Black Jack

There were not many guests.  Elizabeth had chosen them carefully from families which had known her father, Henry Cornish, when, in his reckless, adventurous way, he had been laying the basis of the Cornish fortune in the Rockies.  Indeed, she was a little angry when she heard of the indiscriminate way in which Vance had scattered the invitations, particularly in Craterville.

But, as he said, he had acted so as to show her that he had entered fully into the spirit of the thing, and that his heart was in the right place as far as this birthday party was concerned, and she could not do otherwise than accept his explanation.

Some of the bidden guests, however, came from a great distance, and as a matter of course a few of them arrived the day before the celebration and filled the quiet rooms of the old house with noise.  Elizabeth accepted them with resignation, and even pleasure, because they all had pleasant things to say about her father and good wishes to express for the destined heir, Terence Colby.  It was carefully explained that this selection of an heir had been made by both Elizabeth and Vance, which removed all cause for remark.  Vance himself regarded the guests with distinct amusement.  But Terence was disgusted.

“What these true Westerners need,” he said to Elizabeth later in the day, “is a touch of blood.  No feeling of family or the dignity of family precedents out here.”

It touched her shrewdly.  More than once she had felt that Terry was on the verge of becoming a complacent prig.  So she countered with a sharp thrust.

“You have to remember that you’re a Westerner born and bred, my dear.  A very Westerner yourself!”

“Birth is an accident—­birthplaces, I mean,” smiled Terence.  “It’s the blood that tells.”

“Terry, you’re a snob!” exclaimed Aunt Elizabeth.

“I hope not,” he answered.  “But look yonder, now!”

Old George Armstrong’s daughter, Nelly, had gone up a tree like a squirrel and was laughing down through the branches at a raw-boned cousin on the ground beneath her.

“And what of it?” said Elizabeth.  “That girl is pretty enough to please any man; and she’s the type that makes a wife.”

Terry rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully.  It was the one family habit that he had contracted from Vance, much to the irritation of the latter.

“After all,” said Terry, with complacency, “what are good looks with bad grammar?”

Elizabeth snorted literally and most unfemininely.

“Terence,” she said, lessoning him with her bony, long forefinger, “you’re just young enough to be wise about women.  When you’re a little older, you’ll get sense.  If you want white hands and good grammar, how do you expect to find a wife in the mountains?”

Terry answered with unshaken, lordly calm.  “I haven’t thought about the details.  They don’t matter.  But a man must have standards of criticism.”

“Standards your foot!” cried Aunt Elizabeth.  “You insufferable young prig.  That very girl laughing down through the branches—­I’ll wager she could set your head spinning in ten seconds if she thought it worth her while to try.”

“Perhaps,” smiled Terence.  “In the meantime she has freckles and a vocabulary without growing pains.”

“All men are fools,” declared Aunt Elizabeth; “but boys are idiots, bless ’em!  Terence, before you grow up you’ll have sore toes from stumbling, take my word for it!  Do you know what a wise man would do?”

“Well?”

“Go out and start a terrific flirtation with Nelly.”

“For the sake of experience?” sighed Terence.

“Good heavens!” groaned Aunt Elizabeth.  “Terry, you’re impossible!  Where are you going now?”

“Out to see El Sangre.”

He went whistling out of the door, and she followed him with confused feelings of anger, pride, joy, and fear.  She went to a side window and saw him go fearlessly into the corral where the man-destroying El Sangre was kept.  And the big stallion, red fire in the sunshine, went straight to him and nosed at a hip pocket.  They had already struck up a perfect understanding.  Deeply she wondered at it.

She had never loved the mountains and their people and their ways.  It had been a battle to fight.  She had fought the battle, won, and gained a hollow victory.  And watching Terry caress the great, beautiful horse, she knew vaguely that his heart, at least, was in tune with the wilderness.

“I wish to heaven, Terry,” she murmured, “that you could find a master as El Sangre has done.  You need teaching.”

When she turned from the window, she found Vance watching her.  He had a habit of obscurely melting into a background and looking out at her unexpectedly.  All at once she knew that he had been there listening during all of her talk with Terence.  Not that the talk had been of a peculiarly private nature, but it angered her.  There was just a semblance of eavesdropping about the presence of Vance.  For she knew that Terence unbosomed himself to her as he would do in the hearing of no other human being.  However, she mastered her anger and smiled at her brother.  He had taken all these recent changes which were so much to his disadvantage with a good spirit that astonished and touched her.

“Do you know what I’m going to give Terry for his birthday?” he said, sauntering toward her.

“Well?” A mention of Terence and his welfare always disarmed her completely.  She opened her eyes and her heart and smiled at her brother.

“There’s no set of Scott in the house.  I’m going to give Terry one.”

“Do you think he’ll ever read the novels?  I never could.  That antiquated style, Vance, keeps me at arm’s length.”

“A stiff style because he wrote so rapidly.  But there’s the greatest body and bone of character.  Except for his heroes.  Terry reminds me of them, in a way.  No thought, not very much feeling, but a great capacity for physical action.”

“I think you’d like to be Terry’s adviser,” she said.

“I wouldn’t aspire to the job,” yawned Vance, “unless I could ride well and shoot well.  If a man can’t do that, he ceases to be a man in Terry’s eyes.  And if a woman can’t talk pure English, she isn’t a woman.”

“That’s because he’s young,” said Elizabeth.

“It’s because he’s a prig,” sneered Vance.  He had been drawn farther into the conversation than he planned; now he retreated carefully.  “But another year or so may help him.”

He retreated before she could answer, but he left her thoughtful, as he hoped to do.  He had a standing theory that the only way to make a woman meditate is to keep her from talking.  And he wanted very much to make Elizabeth meditate the evil in the son of Black Jack.  Otherwise all his plans might be useless and his seeds of destruction fall on barren soil.  He was intensely afraid of that, anyway.  His hope was to draw the boy and the sheriff together on the birthday and guide the two explosives until they met on the subject of the death of Black Jack.  Either Terry would kill the sheriff, or the sheriff would kill Terry.  Vance hoped for the latter, but rather expected the former to be the outcome, and if it were, he was inclined to think that Elizabeth would sooner or later make excuses for Terry and take him back into the fold of her affections.  Accordingly, his work was, in the few days that intervened, to plant all the seeds of suspicion that he could.  Then, when the denouement came, those seeds might blossom overnight into poison flowers.

In the late afternoon he took up his position in an easy chair on the big veranda.  The mail was delivered, as a rule, just before dusk, one of the cow-punchers riding down for it.  Grave fears about the loss of that all-important missive to Terry haunted him, for the postmaster was a doddering old fellow who was quite apt to forget his head.  Consequently he was vastly relieved when the mail arrived and Elizabeth brought the familiar big envelope out to him, with its typewritten address.

“Looks like a business letter, doesn’t it?” she asked Vance.

“More or less,” said Vance, covering a yawn of excitement.

“But how on earth could any business—­it’s postmarked from Craterville.”

“Somebody may have heard about his prospects; they’re starting early to separate him from his money.”

“Vance, how much talking did you do in Craterville?”

It was hard to meet her keen old eyes.

“Too much, I’m afraid,” he said frankly.  “You see, I’ve felt rather touchy about the thing.  I want people to know that you and I have agreed on making Terry the heir to the ranch.  I don’t want anyone to suspect that we differed.  I suppose I talked too much about the birthday plans.”

She sighed with vexation and weighed the letter in her hand.

“I’ve half a mind to open it.”

His heartbeat fluttered and paused.

“Go ahead,” he urged, with well-assured carelessness.

She shook down the contents of the envelope preparatory to opening it.

“It’s nothing but printed stuff, Vance.  I can see that, through the envelope.”

“But wait a minute, Elizabeth.  It might anger Terry to have even his business mail opened.  He’s touchy, you know.”

She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders.

“I suppose you’re right.  Let it go.”  She laughed at her own concern over the matter.  “Do you know, Vance, that sometimes I feel as if the whole world were conspiring to get a hand on Terry?”