Black Jack

Twenty-four years made the face of Vance Cornish a little better-fed, a little more blocky of cheek, but he remained astonishingly young.  At forty-nine the lumpish promise of his youth was quite gone.  He was in a trim and solid middle age.  His hair was thinned above the forehead, but it gave him more dignity.  On the whole, he left an impression of a man who has done things and who will do more before he is through.

He shifted his feet from the top of the porch railing and shrugged himself deeper into his chair.  It was marvelous how comfortable Vance could make himself.  He had one great power—­the ability to sit still through any given interval.  Now he let his eye drift quietly over the Cornish ranch.  It lay entirely within one grasp of the vision, spilling across the valley from Sleep Mountain, on the lower bosom of which the house stood, to Mount Discovery on the north.  Not that the glance of Vance Cornish lurched across this bold distance.  His gaze wandered as slowly as a free buzzes across a clover field, not knowing on which blossom to settle.

Below him, generously looped, Bear Creek tumbled out of the southeast, and roved between noble borders of silver spruce into the shadows of the Blue Mountains of the north, half a dozen miles across and ten long of grazing and farm land, rich, loamy bottom land scattered with aspens.

Beyond, covering the gentle roll of the foothills, was grazing land.  Scattering lodgepole pine began in the hills, and thickened into dense yellow-green thickets on the upper mountain slopes.  And so north and north the eye of Vance Cornish wandered and climbed until it rested on the bald summit of Mount Discovery.  It had its name out of its character, standing boldly to the south out of the jumble of the Blue Mountains.

It was a solid unit, this Cornish ranch, fenced away with mountains, watered by a river, pleasantly forested, and obviously predestined for the ownership of one man.  Vance Cornish, on the porch of the house, felt like an enthroned king overlooking his dominions.  As a matter of fact, his holdings were hardly more than nominal.

In the beginning his father had left the ranch equally to Vance and Elizabeth, thickly plastered with debts.  The son would have sold the place for what they could clear.  He went East to hunt for education and pleasure; his sister remained and fought the great battle by herself.  She consecrated herself to the work, which implied that the work was sacred.  And to her, indeed, it was.

She was twenty-two and her brother twelve when their father died.  Had she been a tithe younger and her brother a mature man, it would have been different.  As it was, she felt herself placed in a maternal position with Vance.  She sent him away to school, rolled up her sleeves and started to order chaos.  In place of husband, children—­love and the fruits of love—­ she accepted the ranch.  The dam between the rapids and the waterfall was the child of her brain; the plowed fields of the central part of the valley were her reward.

In ten years of constant struggle she cleared away the debts.  And then, since Vance gave her nothing but bills to pay, she began to buy out his interest.  He chose to learn his business lessons on Wall Street.  Elizabeth paid the bills, but she checked the sums against his interest in the ranch.  And so it went on.  Vance would come out to the ranch at intervals and show a brief, feverish interest, plan a new set of irrigation canals, or a sawmill, or a better road out over the Blue Mountains.  But he dropped such work half-done and went away.

Elizabeth said nothing.  She kept on paying his bills, and she kept on cutting down his interest in the old Cornish ranch, until at the present time he had only a finger-tip hold.  Root and branch, the valley and all that was in it belonged to Elizabeth Cornish.  She was proud of her possession, though she seldom talked of her pride.  Nevertheless, Vance knew, and smiled.  It was amusing, because, after all, what she had done, and all her work, would revert to him at her death.  Until that time, why should he care in whose name the ranch remained so long as his bills were paid?  He had not worked, but in recompense he had remained young.  Elizabeth had labored all her youth away.  At forty-nine he was ready to begin the most important part of his career.  At sixty his sister was a withered old ghost of a woman.

He fell into a pleasant reverie.  When Elizabeth died, he would set in some tennis courts beside the house, buy some blooded horses, cut the road wide and deep to let the world come up Bear Creek Valley, and retire to the life of a country gentleman.

His sister’s voice cut into his musing.  She had two tones.  One might be called her social register.  It was smooth, gentle—­the low-pitched and controlled voice of a gentlewoman.  The other voice was hard and sharp.  It could drive hard and cold across a desk, and bring businessmen to an understanding that here was a mind, not a woman.

At present she used her latter tone.  Vance Cornish came into a shivering consciousness that she was sitting beside him.  He turned his head slowly.  It was always a shock to come out of one of his pleasant dreams and see that worn, hollow-eyed, impatient face.

“Are you forty-nine, Vance?”

“I’m not fifty, at least,” he countered.

She remained imperturbable, looking him over.  He had come to notice that in the past half-dozen years his best smiles often failed to mellow her expression.  He felt that something disagreeable was coming.

“Why did Cornwall run away this morning?  I hoped to take him on a trip.”

“He had business to do.”

His diversion had been a distinct failure, and had been turned against him.  For she went on:  “Which leads to what I have to say.  You’re going back to New York in a few days, I suppose?”

“No, my dear.  I haven’t been across the water for two years.”

“Paris?”

“Brussels.  A little less grace; a little more spirit.”

“Which means money.”

“A few thousand only.  I’ll be back by fall.”

“Do you know that you’ll have to mortgage your future for that money, Vance?”

He blinked at her, but maintained his smile under fire courageously.

“Come, come!  Things are booming.  You told me yesterday what you’d clean up on the last bunch of Herefords.”

When she folded her hands, she was most dangerous, he knew.  And now the bony fingers linked and she shrugged the shawl more closely around her shoulders.

“We’re partners, aren’t we?” smiled Vance.

“Partners, yes.  You have one share and I have a thousand.  But—­you don’t want to sell out your final claim, I suppose?”

His smile froze.  “Eh?”

“If you want to get those few thousands, Vance, you have nothing to put up for them except your last shreds of property.  That’s why I say you’ll have to mortgage your future for money from now on.”

“But—­how does it all come about?”

“I’ve warned you.  I’ve been warning you for twenty-five years, Vance.”

Once again he attempted to turn her.  He always had the impression that if he became serious, deadly serious for ten consecutive minutes with his sister, he would be ruined.  He kept on with his semi-jovial tone.

“There are two arts, Elizabeth.  One is making money and the other is spending it.  You’ve mastered one and I’ve mastered the other.  Which balances things, don’t you think?”

She did not melt; he waved down to the farm land.

“Watch that wave of wind, Elizabeth.”

A gust struck the scattering of aspens, and turned up the silver of the dark green leaves.  The breeze rolled across the trees in a long, rippling flash of light.  But Elizabeth did not look down.  Her glance was fixed on the changeless snow of Mount Discovery’s summit.

“As long as you have something to spend, spending is a very important art, Vance.  But when the purse is empty, it’s a bit useless, it seems to me.”

“Well, then, I’ll have to mortgage my future.  As a matter of fact, I suppose I could borrow what I want on my prospects.”

A veritable Indian yell, instantly taken up and prolonged by a chorus of similar shouts, cut off the last of his words.  Round the corner of the house shot a blood-bay stallion, red as the red of iron under the blacksmith’s hammer, with a long, black tail snapping and flaunting behind him, his ears flattened, his beautiful vicious head outstretched in an effort to tug the reins out of the hands of the rider.  Failing in that effort, he leaped into the air like a steeplechaser and pitched down upon stiffened forelegs.

The shock rippled through the body of the rider and came to his head with a snap that jerked his chin down against his breast.  The stallion rocked back on his hind legs, whirled, and then flung himself deliberately on his back.  A sufficiently cunning maneuver—­first stunning the enemy with a blow and then crushing him before his senses returned.  But he landed on nothing save hard gravel.  The rider had whipped out of the saddle and stood poised, strong as the trunk of a silver spruce.

The fighting horse, a little shaken by the impact of his fall, nevertheless whirled with catlike agility to his feet—­a beautiful thing to watch.  As he brought his forequarters off the earth, he lunged at the rider with open mouth.  A sidestep that would have done credit to a pugilist sent the youngster swerving past that danger.  He leaped to the saddle at the same time that the blood-bay came to his four feet.

The chorus in full cry was around the horse, four or five excited cow-punchers waving their sombreros and yelling for horse or rider, according to the gallantry of the fight.

The bay was in the air more than he was on the ground, eleven or twelve hundred pounds of might, writhing, snapping, bolting, halting, sunfishing with devilish cunning, dropping out of the air on one stiff foreleg with an accompanying sway to one side that gave the rider the effect of a cudgel blow at the back of the head and then a whip-snap to part the vertebrae.  Whirling on his hind legs, and again flinging himself desperately on the ground, only to fail, come to his feet with the clinging burden once more maddeningly in place, and go again through a maze of fence-rowing and sun-fishing until suddenly he straightened out and bolted down the slope like a runaway locomotive on a downgrade.  A terrifying spectacle, but the rider sat erect, with one arm raised high above his head in triumph, and his yell trailing off behind him.  From a running gait the stallion fell into a smooth pace—­a true wild pacer, his hoofs beating the ground with the force and speed of pistons and hurling himself forward with incredible strides.  Horse and rider lurched out of sight among the silver spruce.

“By the Lord, wonderful!” cried Vance Cornish.

He heard a stifled cry beside him, a cry of infinite pain.

“Is—­is it over?”

And there sat Elizabeth the Indomitable with her face buried in her hands like a girl of sixteen!

“Of course it’s over,” said Vance, wondering profoundly.

She seemed to dread to look up.  “And—­Terence?”

“He’s all right.  Ever hear of a horse that could get that young wildcat out of the saddle?  He clings as if he had claws.  But—­where did he get that red devil?”

“Terence ran him down—­in the mountains—­somewhere,” she answered, speaking as one who had only half heard the question.  “Two months of constant trailing to do it, I think.  But oh, you’re right!  The horse is a devil!  And sometimes I think—­”

She stopped, shuddering.  Vance had returned to the ranch only the day before after a long absence.  More and more, after he had been away, he found it difficult to get in touch with things on the ranch.  Once he had been a necessary part of the inner life.  Now he was on the outside.  Terence and Elizabeth were a perfectly completed circle in themselves.