Ronicky Doone's Reward (1922) by Max Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

got one of these tissue-paper skins with color in her cheeks like it was slapped on with a paint brush one of them skins that fade and wrinkle up by the time a girl's thirty, in this here climate. No, sir. Her skin is just sort of creamy, with a look like it had been rubbed and sponged till it was fresh and clear as crystal. D'you foller me, son?"
    He had changed his tone wonderfully in speaking of the girl. He stood with his head thrown back, so that the immense column of this throat was exposed. But out of that great throat came a voice soft and deep and tremulous with an edging of emotion that cut to Ronicky's quick.
    "Oh, lad," said the big man, "a girl like her hadn't ought to belong to no one man. Why, she should be private property. She'd ought to be taken around where everybody could see her and be happy looking at her. A sight of her is better than good news. And a picture of her smiling, or the hearing of her laugh, is like striking gold in the desert."
    He raised his head again and scowled at Ronicky Doone.
    "Why ain't you standing on tiptoe, champing and chawing the bit to get out and see her, you young rapscallion?" he roared.
    "I can get along tolerable well without seeing her," admitted Ronicky Doone.
    "Bah!" said Al Jenkins. "You maybe think that you're in love with some other girl, but you ain't! It ain't no ways possible for a man to be really in love except with a woman like she is, or her mother was before her! Why, I got more reasons for hating Bennett and the Bennett stock than a spider has got for hating a wasp. But I don't dare get within range of that girl. All my hate would wither up. I'd soften up like a sponge. I'd begin to grin and gape at her. And I'd be lost, and she could do what she wanted with me. Inside of a minute I'd be signing over half of my land to that skunk of a father of hers. That's the sort of a girl she is!" He concluded with another explosion of sound.
    "And you think that you'd be safe if you went out to shoot Blondy and met her instead? Bah! She'd make a fool of you. You'd crawl around on your hands and knees begging for a chance to work for her and fight for her!"
    "How does it come," suggested Ronicky, "that she doesn't have the same effect on the other men around these parts? Why doesn't she get a whole army of 'em for her father?"
    "I'll tell you why: folks are blind to what they grow up next to. I was born by the sea. And I never seen nothing in it. I come west and went plumb batty with a case of desert fever, and here I stick. And do you hear them that are born on the desert talking a lot about it? No, you don't. They're too used to it. When you take 'em away from it after a while, they may begin to mourn for it. But it's the things you ain't never lacked that you can't appreciate. Same way with the young folks around here and that flower of a girl, Elsie Bennett. They've growed up in the same schools with her. They've seen her playing dolls with other little girls and putting on long skirts to play grownups. They've seen her get into the feet-hands-and-elbows stage, when all girls look plumb ugly. They've seen all that, and no wonder they don't know what she is! One or two have rubbed their eyes and waked up and found out the truth and gone batty about her for a while, but she gives them the cold shoulder when they come talking marriage, and they wander off some other place to keep from busting their hearts. That's why they don't know what she is."
    Ronicky had listened with the most profound interest, not so much caught by the warnings and the pictures of Jenkins, but intrigued by the revelation of the old man's character.
    "But why are you so set on getting me?" he asked at length.
    "I'll tell you why. Because things ain't now the way they used to be. I don't mean to speak light of you, Doone, after all that I've heard about you. But I just want you to know that twenty years ago I wouldn't have given a shake which side you joined, because with my money and my men I