He headed his horse homeward, fully resolved to give notice of removal, but he did not. On the contrary, he lost himself to Fan. The girl, glowing with love and anger and at the very climax of her animal beauty, developed that night a subtlety of approach, a method of attack, which baffled and in the end overpowered him. She was adroit enough to make no mention of her rivals; she merely set herself to cause his committal, to bend him to her side. As the romping girl she played round him, indifferent to the warning glances of her mother, her eyes shining, her cheeks glowing, till the man he was, the life he had lived, the wishes of his brother, were fused and lost in the blind pa.s.sion of the present.

"This glorious, glowing creature can be mine. What does all the rest matter?" was his final word of renunciation.

In this mood he took her to his arms, in this madness he told her of his love (committing himself into her hands, declining into her life), and in the end requested of her parents the honor of their daughter's hand.

Mrs. Blondell wept a tear or two and weakly gave her consent, but the old ranchman thundered and lightened. "What can you do for my girl?" he demanded. "As I understand it, you haven't a cent--the very clothes you've got on your back are paid for by somebody else! What right have you to come to me with such a proposal?"

To all this Lester, surprised and disconcerted, could but meekly answer that he hoped soon to buy a ranch of his own--that his brother had promised to "set him up" as soon as he had mastered the business.

Blondell opened his jaws to roar again when Fan interposed and, taking a clutch in his s.h.a.ggy beard, said, calmly: "Now, dad, you hush! George Adelbert and I have made it all up and you better fall in gracefully. It won't do you any good to paw the dirt and beller."

Lester grew sick for a moment as he realized the temper of the family into which he was about to marry, but when Fan, turning with a gay laugh, put her round, smooth arm about his neck, the rosy cloud closed over his head again.

II

Blondell was silenced, but not convinced. A penniless son-in-law was not to his liking. Fan was his only child, and the big ranch over which he presided was worth sixty thousand dollars. What right had this lazy Englishman to come in and marry its heiress? The more he thought about it the angrier he grew, and when he came in the following night he broke forth.

"See here, mister, I reckon you better get ready and pull out. I'm not going to have you for a son-in-law, not this season. The man that marries my Fan has got to have sabe enough to round up a flock of goats--and wit enough to get up in the morning. So you better vamoose to-morrow."

Lester received his sentence in silence. At the moment he was glad of it. He turned on his heel and went to packing with more haste, with greater skill, than he had ever displayed in any enterprise hitherto.

His hurry arose from a species of desperation. "If I can only get out of the house!" was his inward cry.

"Why pack up?" he suddenly asked himself. "What do they matter--these boots and shirts and books?" He caught a few pictures from the wall and stuffed them into his pockets, and was about to plunge out into the dusk when Fan entered the room and stood looking at him with ominous intentness.

She was no longer the laughing, romping girl, but the woman with alert eye and tightly closed lips. "What are you doing, Dell?"

"Your father has ordered me to leave the ranch," he answered, "and so I'm going."

"No, you're not! I don't care what he has ordered! You're not going"--she came up and put her arms about his neck--"not without me."

And, feeling her claim to pity, he took her in his arms and tenderly pressed her cheek upon his bosom. Then she began to weep. "I can't live without you, Dell," she moaned.

He drew her closer, a wave of tenderness rising in his heart. "I'll be lonely without you, Fan--but your father is right. I am too poor--we have no home--"

"What does that matter?" she asked. "I wouldn't marry you for any amount of _money_! And I know you don't care for this old ranch! _I'll_ be glad to get shut of it. I'll go with you, and we'll make a home somewhere else." Then her mood changed. Her face and voice hardened. She pushed herself away from him. "No, I won't! I'll stay here, and so shall you!

Dad can't boss me, and I won't let him run you out. Come and face him up with me."

So, leading him, she returned to the kitchen, where Blondell, alone with his wife, was eating supper, his elbows on the table, his hair unkempt, his face glowering, a glooming contrast to his radiant and splendid daughter, who faced him fearlessly. "Dad, what do you mean by talking this way to George Adelbert? He's going to stay and I'm going to stay, and you're going to be decent about it, for I'm going to marry him."

"No, you're not!" he blurted out.

"Well, I am!" She drew nearer and with her hands on the table looked down into his wind-worn face and dim eyes. "I say you've got to be decent. Do you understand?" Her body was as lithe, as beautiful, as that of a tigress as she leaned thus, and an unalterable resolution blazed in her eyes as she went on, a deeper significance coming into her voice: "Furthermore, I'm as good as married to him right now, and I don't care who knows it."

The old man's head lifted with a jerk, and he looked at her with mingled fear and fury. "What do you mean?"

"Anything you want to have it mean," she replied. "You drive him out and you drive me out--that's what I mean."

Blondell saw in her face the look of the woman who is willing to a.s.sume any guilt, any shame for her lover, and, dropping his eyes before her gaze, growled a curse and left the room.

Fan turned to her lover with a ringing, boyish laugh, "It's all right, Dell; he's surrendered!"

III

Lester pa.s.sed the month before his marriage in alternating uplifts and depressions, and the worst of it lay in the fact that his moments of exaltation were sensual--of the flesh, and born of the girl's presence--while his depression came from his sane contemplation of the fate to which he was hastening. He went one day to talk it all over with Mrs. Baker, who now held a dark opinion of Fan Blondell. She frankly advised him to break the engagement and to go back to England.

"I can't do that, my dear Mrs. Baker. I am too far committed to Fan to do that. Besides, I know she would make a terrible scene. She would follow me. And besides, I am fond of her, you know. She's very beautiful, now--and she does love me, poor beggar! I wonder at it, but she does." Then he brightened up. "You know she has the carriage of a d.u.c.h.ess. Really, if she were trained a little she would be quite presentable anywhere."

Mrs. Baker shook her head. "She's at her best this minute. Look at the mother; that's what she'll be like in a few years."

"Oh no--not really! She's an improvement--a vast improvement--on the old people, don't you think?"

"You can't make a purse out of a sow's ear. Fan will sag right down after marriage. Mark my words. She's a slattern in her blood, and before the honeymoon is over she'll be slouching around in old slippers and her nightgown. That is plain talk, Mr. Lester, but I can't let you go into this trap with your eyes shut."

Lester went away with renewed determination to pack his belongings and bolt, but the manly streak in his blood made it impossible for him to go without some sort of explanation to her.

The other hands, who called him "George Adelbert" in mockery, were more and more contemptuous of him, and one or two were sullen, for they loved Fan and resented this "lily-fingered gent," who was to their minds "after the old man's acres." Young Compton, the son of a neighboring rancher, was most insulting, for he had himself once carried on a frank courtship with Fan, and enjoyed a brief, half-expressed engagement. He was a fine young fellow, not naturally vindictive, and he would not have uttered a word of protest had his successful rival been a man of "the States," but to give way to an English adventurer whose way was paid by his brother was a different case altogether.

Of George Adelbert's real feeling the boys, of course, knew nothing. Had they known of his hidden contempt for them they would probably have taken him out of the country at the end of a rope, but of his position with Fan they were in no doubt, for she was very frank with them. If they accused her of being "sweet on the b.l.o.o.d.y Englishman" she laughed.

If they threatened his life in a jocular way she laughed again, but in a different way, and said: "Don't make a mistake; George Adelbert is a fighter from way back East." And once, in a burst of rage, she said: "I won't have you saying such things, Lincoln Compton. I won't have it, I tell you!" No one could accuse her of disloyalty or cowardice.

In his letters home Lester had put his fiancee's best foot forward.

"She's quite too good for me," he wrote to his brother. "She's young and beautiful and sole heiress of an estate twice as big as our whole family can muster. She's uncultivated, the diamond in the rough, and all that sort of thing, you understand, but she'll polish easily." He put all this down in the sardonic wish to procure some sort of settlement from his brother. He got it by return mail.

Edward was suavely congratulatory, and in closing said: "I'm deucedly glad you're off my hands just now, my boy, for I'm confoundedly hard up.

You're doing the sensible thing--only don't try to bring your family home--not at present."

Lester was thrown into despairing fury by this letter, which not only cut him off from his remittances, but politely shut the paternal door in his own face as well as in the face of his bride. For the moment he had some really heroic idea of setting to work to show them what he could do. "The beggar! He squats down on the inheritance, shoves me out, and then takes on a lot of 'side' as to his superiority over me! He always was a self-sufficient a.s.s. I'd like to punch his jaw!"

Then his rage faded out and a kind of sullen resignation came to him.

What was the use? Why not submit to fate? "Everything has been against me from the start," he bitterly complained, and in this spirit he approached his wedding-day.

The old man, acknowledging him as a son-in-law prospective, addressed him now with gruff kindness, and had Lester shown the slightest gain in managerial ability he would have been content--glad to share a little of his responsibility with a younger man. In his uncouth, hairy, grimy fashion Blondell was growing old, and feeling it. As he said to his wife: "It's a pity that our only child couldn't have brought a real man, like Compton, into the family. There ain't a hand on the place that wouldn't 'a' been more welcome to me. What do you suppose would become of this place if it was put into this dandy's hands?"

"I don't know, pa. Fan, for all her slack ways, is a purty fair manager.

She wouldn't waste it. She might let it run down, but she'd hang on to it."

"But she's a fool about that jacka.s.s."

"She is now," answered the mother, with cynical emphasis, which she softened by adding, "Dell ain't the kind that would try to work her."

He sighed with troubled gaze and grumbled an oath. "I don't know what to think of him! He gits me." And in that rather mournful spirit he went about his work, leaving the whole matter of the marriage festival in the hands of the women. In a dim way he still felt that haste was necessary, although Fan's face was as joyous, as careless, and as innocent as a child's. As she galloped about the country with her George Adelbert she sowed her "bids" broadcast, as if wishing all the world to share her happiness. There was nothing exclusive, or shrinking, or parsimonious in Frances Blondell.

IV

The marriage feast was indeed an epoch-making event in the county. It resembled a barbecue and was quite as inclusive. Distinctions of the social sort were few in Arapahoe County. Cattle-rustlers and sheepmen were debarred, of course, but aside from these unfortunates practically the whole population of men, women, children, and babies a.s.sembled in the Kettle Hole Ranch grove. The marriage was to be "_al fresco_," as the Limone _Limerick_ repeated several times.

Blondell found it a hard day, for what with looking after the roasting ox and the ice and the beer, he was almost too busy to say h.e.l.lo to his guests. Fan had contrived to get a clean shirt on him by the trick of whisking away his old one and subst.i.tuting a white one in its place. He put this on without realizing how splendid it was, but rebelled flatly at the collar, and by the time the ox was well basted his shirt was subdued to a condition which left him almost at ease with himself.