Blue Kingdom (6 page)

She concluded briefly: “People don't have the same expression without having the same sort of mind and nature . . . I . . . but I don't want to talk about it. It's too spooky.”

He agreed with her. It fairly made his flesh crawl, and he was glad to go outdoors with her a moment later. She pulled on a pair of old gloves, and tied a leather apron around her.

“What are you going to do, Elizabeth?” he asked.

“I'm going out to the blacksmith shop. There's a broken brake rod that I have to weld.”

He stared as he answered: “You? Weld it?”

“I can do all sorts of odd jobs,” she replied, and smiled at him.

He went with her without a word and found the blacksmith shop quite a spacious shed on the edge of the corral. Around it was the usual junk heap that accumulates on an old ranch—broken wheels, ribs of iron, a rake with a sagging back, a decrepit mowing machine, tangles of wire and barrel hoops of iron, and some fifty more items. Inside, the place seemed thoroughly gone to pieces. The roof was partly gone, and a sheathing of tin insufficiently replaced the shingles in two places. There were a few tools and much junk; everything was very old; the iron curled back from the much-battered faces of the hammers.

However, she went to work at once on the brake rod. It was a clumsy job because of its length, but Dunmore helped her by handling the weight of the rod while she worked the bellows and attended to the fire. She, too, did the hammering when the glowing iron was brought from the fire—he saw her set her teeth and apply the strokes quickly and with skill. The sparks showered. It seemed to him that he never before had been so little a man as he was now.

The welding was finished in an amazingly short time, the tempering and cooling accomplished, and then he carried out the rod and helped her refasten it beneath the wagon. It was an old, two-ton, wooden affair, with the wheels sagging in and out in perilous attitudes.

“Is that your best?” he asked her.

“That's our best,” she assured him. “Carrick, I know you want to be riding on. Don't you bother about these odd jobs now. I know you'd like to stay and help, but you have your own life to lead.”

He took a long breath, then he said: “Elizabeth, there's not a shadow of doubt that I'm a Dunmore of the old line. That picture was enough to wipe out any such idea. I've got to stay here and do my share.”

“It's no use, Carrick,” she assured him without bitterness. “The family fortunes have been skidding for so long that it would take ten men digging their heels in to stop them going downhill. Tie yourself to something that's going up, not down. There's no use in that, you know.”

He looked vaguely around him. Everything he saw was sagging. The fence posts stood at odd angles, showing plainly that they were rotted away at the bottom; the barbed wire drooped or hung in festoons; the back of the barn had fallen in, and the eastern end of it, on the nearest side, was quite broken through.

“Elizabeth, is that pile of shakes intended for the roof?” he asked.

“Yes, for the roof of the barn. When I have a chance to put in a couple of days, before the rains. . . .”

“You'd climb up there and fix the thing?”

“Yes. I've done harder things than that, since Rodman left.”

“Rodman . . . what sort of a fellow?” he asked tersely.

“Rodman . . . is twenty-one,” she said, after a moment of hesitation. “He's a good boy, too. But you
can't blame a youngster for growing tired of such a life as this, can you?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I'm goin' to fix that roof,” he said, and he marched straight to the task. As he went, his heart swelled. When he looked about him at the signs of wreck and ruinous age, it no longer made him hopeless, but, instead, it filled him with determination. When he sat on the roof looking over the task to be accomplished, he already, in his mind's eye, had repaired every flaw, had covered the land of the ranch with cattle, had enlarged its boundaries, and placed a hired man in the garden, a cook in the kitchen, and put Elizabeth at a tea table in the living room in a pleasant summer frock.

He roused himself from this reverie and took more careful note of the condition of the roof. It was very bad. The shakes had in part worked loose, rotting away around the nails that held them, and in part they had been clean stripped away by strong winter winds. So he went down the ladder and began carrying up bunches of shakes.

It was stiff work. The big bundles weighed a hundred pounds and more apiece, and, as he toiled up the ladder, the hot sun made the moisture pour down his face, down his breast and back. Wood dust, too, fell down his neck and began to set up an itching, and, before he had brought up two burdens, his fingers were filled with splinters. However, he set his teeth, paused only to swear at the extraordinary heat of the roof, which had been well baked in the sun, and then set about laying the shakes.

He put on half a dozen. It was not a simple task, no
matter how it looked. He knew that Elizabeth Furneaux would have done the thing ten times as quickly and ten times as well as he. The craft that enabled him to juggle five knives at once seemed utterly useless for the purpose of handling a hammer. He barked his own fingers twice, and the nails bent under his strokes as though they were made of wax. He began to swear slowly, softly, but with intense viciousness.

He went down the ladder, after a time, for a drink, and walked to get it fresh and cold from the windmill. The water was like ice, with a delicious taste, and he drank deeply of it. Then he sat down on an old bench, and took off his hat. It was very pleasant here. The coolness soaked into him. Water was dripping, and the wheel high above him whirred and hummed, while the pump rod heaved busily up and down. The water it raised poured with hollow-sounding bursts into the almost emptied tank, and to this music he listened with wonderful content, thinking how delightful it was for the very wind that blows to be harnessed to the works of man. There might even be machines invented, one day, for the covering of roofs with shakes and shingles. He busied his mind for a moment with a rather formless conceiving of such an affair. His idea grew gradually dimmer—and presently he wakened to find Elizabeth Furneaux standing before him, saying: “It's lunchtime, Carrick.”

Carrick started up with a spinning brain. “Why . . . I just sort of dropped off . . . ,” he began.

“You shouldn't have tried work today,” said Elizabeth. “You're not fit yet. It's much too soon after your accident.” She turned toward the house. “Come along,” she said.

“Wait a minute, Elizabeth,” he begged. “Turn about and look at me, will you?”

She obeyed, and he looked searchingly into her face to try to discover scorn, and contempt, and disappointment in it. There was no shadow, however. She was as bright and as cheerful as ever.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “is it possible that you really aren't disgusted with me?”

“For what?” she asked.

“For starting to do so much. I was going to cover the roof of the barn . . . all sorts of things . . . and I've sat down here and gone to sleep.”

“You're tired.”

“I'm mighty near always tired,” he answered, “when
there's any work to do. Nothing like the idea of work to keep me in bed of a morning, for instance.”

She smiled at him and nodded, then she shook a warning finger. “Don't try to grow a conscience,” she said, “because it's the one crop that a Carrick Dunmore never could raise, I'm sure.”

“No,” he admitted, “I've got on without being bothered much by it until now. . . .” He paused.

“Have you forgotten what I told you about Carrick Dunmore the First?” asked Elizabeth.

“I'm remembering. He was a man.”

“Who never worked. Do you remember, Carrick? When the earl first saw him, he was juggling in the street of the village. . . .”

He started.

“Don't tell me that you're a juggler, too!” Elizabeth exclaimed.

He wiped his forehead. “Don't matter,” he said. “But . . . Elizabeth, tell me one thing. Is there anything I can do to help you . . . that's not work? It makes me pretty sick to have to admit that, but I'm not a worker. I've got no strength for it . . . no strength in the brain, I mean.” He was taken by an impulse that made him stand close to her and catch both her hands. “D'you think I'm talkin' like a fool?” he asked. “Or . . . ?”

She was serious at once. “You've no obligation to this house, Carrick,” she said.

“Then why's my picture hanging inside it?”

Her eyes wandered, and then they came back to his face with a snap. “The fact is that you might walk into a lion's den for me, Carrick,” she said, without smiling in the least.

“Give me the street and number of the lions,” he stated, “and tell me what was in the purse you dropped there?”

“I'll tell you,” she said. “There's a twenty-one-year-old boy now herding with Jim Tankerton's gang. Go get him and bring him safe home before he has a chance to commit more crimes . . . hanging crimes, Carrick.” Suddenly she was trembling. “Don't answer quickly, Carrick. But think . . . think a moment.”

“Tankerton?” he repeated slowly.

“Yes, Tankerton. Jim Tankerton. You couldn't find a harder man to deal with.”

Instinctively he turned toward the mountains. The brown foothills rolled away into smoky blue, which was spotted here and there with streaks of white that might be the gleam of a cloud or of the snow on a distant peak.

Carrick Dunmore laughed softly. “That's my road, Elizabeth,” he said. “That's Tankerton's hang-out, isn't it?”

She looked white and sick, and her mouth twisted a little to one side as she watched him. “Yes,” she said faintly. “Heaven forgive me for letting the idea come into your mind. Oh, you know of Tankerton, but you can't know all that we do in this part of the world. There is no other evil, no other supreme, overmastering, and exquisitely complete evil except Tankerton.”

“I've heard a bit about him, here and there,” he admitted, “but you see how it is? What right has he got over there on my ground?”

“What ground, Carrick? What do you mean?”

“Why, Elizabeth, I mean the blue, yonder, and all
the roads that climb out of sight into the horizon blue. That's the land of the first Carrick Dunmore, and I'd say that I ought to have the same right, eh? Don't you think no more about it. I'm off.”

“Not before lunch, Carrick.”

“I wouldn't trust myself,” he said bitterly. “I might start to thinking about the long, hot trail that's lyin' ahead of me, and the first thing you know, you'd have to wake me up for supper. No, no, Elizabeth, I'm startin' now. As quick as I can make up my pack and slap it onto the back of Excuse Me.”

She did not speak another word in dissuasion but went meekly about working on the pack. She put up a quantity of food for him, since, as she pointed out, he would be following a road that rarely touched houses, and he would probably have to sleep out in the open that night. So the pack was made up, wrapped securely in a tarpaulin, and lashed behind the saddle upon the back of Excuse Me. She accepted this new burden with an angry stamping and rattling of her bridle, but she did not attempt to buck it off. Then Elizabeth Furneaux opened the corral gate for her champion to get out onto the road. She stood beside the open panel with the same troubled look and white face that he had seen before, so he checked the mare close beside her, as he came out, and leaned above her.

“Look here, Elizabeth,” he said, “I'm going to tell you something that you can write down as all true. It's about me. I've never done a square day's work in my life . . . nor a half day's work . . . I've been a loafer, a hard drinker, a deadbeat, borrowin' money and never payin' it back . . . I've been a tramp, that's all. So no
matter what happens to me on this trail, there's no difference. You ain't takin' the bread out of no child's mouth, and they's no girl that's gonna break her heart because I never come back.”

She listened to him with an attempt at a smile that failed.

Then he added: “But I will come back, after all. That's my country . . . if I can't get on in the horizon blue, I'll never get on anywhere.”

“Dear Carrick. Bless you,” she said.

He went past her into the road, then the mare stretched into a gallop as long and as easily rhythmical as the swing of a wave. He looked back only once and waved his hat to the figure that was dwindling at the gate. His glance could embrace all the place—the barn, the sheds, the land, the trees, the house white above them. Then a hilltop swelled behind him, and all was lost to him.

He fell into an odd dream, and, rousing himself from that, it seemed to him as though he actually had passed into a new world. This sense, perhaps, came to him because already his mind was casting forward into mountains through which he never had ridden before. And it might also have been that he was now really feeling the impact of the shock that he had received that day, when he found that his face was the face of the first of the Dunmores.

It took his breath, it gave him an odd sense of disaster impending, but it also gave him a prodigious feeling of liberty as though, in very fact, he were now the possessor of some feudal castle and of a hard-riding band of retainers who would follow him wherever adventure
and loot seemed in sight. To that blue land of the mountains he turned his face with a strange assurance and rode the mare eagerly on, even leaning a bit in the saddle, as a child might do, hurrying home.

Hoofs rang on the road beside him. Two hard-galloping riders pulled up beside the mare.

“Hey, Carrie! Is that Excuse Me? Did she turn out a square one, after all?” asked one of the riders.

“She's turned out pretty square,” he told them.