_ CHAPTER XXV. THE CHINOOK
Emblazoned on the front page of the Omaha paper upon which Mr. Pantin relied to keep him abreast of the times was the announcement that both mutton and wool had touched highwater mark in the history of the sheep-raising industry.
Mr. Pantin moved into the bow window where the light was better and read the article carefully. The Australian embargo, dust-storms in the steppes of Russia, rumors of war, all had contributed to send prices soaring. When he had concluded, he took the stub of a pencil from his waistcoat pocket and made a computation in neat figures upon the margin. As he eyed the total his mouth puckered in a whistle which changed gradually to a grin of satisfaction.
"You can't keep a squirrel down in a timbered country," Mr. Pantin chuckled aloud, ambiguously.
A pleased smile still rested upon his face when Mrs. Pantin entered.
"Priscilla, will you do me a favor?"
"Abram," reproachfully, "have I ever failed you? What is it?"
"The next time you have something going on here I want you to invite Kate Prentice."
Mrs. Pantin recoiled.
"What!"
"Don't squawk like that!" said Mr. Pantin, irritably. "You do it often, and it's an annoying mannerism."
"Do you quite realize what you are asking?" his wife demanded.
"Perfectly," replied Mr. Pantin, calmly. "I've passed the stage when I talk to make conversation."
"But think how she's been criticised!"
Mr. Pantin got up impatiently.
"Oh, you virtuous dames--"
Mrs. Pantin's thin lips went shut like a rat-trap.
"Abram, are you twitting me?"
Mr. Pantin ignored the accusation, and observed astutely:
"I presume you've done your share of talking, and that's why--"
"She is impossible, and what you ask is impossible," Mrs. Pantin declared firmly.
"It's not often that I ask a favor of you, Prissy." His tone was conciliatory.
Mrs. Pantin met him half way and her voice was softer as she answered:
"I appreciate that, Abram, but there are a few of us who must keep up the bars against such persons. Society--"
"Rats!" ejaculated Mr. Pantin coarsely.
The hand which she had laid tenderly upon his shoulder was withdrawn as if it harbored a hornet.
"I don't understand this at all--not at all," she said, icily. "However," very distinctly, "it is not necessary that I should, for I shall not do it." She folded her arms as she confronted him.
Mr. Pantin was silent so long that she thought the battle was over, and purred at him:
"You can realize how I feel about it, can't you, darling?"
"No, by George, I can't! And I'm not going to either." He slapped the table with Henry Van Dyke in ooze leather for emphasis. "I want Kate Prentice invited here the next time she's in town. If you don't do as I ask, Priscilla, you shan't go a step--not a step--to Keokuk this winter."
"Is that an ultimatum?" Mrs. Pantin demanded.
Mr. Pantin gave a quick furtive look over either shoulder, then declared with emphatic gusto:
"I mean every damn word of it!"
Mrs. Pantin stood speechless, thinking rapidly. There was nothing for it evidently but to play her trump card, which never yet had failed her. She wasted no breath in further argument, but threw herself full-length on the davenport and had hysterics.
Only a few times in their married life had Mr. Pantin risen on his hind legs, speaking figuratively, and defied her. In the beginning, before he was well housebroken, he was careless in the matter of cleaning his soles on the scraper, and had been obstinate on the question of changing his shirt on Wednesdays, holding that once a week was enough for a person not engaged in manual labor. Mrs. Pantin had won out on each issue, but it had not been an easy victory. Mr. Pantin had been docile so long now that she had expected no further trouble with him, therefore this outbreak was so unlooked for that her fit was almost genuine.
Having hurled his thunderbolt, Mr. Pantin stood above his wife regarding her imperturbably as she lay with her face buried in a sofa pillow. Unmoved, he even felt a certain interest in the rise and fall of her shoulder blades as she sobbed. Actually, she seemed to breathe with them--"like the gills of a fish," he thought heartlessly--and wondered how long she could keep it up.
"It's no use having this tantrum, Prissy," he said inexorably.
Tantrum! The final insult. Mrs. Pantin squealed with rage and gnawed the corner of the leather pillow.
"You might as well come out of it," he admonished further. "You'll only make your eyes red and give yourself a headache."
"You're a brute, Abram Pantin, and I wish I'd never seen you!"
Mr. Pantin suppressed the reply that the wish was mutual. Instead, he picked up the leather button which flew on the floor when Mrs. Pantin doubled her fist and smote the davenport.
"I doubt very much if she'd come, even if you ask her," said Pantin. It was a stroke of genius.
"Not come!" The eye which Mrs. Pantin exposed regarded Mr. Pantin scornfully. "Not come? Why, she'd be tickled to pieces."
But of that Mr. Pantin continued to have his own opinion.
Mrs. Pantin sat up and winked rapidly in her indignation.
"She's made if I take her up, and the woman isn't so stupid as not to know it, is she?"
"She may not see it from that angle," dryly. "At any rate, you'll be pleasing me greatly by asking her."
Mrs. Pantin looked at her husband fixedly:
"Why this deep interest, Abram?"
Flattered by the implied accusation, Mr. Pantin, however, resisted the temptation to make Mrs. Pantin jealous, and answered truthfully:
"I admire her greatly. She deserves recognition and will get it. If you are a wise woman you'll swallow your prejudices and be the first to admit it."
Mrs. Pantin raised both eyebrows--her own and the one she put on mornings--incredulously.
"She's the kind that would win out anywhere," he added, with conviction.
Mrs. Pantin stared at him absently, while the tears on her lashes dried to smudges. She murmured finally:
"I could have pineapple with mayonnaise dressing."
To conceal a smile, Mr. Pantin stooped for his paper.
"Or would you have lettuce with roquefort cheese dressing, Abram?"
"You know much more about such things than I do--your luncheons are always perfect, Prissy. Who do you think of inviting to meet her?"
Mrs. Pantin considered. Then her eyes sparkled with malice, "I'll begin with Mrs. Toomey."
* * * * *
In the office of the
Grit, Hiram Butefish was reading the proof of his editorial that pointed out the many advantages Prouty enjoyed over its rival in the next county.
There was no more perfect spot on the footstool for the rearing of children, Mr. Butefish declared editorially. Fresh air, pure water, and a moral atmosphere--wherein it differed, he hinted, from its neighbor. There Vice rampant and innocent Youth met on every corner, while the curse of the Demon Rum was destroying its manhood.
Mr. Butefish laid down the proof-sheet, sighed deeply, and quite unconsciously moistened his lips.
He was for Reform, certainly, but the thought would intrude that when Vice moved on to greener fields it took with it much of the zest of living. In the days when a man could get drunk as he liked and as often as he liked without fear of criticism, sure of being laid away tenderly by tolerant friends, instead of, as now,--being snaked, scuffling, to the calaboose by the constable--
The arrival of the mail with its exchanges interrupted thoughts flowing in a dangerous channel.
The soaring price of wool, featured in the headlines, caught his attention instantly, since, naturally, anything that pertained to the sheep industry was of interest to the community. Mr. Butefish used his scissors freely and opined that the next issue of the
Grit would be a corker. Then an idea came to him. Why not make it a sheep number exclusively? Give all the wool-growers in the vicinity a write-up. Great! He'd do it. Mr. Butefish enumerated them on his fingers. When he came to Kate Prentice, he hesitated. Would Prouty stand for it--the eulogy he contemplated? In a small paper one had to consider local prejudices--besides, she was not a subscriber.
While Mr. Butefish debated, a spirit of rebellion rose within him. Ever since he had established the paper he had been a worm, and what had it got him? It had got him in debt to the point of bankruptcy--that's what it had got him--and he was good and sick of it! He was tired of grovelling--nauseated with catering to a public that paid in rutabagas and elk meat that was "spoilin' on 'em." He hadn't started in right--that was half the trouble. If he had dug into their pasts and blackmailed 'em, they'd be eating out of his hand, instead of pounding on the desk in front of him if he transposed their initials. He would have been a power in the country in place of having to drag his hat brim to 'em, lest they take out their advertisement of a setting of eggs or a Plymouth Rock rooster.
He'd show 'em, by gorry! He'd show 'em! Mr. Butefish jabbed his pen into the potato he used as a penwiper, instead of the ink, in his fury. He wrote with the rapidity of inspiration, and words came which he had not known were in his vocabulary as he extolled Kate and her achievements. Emotion welled within him until his collar choked him, so he removed it, while the pen spread with the force he put into the actual writing. And when he had finished, he walked the floor reading the editorial, his voice vibrating, tingling with his own eloquence. The article snorted defiance. Mr. Butefish tacitly waved the bright flag of personal freedom in the face of Public Opinion. He bellowed his liberty, as it were, over Kate's shoulder. He strode, he swaggered--he had not known such a glorious feeling of independence since he left off plumbing. And he could go back to it if he had to! Mr. Butefish stopped in the middle of the floor and showed his teeth at an invisible audience of advertisers and subscribers.
The article came out exactly as written. Reflection did not temper Mr. Butefish's attitude with caution. The bruised worm not only had turned, but rolled clean over.
The following week, Kate rode into Prouty in ignorance of the flattering tribute which the editor had paid her. Coming at a leisurely gait down Main Street she looked as usual in pitiless scrutiny at the signs which told of the collapse of the town's prosperity. She saw without compassion the graying hair, the tired eyes of anxiety, the lines of brooding and despondency deepening in faces she remembered as carefree and hopeful, the look of resignation that comes to the weaklings who have lost their grip, the emptiness of burned-out passion, the weary languor of repeated failure--she saw it all through the eyes of her relentless hatred.
But to-day there was a something different which, in her extreme sensitiveness, she was quick to see and feel. There was a new expression in the eyes of the passersby with whom she exchanged glances. Eyes which for years had stared at her with impudence, indifference, or ostentatious blankness now held a sort of friendly inquiry, something conciliatory, which told her they would have spoken had they not been met by the immobile mask of imperturbability that she wore in Prouty.
"Why the chinook?" Kate asked herself ironically.
The warm wave met her everywhere and she continued to wonder, though it did not melt the ice about her heart that was of many years' accumulation.
Kate had sold her wool, finally, through a commission house, and at an advance over the price at which she had held it when Bowers had advised her to accept the buyer's offer. She expected the draft in the three weeks' accumulation of mail for which she had come to Prouty. When the mail was handed out to her, she looked in astonishment at the amount of it. At first glance, there appeared to be only a little less than a bushel. The postmaster, who had forgotten Bowers's instructions, grinned knowingly as he passed out photographs and sweet-scented, pink-tinted envelopes addressed to the sheepherder in feminine writing.
"So he had done it!" Kate mused as she crowded them all into the leather mail sack which bulged to the point of refusing to buckle. The letter she expected was among the rest, and, as she looked at the draft it contained, a smile that had meant not only gratification but exultation lurked at the corners of her mouth. She led her horse to the bank and tied it. Mr. Wentz came nimbly forward to the receiving teller's window as she entered, and flashed his eloquent eyes at her.
"You're quite a stranger!" he greeted her tritely, and added, "But we've been reading about you."
Kate looked her surprise.
"In the
Grit--haven't you seen it? A great boost! Butefish really writes vurry, vurry well when he puts his mind to it."
This explained the warmer temperature, she thought sardonically, but said merely:
"I haven't seen the paper." Then changing the subject: "I've decided to increase the size of my account with you, Mr. Wentz. I'll leave this draft on open deposit, though it may be considerable time before I need it." She passed it to him carelessly.
Since leaving the laundry, where he had been as temperamental as he liked, and taken it out on the wringer, Mr. Wentz had endeavored to train himself to conceal his feelings, and imagined he had succeeded. But now the wild impulse he felt to crawl through the aperture and embrace Kate told him otherwise.
Kate watched the play of emotions over his face in deep satisfaction. There was no need of words to express his gratitude--which was mostly relief.
"I appreciate this, Miss Prentice, I do indeed. I am glad that you do not hold it against us because upon a time we were not able to accommodate you."
"A bank must abide by its rules, I presume," she replied noncommittally.
"Exactly! A bank must protect its customers at all hazards."
"And the directors."
Mr. Wentz colored. Did she mean anything in particular? He wondered. He continued to speculate after her departure. It was a random shot, he decided. If it had been otherwise she scarcely would be giving him her business now, especially to the extent of this deposit--which he was needing--well, nobody but Mr. Wentz knew exactly how much.
There was a quizzical smile upon Kate's face as she passed down the steps of the bank and turned up the street on another errand. She was walking with her eyes bent upon the sidewalk, thinking hard, when her way was blocked by Mrs. Abram Pantin extending a high supine hand with the charming cordiality which distinguished her best social manner. Mrs. Pantin slipped her manner on and off, as the occasion warranted, as she did her kitchen apron.
The suddenness of the meeting surprised Kate into a look of astonishment.
"This is Miss Prentice, isn't it?"
"That's the general impression," Kate answered.
Mrs. Pantin registered vivacity by winking rapidly and twittering in a pert birdlike fashion:
"I've so much wanted to know you!"
The reply that there always had been ample opportunity seemed superfluous, so Kate said nothing.
"I've been reading about you, you know, and I want to tell you how proud we all are of you and of what you have accomplished. This is Woman's Day, isn't it?"
Since she seemed not to expect an answer, Kate made none and Mrs. Pantin continued:
"I've been wanting to see you that I might ask you to come to me--say next Thursday?"
Mrs. Pantin's manner was tinged with patronage.
Kate's silence deceived her. She imagined that Kate was awed and tongue-tied in her presence. The woman was, as Prissy had assured Abram, "tickled to pieces."
In the meanwhile, interested observers of the meeting were saying to each other cynically:
"Nothing succeeds like success, does it?"
This time, apparently, Mrs. Pantin expected an answer, so Kate asked bluntly:
"What for?"
"Luncheon. At one--we are very old-fashioned. I want you to meet some of our best ladies--Mrs. Sudds--Mrs. Neifkins--Mrs. Toomey--and others."
As she enumerated the guests on her fingers the tip of Mrs. Pantin's pink tongue darted in and out with the rapierlike movement of an ant-eater.
Kate's face hardened and she replied curtly:
"I already have had that doubtful pleasure upon an occasion, which you should remember."
Mrs. Pantin flushed. Disconcerted for a moment, she collected herself, and instead of protesting ignorance of her meaning, as she was tempted, she said candidly:
"We must let bygones be bygones, Miss Prentice, and be friends. We are older now, and wiser, aren't we?"
Kate clasped her hands behind her, a mannerism with which offending herders were familiar, and regarded Mrs. Pantin steadily.
"Older but not wiser, apparently, else you would have known better than to suggest the possibility of friendship between us. You are a poor judge of human nature, and conceited past my understanding, to imagine that it is a matter which is entirely optional with you." With the slow one-sided smile of irony which her face sometimes wore, she bowed slightly. Then, "You will excuse me?" and passed on. _