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Page 20
More and more as she talked the man wondered how this girl reared in the
wilds had acquired a speech so free from grammatical errors. She was
apparently deeply ignorant, and yet with a very few exceptions she made
no serious errors in English. How was it to be accounted for?
He began to ply her with questions about herself, but could not find that
she had ever come into contact with people who were educated. She had not
even lived in any of the miserable little towns that flourish in the
wildest of the West, and not within several hundred miles of a city. Their
nearest neighbors in one direction had been forty miles away, she said,
and said it as if that were an everyday distance for a neighbor to live.
Mail? They had had a letter once that she could remember, when she was a
little girl. It was just a few lines in pencil to say that her mother's
father had died. He had been killed in an accident of some sort, working
in the city where he lived. Her mother had kept the letter and cried over
it till almost all the pencil marks were gone.
No, they had no mail on the mountain where their homestead was.
Yes, her father went there first because he thought he had discovered
gold, but it turned out to be a mistake; so, as they had no other place to
go to, and no money to go with, they had just stayed there; and her father
and brothers had been cow-punchers, but she and her mother had scarcely
ever gone away from home. There were the little children to care for; and,
when they died, her mother did not care to go, and would not let her go
far alone.
O, yes, she had ridden a great deal, sometimes with her brothers, but not
often. They went with rough men, and her mother felt afraid to have her
go. The men all drank. Her brothers drank. Her father drank too. She
stated it as if it were a sad fact common to all mankind, and ended with
the statement which was almost, not quite, a question, "I guess you drink
too."
"Well," said the young man hesitatingly, "not that way. I take a glass of
wine now and then in company, you know--"
"Yes, I know," sighed the girl. "Men are all alike. Mother used to say so.
She said men were different from women. They had to drink. She said they
all did it. Only she said her father never did; but he was very good,
though he had to work hard."
"Indeed," said the young man, his color rising in the moonlight, "indeed,
you make a mistake. I don't drink at all, not that way. I'm not like them.
I--why, I only--well, the fact is, I don't care a red cent about the stuff
anyway; and I don't want you to think I'm like them. If it will do you any
good, I'll never touch it again, not a drop."
He said it earnestly. He was trying to vindicate himself. Just why he
should care to do so he did not know, only that all at once it was very
necessary that he should appear different in the eyes of this girl from,
the other men she had known.
"Will you really?" she asked, turning to look in his face. "Will you
promise that?"
"Why, certainly I will," he said, a trifle embarrassed that she had taken
him at his word. "Of course I will. I tell you it's nothing to me. I only
took a glass at the club occasionally when the other men were drinking,
and sometimes when I went to banquets, class banquets, you know, and
dinners--"
Now the girl had never heard of class banquets, but to take a glass
occasionally when the other men were drinking was what her brothers did;
and so she sighed, and said: "Yes, you may promise, but I know you won't
keep it. Father promised too; but, when he got with the other men, it did
no good. Men are all alike."
"But I'm not," he insisted stoutly. "I tell you I'm not. I don't drink,
and I won't drink. I promise you solemnly here under God's sky that I'll
never drink another drop of intoxicating liquor again if I know it as long
as I live."
He put out his hand toward her, and she put her own into it with a quick
grasp for just an instant.
"Then you're not like other men, after all," she said with a glad ring in
her voice. "That must be why I wasn't so very much afraid of you when I
woke up and found you standing there."
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