Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 1200
“Suits us swell!” yelled the boys. “And Majesty—” added Rollie, “we’re tired of pink teas and cakes, you know.”
“I’m sending over cases and cases,” replied Madge, radiantly. And when the row had subsided she continued: “I can supply anything in the world but happy hearts. You must bring them.
“I’ve been hours on end making up lists. It’ll take two full days to shop. Oh, some job! And then I’m off. No more dates. The sooner I go the better, dear friends.... That’s my say — for my — last bull session!”
She fled in a silence that hurt.
Early and late for three days Madge shopped in the Los Angeles stores. At night she packed, with Allie to help, and sometimes Pequita or Selma. What a relief when the expressman took her trunks away! At length all her tasks were done, even to the packing of bags in her car. Next morning when she awoke the sun was flashing on the vine-covered walls of the chapel. With Allie in her pajamas, Madge tiptoed down the stairs, passed the closed doors of her sisters, and hurried to the garage. Her last load of baggage was stowed away.
“Don’t make me — cry—” she whispered, huskily, to the weeping mute Allie. “I’ve got to drive some.... Tell them all — good-by... darling — I’ll — be — seeing...”
Madge drove out with blurred eyes that did not clear until she rounded the corner and turned her back to the campus forever. An early rising student halloed, but she did not look. The constriction in her throat eased as she threaded into the traffic. It was over — college and all that went with it. Madge did not deceive herself. All these lovely contacts would sever and fade away in the conflicting tides of new and wider life.
Not to press down on the accelerator seemed harder to resist than ever. In one of the suburban towns Madge stopped for breakfast and to send telegrams home. To her sorority sisters she wired: “All’s well. I’ll be seeing you.” Soon then she faced the long orange-grove — and vineyard-bordered road, and here she drove the powerful car up to sixty along the straight stretches. Madge loved to drive, to speed, to feel the impact of wind, to see the narrow thread of road flash under her, and the blurred greens pass by. By ten o’clock she was in Banning, where she halted for fuel. The service man paid Madge and her car an admiring gaze.
A hot furnacelike breath waved into Madge’s face up from the long Gorgonio Pass, as she left Banning. Once, however, under way again, the pressing air felt cool to her. At Indio she had a bite to eat and a malted milk, then leaving her car at a service station she crossed out of the copper sun to the shade of cottonwoods. These green full-foliaged trees, like the pines, were reminiscent of her ranch, and the ranges of the West. Palms and orange trees belonged to California, somehow removed from Arizona. A sultry breeze blew off the desert, tinged with an acrid dust, that felt gritty to her moist hands. Gloves were almost intolerable, and the skin of her lips and cheeks felt drying up. Nevertheless she welcomed this dry heat. Soon she would be across the desert, up on the sage ranges of Arizona, where the air was different. The sun could shine down hot, but in the shade the air felt cool. Then in her beloved home state there was never that copper sky or the blurred distance which she saw now. San Jacinto stood up shrouded in heat; smoky veils curled up from the gray weed-spotted desert; the ragged line of the barren ranges stretched south to fade in the distance; the pale expanse of the Salton Sea gleamed in the hollow of the valley, its salty shore line ghastly and weird.
Madge walked a few minutes under the cottonwoods, despite the discomfort. The next two hundred miles and more would be the most trying of this drive. To traverse a long stretch of flat country below sea level was far from a joy ride in June. Madge, rested from nervous strain, went back to her car to resume her journey. From Indio to El Centro Madge reveled in speed and the rare delight of catapulting through space. Beyond El Centro, where she halted for a little while, sunset caught her in the dunes, those exquisitely graceful curves and mounds and scallops of sand, beginning to color with opal tints, and shadow darkly away from the sun. This five-mile stretch was the only one on the journey that she longed to acquire for Arizona. Through that stately region Madge drove at a snail’s pace, and rediscovered her love of color and symmetry and solitude. She felt like a Navajo at sunset, part of the nature she watched.
When dusk mantled the black lava point of Pilot Knob, and dim purple Picacho, Madge sighted the lights of Yuma and soon the broad Colorado, chafing in sullen flood away into the darkness of a bend toward the south.
In a few more minutes she crossed the bridge into Arizona, and drove to the Alcatraz, a new hotel where she had stayed coming and going on her visit home the preceding summer. Her head and eyes ached, and her body was stiff from the long drive. And hungry and thirsty as she was she enjoyed the luxury of a bath and change before going downstairs. Apparently there were only a few guests at the hotel. After finishing a light dinner Madge went out to walk up and down the street and send some telegrams. The night was sultry and warm, with no air stirring, but she required exercise more than comfort. She walked to a corner and back. Mexicans with sloe-black eyes passed her, and a group of the lofty statured Yuma Indians who wrapped their long hair in a coil on top of their heads and set a cake of mud upon it. The glaring twin lights of cars loomed and passed by. Madge did not succumb to an impulse to walk down to the main street. Yuma was fascinating at any hour, especially after nightfall.
A long black car had drawn up to the curb before the hotel. Madge, as she passed it, heard a low exclamation, then quick footsteps. A slim hand with fingers like steel clutched her arm.
“Gold-top, what you doing here?” called a sharp voice, cold as ice. Madge knew to whom it belonged before she turned to see Uhl, bareheaded under the electric light, his eyes glittering from his pale face.
“Oh! — hello — this is a surprise,” replied Madge, haltingly, as her wits leaped to meet the situation.
“You alone?”
“Yes. On my way home,” she said, slowly, fighting a confusion of thought. She did not like his look nor the hard clutch on her arm.
“Home! Say, what kind of a twist are you? Told me you lived in Santa Barbara.”
“Did I? Will you be good enough to let go my arm? You hurt.”
“Come for a ride,” he returned, in a voice that brooked no opposition to his will and he almost dragged her toward the big black car.
“No, thanks,” rejoined Madge, as, supple and strong, with one wrench she freed herself. “I’m tired. Drove all day. See you tomorrow.”
“Like hell you will! Same as phone calls. I’m seeing you right now. Get that, baby!” He was neither angry nor insolent. His face had the clear cold chiseling of a diamond. Madge was not afraid of him, but she realized that she should be. She wavered between turning her back upon him and asking him into the hotel. The important thing was to get in off the street, and acting upon that she said: “I won’t talk here. Come in for a moment.”
Uhl hung close to her, hand at her elbow, and did not speak while they went through the lobby. He steered Madge into a back room with subdued lights, where several couples sat at tables, drinking. Here Uhl led her to a seat at a corner table and ordered cocktails from the attendant.
“What kind of a deal are you giving me, sister?” he began, forcefully, as he leaned toward her across the table. All about him was cold, suspicious, repellent.
“Deal?” she queried, playing for time.
“You knew I fell for you. I told you. And you met me, danced and drank with me. Then when I get stuck deep you try to pull this ‘I’ll be seeing you’ gag. That doesn’t go. See?”
“Mr. Uhl, I seem to see that you have misunderstood me.”
“Yeah? Nothing doing, eh?”
“If you wish to put it that way.”
He controlled what must have been a murderous fire, judging from the instant lowering of his blazing eyes and the quiver of his slim hands. Strangely, this reaction of his again restored a certain fascination he had exerted over Madge, she felt that it was almost an attraction of repugnance. She had had too much adulation, too many at her feet. There was in her, unconsciously, a primitive longing.
“Baby, I’ve gone nuts over some dames,” began Uhl deliberately, apparently having suppressed his violent feelings. “But none ever held a copper to you. I’m horribly in love with you, sweetheart.”
“Oh, I’m sorry you’ve allowed it to go so far,” murmured Madge. “Any girl would be flattered and.... But, you see, I’m engaged.”
“Yeah? What’s that to me?”
“I can’t imagine, I’m sure. But I know a girl can’t accept serious attentions from one man when she’s engaged to another.”
“The hell dames can’t. They do. They all do... Aw, Beauty, don’t be such a plaster. I’m crazy about you.... If you’re alone here tonight let me....”
Madge felt his slim hand slide upon her knee under the table. His eyes, gray as molten metal had a hypnotic power. For a moment she felt paralyzed. Then her rigidity broke to a start, to a stinging heat, to an insupportable sensation. That tearing thing seemed to actuate Madge more than Uhl’s outrage. In a fury she kicked out with all her might. And her onslaught sent the man sprawling over his chair. Madge almost overturned the table as she leaped up. Wheeling she fled from the room, and never stopped until she backed up against her locked door.
“Serves you damn — right!” she panted, passionately. “Playing with a heel like him!... Are you ever — going to think?”
Madge hardly had time to think then. Hurried steps in the hall preceded a knock on the door. Another knock, louder, followed, and the handle of the door was tried.
“Madge!”
“Who is it?” she called.
“Bee. Let me in. I want to square myself.”
“I’ll take your word for it — from that side.”
“I was out of my head. I’ll come clean. You’re not like other dames.”
“Thanks, Mr. Uhl. You discovered that rather late. But I take the blame for your mistake.”
“Will you let me in?”
“No. I’m going to bed.”
“That wouldn’t make any difference to me. I want to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t want to listen.... But I’ll see you in the morning. At breakfast. Eight o’clock,” she replied, thinking that might be a way to get rid of him.
“Okay, baby. But don’t string me again.”
Uhl’s voice had an ominous ring that jarred unpleasantly upon Madge’s ruffled nerves. Uhl was dangerous. Recalling his bragging, the roll of bills he exhibited, his extraordinary intimation of some kind of power, which Madge now analyzed as underworld, she realized that she might be in actual peril and by no means should she encounter him again. She determined to be a hundred miles and more beyond Yuma by eight o’clock next morning. Following that decision her first impulse was to telephone the desk to leave a call for five o’clock, but she thought better of it. She always awakened early, provided she went to bed early. This she did at once, and eventually fell asleep.
The roaring of a motor truck awakened Madge. She hardly seemed to have done more than close her eyes. Ruddy light on the desert ridges attested to sunrise. Her wrist watch said ten minutes to five. By five o’clock she was at the desk downstairs, paying her bill. She told the night clerk, in case anyone asked, that she had received a telegram which recalled her to Los Angeles. In another ten minutes she was speeding east on the Arizona highway.
The morning was fresh and cool. A line of fire rimmed the ranges. No cars, no curves on the empty black road ahead gave full rein to her desire and her need to drive fast. Sixty miles an hour had been her conservative limit, except a few times on short favorable stretches. Here Madge had the course and the incentive to increase her speed to seventy and more. The motor droned like a homing bee. It ate up the miles. At eighty miles on the indicator Madge tasted the last complete and full elation of the speedster. The telegraph poles were almost as fence posts.
Madge never looked back once. She drove under the urge that Uhl was pursuing her and that she could run away from him. At Gila Bend where the highway forked she slowed down and took the right branch, then opened up again. Mohawk, Aztec, Sentinel — the stations that she knew well were overtaken and passed by. At Casa Grande, while the car was being refueled and gone over, she had breakfast and lunch in one. From there Madge again faced the waving colored desert, with its black buttes and red ranges, ever growing rougher. But she took little account of it or of the hours. She was bent on a record drive. Tucson for once was not interesting, only as a service station; and the quaint Tombstone and bustling Bisbee only obstacles on the road. Late that day, which had flashed by like the hamlets, Madge drove into Douglas with the most perfect satisfaction for a driving mania she had ever experienced.
She stopped at an automobile camp, had her dinner at a lunch counter, and by eight o’clock she was in bed, her eyelids heavy. Her last thought was of what she would do on the morrow to the hundred-odd miles between Douglas and Majesty’s Rancho.
Next morning she was on the way by six o’clock, after having breakfasted. She would have made the run to Bolton in an hour but for the fact that she was held back by a detour, and some heavily laden, slow-moving canvas-covered trucks that simply stuck to the middle of the road. They annoyed her so that she thought that she would not soon forget them, nor one of the drivers, a swarthy visaged fellow who glared at her when at last with incessant honking she forced him over.
At Bolton Madge tarried long enough to leave orders with the stationmaster about her baggage and freight due to arrive. Then she refueled again, and drove on, beginning to feel strangely happy — with the journey almost ended, with turmoil behind her, and rest and home almost gained.
But when she struck off the highway beyond the culvert, up the old rancho road, which proved to be annoyingly full of lumps and gutters and rocks, she passed from an amused impatience to a burst of temper. She endured the jolting and the messing of her baggage and packages for some miles, then she had to drive slowly. What an atrocious road! And she with a crowd of guests due in less than two weeks! How would three truckloads of purchases ever safely negotiate that trail for steers and cowboys? Did her father have that same old loafing bunch of vaqueros? She would hire a gang of Mexicans to make a decent road out of it pronto. It took Madge three quarters of an hour to drive from the culvert to the summit of the slope — approximately fifteen miles.
Madge, surmounting the slope, abruptly to face the vast purple valley, with its arresting black knoll topped by the gray mansion which was her home, and the grand uplifting range beyond, stopped the car to gaze as one in transport. How astoundingly familiar! She had only to see to realize that all these blue distances and splendid landmarks were veritably a part of herself. But absence and life too full for memory had come between them, and her thought and her love, now suddenly leaping to vivid and poignant life again. The morning was still fresh; shadows still lingered under the ridges; every wash and rock shone white; the waves of sage rolled on and on, in an endless sea, dotted with cattle; the league-long slope up to the knoll had a beautiful sweep; and there peeping out of the black pines, lonely and superb, stood the mansion of the old Dons. As a fitting background the mountains loomed impressively, white-slided and black-canyoned, upflung in rock battlements to the blue sky.
“Oh, darling, darling home!” cried Madge, in rapture and reproach. “I have been faithless. But I have come back. For good! Forever, to you — to my home — to the love and life I shall find here!”
The moment of exaltation was difficult for Madge, inasmuch as she had a vague realization that she was not big enough, not good enough for this noble country, nor for the devoted mother and father who awaited her coming. But she had a clear conception that if she were true to the emotion this magnificent scene had aroused in her heart, she would grow far toward being worthy of it. That thought persisted helpfully, too strong even for her misgivings.
She drove on. The descent into the valley afforded swifter travel. She had left rocks and ruts behind. Soon she was down to a level, on a white road, six inches deep in dust; and here she cut loose again with a shriek of joy, to shoot ahead of the yellow clouds that puffed up from the wheels. The wash in the center was sand and she hit that at a fifty-mile clip, to veer and leap and plunge, the wheel lurching under her strong grip, and roar safely across to another strip of dust. Beyond that the long slope of yellow road was like a country lane, with its two narrow wheel strips, its weedy center, its hard ground. Madge hummed up that, out of the grass and sage, into the pines, and on up the shaded brown-matted aisle to the green oval before the stately mansion.
And on the porch, telescope in hand, her eyes deeply dark with joy stood her mother. Madge pressed the brake so forcibly that the great car, answering with a grinding scream on gravel, stopped so suddenly that she and the bags had a violent jerk. Madge threw off gloves, goggles, hat all in one swift action, and leaping out she ran up the steps into her mother’s arms.
* * * * *
They were inside, in the living room, and Madge, wiping her eyes was saying: “Fancy me being such a baby! But somehow it’s different this time. Coming home!... Let me look at you, Mom darling... . Oh, the same lovely patrician mother! — But, darling, you have some gray in this beautiful hair — and a few lines I never saw before. But you’re more perfect than ever!”
“Madge! How you rave!” exclaimed her mother, her voice low. “But it’s worth a great deal to have you home — and hear you talk like that.... I hope it’s not all — let me say, remorse.”
“Mom!... Come, let’s not stand all day. My legs are weak.... I’ll sit on the arm of your chair.... There,” and Madge slipped her arm around her mother and drew the handsome head to her shoulder. “I’m the little girl who has courage to confess — but who would rather not face her mother’s loving eyes.... Let me get it over, darling.... You had my letters — my telegrams?”
