Where’s my Boy in Breeches?” Dick shouted, stamping with jingling1 spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.
He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But Dick shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the spring, and the door swung wide.
“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?” he called and stamped down the length of her quarters.
A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending2 marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula’s wardrobe room and dressing3 room. He passed the short, broad stairway that led to her empty window-seat divan4 in what she called her Juliet Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray5 of filmy, pretty, lacy woman’s things that he knew she had spread out for her own sensuous6 delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh of recognition and appreciation7 at the sketch8, just outlined, of an awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of madly whinneying for its mother.
“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?” he shouted before him, out to the sleeping porch; and found only a demure9, brow-troubled Chinese woman of thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment10 into his eyes.
This was Paula’s maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before, because of a certain solicitous11 contraction12 of her delicate brows that made her appear as if ever on the verge13 of saying, “Oh dear!” In fact, Dick had taken her, as a child almost, for Paula’s service, from a fishing village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as much as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the fishermen. Oh Dear’s first service for Paula had been aboard the three-topmast schooner14, All Away, at the same time that Oh Joy, cabin-boy, had begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him, through the years, to rise to the majordomoship of the Big House.
“Where is your mistress, Oh Dear?” Dick asked.
Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.
Dick waited.
“She maybe with ’m young ladies—I don’t know,” Oh Dear stammered15; and Dick, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.
“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?” he shouted, as he stamped out under the porte cochère just as a ranch17 limousine18 swung around the curve among the lilacs.
“I’ll be hanged if I know,” a tall, blond man in a light summer suit responded from the car; and the next moment Dick Forrest and Evan Graham were shaking hands.
Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and Dick accompanied his guest to the watch tower quarters.
“You’ll have to get used to us, old man,” Dick was explaining. “We run the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If you’d arrived two minutes later there’d have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was just going for a ride, and Paula—Mrs. Forrest—has disappeared.”
The two men were almost of a size, Graham topping his host by perhaps an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely19 similarly bronzed by sun and weather-beat. Graham’s features were in a slightly larger mold; his eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a heavier droop20 of lids. His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter as well as larger than Dick’s, and his lips were a shade thicker, a shade redder, a shade more bowed with fulsome-ness.
Forrest’s hair was light brown to chestnut21, while Graham’s carried a whispering advertisement that it would have been almost golden in its silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun. The cheeks of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrest’s cheek-bones were more pronounced. Both noses were large-nostriled and sensitive. And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the impression of girlish sweetness and chastity along with the muscles that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.
But the inch more in height and the inch less in chest-girth gave Evan Graham a grace of body and carriage that Dick Forrest did not possess. In this particular of build, each served well as a foil to the other. Graham was all light and delight, with a hint—but the slightest of hints—of Prince Charming. Forrest’s seemed a more efficient and formidable organism, more dangerous to other life, stouter-gripped on its own life.
Forrest threw a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that glance, without pause or fumble22 of focus, with swift certainty of correlation23, he read the dial.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. “Come along at once, Graham. We don’t eat till twelve-thirty. I am sending out a shipment of bulls, three hundred of them, and I’m downright proud of them. You simply must see them. Never mind your riding togs. Oh Ho—fetch a pair of my leggings. You, Oh Joy, order Altadena saddled.—What saddle do you prefer, Graham?”
“Oh, anything, old man.”
“English?—Australian?—McClellan?—Mexican?” Dick insisted.
“McClellan, if it’s no trouble,” Graham surrendered.
They sat their horses by the side of the road and watched the last of the herd24 beginning its long journey to Chili25 disappear around the bend.
“I see what you’re doing—it’s great,” Graham said with sparkling eyes. “I’ve fooled some myself with the critters, when I was a youngster, down in the Argentine. If I’d had beef-blood like that to build on, I mightn’t have taken the cropper I did.”
“But that was before alfalfa and artesian wells,” Dick smoothed for him. “The time wasn’t ripe for the Shorthorn. Only scrubs could survive the droughts. They were strong in staying powers but light on the scales. And refrigerator steamships26 hadn’t been invented. That’s what revolutionized the game down there.”
“Besides, I was a mere16 youngster,” Graham added. “Though that meant nothing much. There was a young German tackled it at the same time I did, with a tenth of my capital. He hung it out, lean years, dry years, and all. He’s rated in seven figures now.”
They turned their horses back for the Big House. Dick flirted27 his wrist to see his watch.
“Lots of time,” he assured his guest. “I’m glad you saw those yearlings. There was one reason why that young German stuck it out. He had to. You had your father’s money to fall back on, and, I imagine not only that your feet itched28, but that your chief weakness lay in that you could afford to solace29 the itching30.”
“Over there are the fish ponds,” Dick said, indicating with a nod of his head to the right an invisible area beyond the lilacs. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity to catch a mess of trout31, or bass32, or even catfish33. You see, I’m a miser34. I love to make things work. There may be a justification35 for the eight-hour labor36 day, but I make the work-day of water just twenty-four hours’ long. The ponds are in series, according to the nature of the fish. But the water starts working up in the mountains. It irrigates37 a score of mountain meadows before it makes the plunge38 and is clarified to crystal clearness in the next few rugged39 miles; and at the plunge from the highlands it generates half the power and all the lighting40 used on the ranch. Then it sub-irrigates lower ............