The Readjustment.

by Will Irwin.

CHAPTER I

After luncheon they walked over from the ranch-house--more indeed a country villa, what with its ceiled redwood walls, its prints, its library, than the working house of a practical farm--and down the dusty, sun-beaten lane to the apricot orchard. Picking was on full blast, against the all too fast ripening of that early summer.

Judge Tiffany, pattern of a vigorous age, seemed to lean a little upon his wife as she walked beside him, her arm tucked confidently into his; but it was a leaning of the spirit rather than of the flesh. She, younger than he by fifteen years, was a tiny woman, her hair white but her waist still slim. She seemed to tinkle and twinkle. Her slight hands,--the nail of the little finger was like a grain of popcorn--moved with swift, accurate bird-motions. As she chattered of the ranch and the picking, her voice, still sweet and controlled, came from her lips like the pleasant music of a tea bell. He was mainly silent; although he threw in a quiet, controlled answer here and there. One could read, in the shadowy solicitude with which she regarded him now and then, the relation between that welded old couple--she the entertainer, the h.o.a.rder of trivial detail from her days; he the fond, indulgent listener.

"I think Eleanor must be back from the city," Mrs. Tiffany was saying, "I notice smoke from the big chimney; and I suppose she'll be over before noon with the sulphur samples. It's amusing and homey in her--her habit of flying to her own little nest before she comes to us. She'll inspect the house, have dinner ordered, and know every blessed detail of the picking before we catch a glimpse of her." Mrs.

Tiffany smiled sadly, as though this industry were somewhat tragic.

"I wonder how long Eleanor will be contented with such a way of life?"

put in Judge Tiffany.

"I've worried over that," answered his wife. "Suppose she should settle down to it? It isn't as though Eleanor hadn't her chance at travel and society and the things a girl of her breeding should have.

This is all her deliberate choice, and I've done nothing to help her choose. Perhaps I should have decided for her. It's curious the guard that girl keeps over her deeper feelings. How unlike she is to her mother--and yet how like--" Her thought shifted suddenly with the direction of her eyes. "Hasn't Olsen overloaded that little team?" she said.

The cutting-shed stood midway of their course. Twenty women and girls, their lips going as rapidly as their knives, sat on fruit crates at long tables, slicing the red-and-gold b.a.l.l.s apart, flicking out the stones, laying the halves to dry in wooden trays. A wagon had just arrived from the orchard. Olsen, the Swedish foreman, was heaving the boxes to his Portuguese a.s.sistant, who pa.s.sed them on into the cutting shed. Further on stood the bleaching kilns; still further, the bright green trees with no artistic irregularities of outline--trees born, like a coolie, to bear burdens. Now the branches bent in arcs under loads of summer-gilded fruit.

Long step-ladders straddling piles of boxes, beside this row or that, showed where picking was going forward. Mrs. Tiffany halted under one tree to call pleasantries up to a Portuguese, friend of many a harvest before. Judge Tiffany proceeded on down the row, pausing to inspect the boxes for any fruit gathered before it was ripe.

The first picker was a Chinese. His box, of course, showed only perfection of workmanship. The Judge called up familiarly:

"h.e.l.lo, Charlie!"

A yellow face grinned through the branches; the leaves rustled as though some great bird were foraging, and the answer came back:

"h.e.l.lo you Judge!" The Judge picked over the next two boxes without comment; at the third, he stopped longer.

"Too much greenery, young man!" he cried at length. The branches of this tree rustled, and a pair of good, st.u.r.dy legs, clad in corduroys, appeared on the ladder; then the owner of the legs vaulted from four feet high in the air, and hit the ground beside his box.

He was a stalwart boy of perhaps two and twenty, broad, though a bit over-heavy, in the shoulders. That approach to over-heaviness characterized his face, otherwise clean-cut and fair. His eyes, long, brown and ingenuous, rather went to redeem this quality of face. Under his wide and flapping sombrero peered the front lock of his straight, black hair. Even before he smiled, Judge Tiffany marked him as a pleasing youth withal; and when he did smile, eyes and mouth so softened with good humor that stern authority went from the face of Judge Tiffany. He stood in that embarra.s.sment which an old man feels sometimes in the presence of a younger one, struggled for a word to cover his slight confusion, and said:

"You are one of the college outfit camped down by the arroyo, aren't you?"

"I am," said the youth. "I also picked the fruit too green. I am here to take my beating."

Judge Tiffany, who held (he thought) an old-fashioned distaste for impudence, smiled back in spite of himself.

"If you don't attend to business in small matters, how can you hope to succeed when you go out into life?" he asked with some pomposity. He had intended, when he opened his mouth, to say something very different. His pomposity, he felt, grew out of his embarra.s.sment; he had a dim feeling that he was making himself ridiculous.

"I can't," said the youth with mock meekness; and he smiled again. At that moment, while the Judge struggled for a reply and while the youth was turning back to the ladder as though to mount it and be done with the conversation, two things happened. Up from one side came Mrs.

Tiffany; and from the other, where ran a road dividing the Tiffany orchard from the next, approached a buckboard driven by a lolling Portuguese. Beside him sat a girl all in brown, dust-resistant khaki, who curtained her face with a parasol. Mrs. Tiffany ran, light as an elderly fairy, down the rows.

"Eleanor!" she called.

"Dear, dear Aunt Mattie!" cried the girl. Judge Tiffany, too, was hurrying forward to the road. The youth had his hand on the ladder, prepared to mount, when the parasol dropped. He stopped short with some nervous interruption in his breathing--which might have been a catch in his throat--at the sight of her great, grey eyes; stood still, watching. Mrs. Tiffany was greeting the girl with the pats and caresses of aged fondness. Out of their chatter, presently, this came in the girl's voice:

"And I was so excited about getting back that when Antonio left the corral gate open I never thought to speak to him. And Ruggles's Dynamo--they've let him run away again--just walked in and b.u.t.ted open the orchard bars and he's loose now eating the prune trees!"

"Edward, you must go right over!" cried Mrs. Tiffany; and then stopped on the thought of an old man trying to subdue a Jersey bull, good-natured though that bull might be. The same thought struck Judge Tiffany. Antonio, the Portuguese, lolling half-asleep against the dashboard, was worse than useless; the nearest visible help was a Chinaman, incompetent against horned cattle, and another Portuguese, and--

"Let me corral your bull," said the easy, thrilling voice of the boy who stood beside the step-ladder. Judge Tiffany turned in reproof, his wife in annoyance, the girl in some surprise. The youth was already walking toward the buckboard.

"I guess that lets you out, John," he said to the Portuguese.

Something in him, the same quality which had made the Judge smile back through his rebuke concerning the green apricots, held them all. The Judge spoke first:

"Very well, Mr.--"

"Chester--Bertram Chester," said the youth, throwing his self-introduction straight at the girl.

"Mr. Chester is one of the University boys who are picking for us this summer," said Judge Tiffany.

"Yes?" replied the girl in a balanced, incurious tone. Her eyes followed Mr. Chester, while he took the reins from the deposed Antonio and waited for her to mount the buckboard. As she sprang up, after a final caution from Mrs. Tiffany, she perceived that he was going to "help her in." With a motion both quick and slight, she evaded his hand and sprang to the seat unaided.

Mr. Chester slapped the reins, clucked to the horse, and bent his gaze down upon the girl. He had seated himself all too close. She crowded herself against the iron seat-rail. It annoyed her a little; it embarra.s.sed her still more. She was slightly relieved when he made a beginning of conversation.

"So you're Judge Tiffany's niece, the girl who runs her ranch herself.

I've heard heaps about you."

"Yes?" Embarra.s.sment came back with the sound of her own voice. She could talk to Judge Tiffany or to any man of Judge Tiffany's age, but with her male contemporaries she felt always this same constraint. And this young man was looking on her insistently, as though demanding answers.

"They say you're one of the smartest ranchers in these parts," he went on.

"Do they?" Her tone was even and inexpressive. But Mr. Chester kept straight along the path he was treading.

"And that you're also the prettiest girl around Santa Lucia."

"That's very kind of them."

"I haven't seen your ranch, but about the rest of it they're dead right."

To this, she made no answer.

"I'm just down for a few weeks," he went on, changing the subject when he perceived that he had drawn no reply. "I'm a Senior next year at Berkeley. Ever been over to Berkeley?"

"Yes."

"Ever go to any of the cla.s.s dances?"

"No."

"Thought you might, being in the city winters. I'm not much on dances myself. I'm a barb."

He peered, as though expecting that this last statement would evoke some answer. But her eyes were fixed on the little group of buildings--a bungalow, a barn and a corral--which had just come in sight around a turn of the orchard road. For the first time, she spoke with animation.