out from San Francisco, through knowing one of the old families
that had lived there man and boy for upward of four years. It's a town
where I believe they won't let you get off the train unless you got a
visitor's card and a valet.

"Here at last Ellabelle felt she might come into her own, for parties
seemed to recognize her true worth at once. Some of them indeed she
could buffalo right on the spot, for she hadn't lived in Europe and such
places all them years for nothing. So, camping in a miserable rented
shack that never cost a penny over seventy thousand dollars, with only
thirty-eight rooms and no proper space for the servants, they set to
work building their present marble palace--there's inside and outside
pictures of it in a magazine somewhere round here--bigger than the state
insane asylum and very tasty and expensive, with hand-painted ceilings
and pergolas and cafes and hot and cold water and everything.

"It was then I first see Ellabelle after all the years, and I want to
tell you she was impressive. She looked like the descendant of a long
line of ancestry or something and she spoke as good as any reciter you
ever heard in a hall. Last time I had seen her she was still forgetting
about the r's--she'd say: 'Oh, there-urr you ah!' thus showing she was
at least half Iowa in breed--but nothing like that now. She could give
the English cards and spades and beat them at their own game. Her face
looked a little bit overmassaged and she was having trouble keeping her
hips down, and wore a patent chin-squeezer nights, and her hair couldn't
be trusted to itself long at a time; but she knew how to dress and she'd
learned decency in the use of the diamond except when it was really
proper to break out all over with 'em. You'd look at her twice in any
show ring. Ain't women the wonders! Gazing at Ellabelle when she had
everything on, you'd never dream that she'd come up from the vilest
dregs only a few years before--helping cook for the harvest hands in
Iowa, feeding Union Pacific passengers at twenty-two a month, or
splitting her own kindling at Wallace, Idaho, and dreaming about a new
silk dress for next year, or mebbe the year after if things went well.

"Men ain't that way. Angus had took no care of his figure, which was now
pouchy, his hair was gray, and he was either shedding or had been
reached, and he had lines of care and food in his face, and took no
pains whatever with his accent--or with what he said, for that matter. I
never saw a man yet that could hide a disgraceful past like a woman can.
They don't seem to have any pride. Most of 'em act like they don't care
a hoot whether people find it out on 'em or not.

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