JOHNNY'S DILEMMA
"Well, thank heavens she's gone! Perhaps a person can have a minute or two of peace and comfort on this ranch now. I don't know when I have ever disliked a person so much. I don't see how you stood her. For my part, that creature would make me sick, just having her around!" As a final venting of her animosity, Mary V made faces at the car that carried the nurse hack to town.
Johnny looked at Mary V, looked after the nurse, and looked at Mary V again. He had thought the nurse a very nice nurse, with a quiet kind of efficiency that soothed a fellow without any fuss or frills. It was queer Mary V did not like her, but then--
"I know I've been a darned nuisance," he apologized so meekly that he did not sound in the least like Johnny Jewel. "But I'm getting well fast. I'll be able to beat it in a few days now."
"Why, for gracious sake? Haven't we--er--made you comfortable?"
"Sure, you have. Only you shouldn't have put yourselves out, this way. I ought to have gone to a hospital or some place." Johnny looked so distressed that Mary V could have cried. Only she was afraid that would distress him still more, and the doctor had said he must not be worried about anything.
"It wasn't any trouble. You are being absolutely silly, so I guess you are getting well, all right. I--I didn't see any sense of having that nurse in the first place. Because I can take temperature and count pulse and everything. I've really been crazy for a chance to practice nursing on somebody. And then when I had the chance, they wouldn't let me do a thing."
Johnny grinned, which was rather pathetic--he was so thin and so white. "Why didn't you practice on the greasers?" he taunted her. "Bill says you sure made some dandy work for the hospitals."
"Well, I couldn't help that. I didn't have any way of tying them, or anything, and--"
"Brag, girl! For Lord's sake don't apologize; it doesn't come natural to you. What gets me is that I was ripping the atmosphere wide open, trying to rescue you, and all the while you were making a whole sheriff's posse of yourself--and it was you that rescued me. I should think--"
"I did not! I--did Bill tell you the latest, Johnny? You know how dad is--about making people tell things he wants to know, and keeping them right to the point--"
"I know." Johnny's tone was eloquent.
"Well, he got at those Mexicans, and they told everything they knew--and some besides. And who do you think was the real leader of that gang, Johnny? And I know now it was his voice that I couldn't quite recognize over the 'phone. They've arrested him and two or three of his men, and you wouldn't believe a neighbor could be so tricky and mean as that Tucker Bly. Stealing our horses to sell to the Mexicans, if you please, and selling his own to the government mostly--but some to the Mexicans, too, I suppose. And nobody suspecting a thing all the while, and Tex in with them and all. And if you hadn't stampeded the horses so they came back to the line, and the boys rounded them up, dad would have lost a lot more than he did. But now the whole thing is out, and really, if I hadn't caught those two greasers, there wouldn't be any evidence against the Tucker Bly outfit, or Tex either. And I just think it's awful, the way--"
She stopped abruptly. Johnny's bandaged head was leaning against the back of his big chair, and his eyes were closed. His face looked whiter than it had a few minutes ago. Mary V was scared. She should have known better than to talk of those things.
"Shall--would you like a drink, or--or something?" she asked in a small, contrite voice.
Johnny opened his eyes and looked at her.
"No, I don't want a drink; I just want somebody to give me another knock on the head that will finish me." And before Mary V could think of anything soothing to say, Johnny spoke again. "I think I'll go back and lie down awhile. I--don't feel very good."
He would not let Mary V help him at all, but walked slowly, steadying himself by the chairs, the wall, by anything solid within reach. He did not look much like the very self-assured, healthy specimen of young manhood whom Mary V could bully and tease and talk to without constraint. She felt as though she scarcely knew this thin, pale young man with the bandaged head and the somber eyes. He seemed so aloof, as though his spirit walked alone in dark places where she could not follow.
After that she did not mention stolen horses, nor thieves, nor airplanes, nor anything that could possibly lead his thoughts to those taboo subjects. Under that heavy handicap conversation lagged. There seemed to be so little that she dared mention! She would sit and prattle of school and shows and such things, and tell him about the girls she knew; and half the time she knew perfectly well that Johnny was not listening. But she could not bear his moody silences, and he sat out on the porch a good deal of the time, so she had to go on talking, whether she bored him to death or not.
Then one day, when the bandage had dwindled to a small patch held in place by strips of adhesive plaster, Johnny broke into her detailed description of a silly Western picture she had seen.
"What's become of Bland?" he asked, just when she was describing a thrilling scene.
"Bland? Oh, why--Bland's gone." Mary V was very innocent as to eyes and voice, and very uneasy as to her mind.
"Gone where? He was broke. I didn't get a chance to pay him--"
"Oh, well, as to that--I suppose dad fixed him up with a ticket and so on. And so this girl, Inez, overhears them plotting--"
"Where's your dad?"
"Dad? Why, dad's in Tucson, I believe, at the trial. What makes you so rude when I'm telling you the most thrill--"
"When's he coming back?"
"For gracious sake, Johnny! What do you want of dad all at once? Am I not entertaining--"
"You are. As entertaining as a meadow lark. I love meadow larks, but I never could put in all my time listening to 'em sing. I generally had something else I had to do."
"Well, you've nothing else to do now, so listen to this meadow lark, will you? Though I must say--"
"I'd like to, but I can't. There are things I've got to do."
"There are not! Not a single thing but be a nice boy and get well. And to get well you must--"
"A lot you know about it--you, with nothing to worry you, any more than a meadow lark. Not as much, because they do have to rustle their own worms and watch out for hawks and things, and you--"
"I suppose you would imply that I have about as much brains as a meadow lark, perhaps!" Mary V rose valiantly to the argument. If Johnny would rather quarrel than talk about things that didn't interest either of them a bit, why, a quarrel he should have.
But Johnny would not quarrel. He made no reply whatever to the tentative charge. When Mary V stopped scolding, she became aware that Johnny had not heard a word of what she had said.
"How many horses did your dad figure had been stolen? I mean, besides the ones he got back."
"Why--er--you'll have to ask dad. I don't see what that can have to do with meadow larks' brains."
"It hasn't a thing to do with brains. I was merely wondering."
"Well," Mary V retorted flippantly, "I believe the wondering is very good to-day. Help yourself, Johnny."
Johnny looked at her unsmilingly. "That," he told her bitterly, "is what I'm trying to do."
He did not explain that somewhat cryptical remark, and presently he left her and went to his room. Mary V felt that she was not being trusted by a person who surely ought to know by this time that he needn't be so secretive about his thoughts and intentions. If she had not proved her loyalty and her friendship by this time, what did a person want her to do, for gracious sake?
Mary V had rather an unhappy time of it, the next week or so. She had, for some reason, lost all interest in collecting "Desert Glimpses"; so much so that when her mother told her she must stay close to the ranch lest she meet more of those terrible Mexican bandits, Mary V was very sweet about it and did not argue with her mother at all. She seldom went farther than the ledge, these days, and she could not keep her mind off Johnny Jewel, even when there was no doubt at all that he was nearly as well as ever.
Of course, it did not really matter--but why was Johnny so glum with her? Why wouldn't he talk, or at least quarrel the way he used to do? He did not seem angry about anything. He simply did not seem to care whether she was with him or not. She might as well be a stick or a stone, she told herself viciously, for all the attention Johnny Jewel ever paid to her. She did not mind in the least; but it did seem perfectly silly and unaccountable; she wondered merely because she hated mysteries.
It really should not have been mysterious. Mary V made the mistake of not putting herself in Johnny's place and from that angle interpreting his preoccupation. Had she done that she would have seen at once that Johnny was fighting a battle within himself. All his ideas, his plans, and his hopes had been turned bottom up, and Johnny was working over the wreck.
She sat and watched him from the ledge one day, and wondered why he did not act more pleased when he walked down toward the corral and discovered his airplane all repaired, just exactly as good as it had been before. He stood there looking at it with the same apathetic gloom in his bearing that had marked him ever since he was able to be out of bed. Mary V thought he might at least show a little gratitude--not to herself, but toward her dad, because he had kept Bland and had paid him to repair the machine for Johnny, when Johnny was too sick to know anything about it--too sick even to hear the noise of it when Bland tried out the motor--and the nurse was so afraid it would disturb "her patient."
She saw her dad stroll down that way, and stop and look at the airplane with Johnny. Johnny seemed to be asking a few questions. But they did not talk five minutes until Johnny went off by himself to the bunk house, and stayed there. He did not even come back to the house for supper, but ate with the boys.
Mary V would have died before she would ask Johnny what was the matter, but she took what measures she could to find out, nevertheless. She asked her dad, that evening, what Johnny thought about his aeroplane being all fixed up again.
Sudden smoked for a minute or two before he answered. "Well, I don't know, kitten. He didn't say." Sudden's tone was drawling and comfortable, but Mary V somehow got the notion that her dad, too, was rather disappointed in Johnny's lack of appreciation.
"Well, but what's he going to do with it, dad?"
"He didn't say, kitten."
"Well, but dad, he was looking at it, and you were with him, and didn't he say anything, for gracious sake?" Mary V could not have kept the exasperation out of her voice if she had tried.
Sudden's lips quirked with the beginning of a smile. He looked at the end of his cigar, looked toward the bunk house, scraped off the cigar's ash collar on the porch rail, looked at Mary V.
"Well, he asked me how it got here to the ranch, and I told him with a wagon and team and so on. And he said, 'Mh-hum, I see.' Then he asked me who repaired it, and I told him that buttermilk-eyed aviator he'd had with him. He replied, 'I--see.' Then he asked me what the repairing had cost, and the fellow's wages or whatever he had got, and I told him, 'Dam-fi recollect, Johnny.' And he didn't say a word. Just strolled off as if he'd talked himself tired--which I guess maybe he had."
"Well, but dad, what do you suppose he's going to do? He--he's awfully queer since he was hurt. Do you suppose--?"
"Kitten," said her dad quietly, "when you're breaking a high-strung colt he sometimes sorta resents his schooling and sulks. Then you've just got to wait till he figures things out for himself a little. If you force him you're liable to spoil him and make him mean. Johnny's like that. He's just a high-strung human colt that life is breaking. I guess, kitten, we better not crowd him right now."
"Well, I don't see why he should act that way with me," Mary V complained, and thereby proved herself altogether human and feminine in her point of view.