Part 2

The tacit bargain between Long Jim and Rosie had never got itself into words; they hadn’t felt the need of them. He had pulled her out of hell. The strength of her allegiance to him couldn’t be increased by the mere saying of words, however sacred, or the giving of a ring. Marriage would have added nothing to her side of it. Nor, she had thought, to his. She wished now that she had it, but it had not occurred to her to wish it before. She had had something so much solider in poverty. Marriage might hold and it might not, but while he had been dependent upon her for his food and clothes, there had been no doubt.

She went back to that over and over that night, seeing the placid years in the little house as very beautiful through a mist of pain. She had a feeling that, pulling at the almost forgotten cadences of the song, she had brought the past down about her ears. She felt the old trapped fatalistic despair and sick rage, without the old vigor. Something began banking up inside of her, steadily, relentlessly. She was terribly afraid of it. It seemed to her that it was a great bubble of black blood in her brain, and that when it burst-- She tried to keep from thinking to ease the strain on it, but her thoughts streamed out swiftly from oubliettes in obscure corners of her mind.

They were hideous thoughts and really not hers at all. It seemed that some devil sent them to torture her. The unfairness of it gagged in her throat. She had fought her way out of filth and blackness to cleanness and the sun, and now, without volition, the old horror came on her again from within--clicked through her brain like yards and yards of cinema film. The current of her life had swept past its one clean tranquil place and was swirling along muddied and normal. The familiar ache was in her heart, and Rosie was herself again--Captain Mac, of Al’s Dance Hall. You didn’t get away from things like that.

Well, there were things that Captain Mac knew how to do that Rosie Briggs had forgotten. She had whipped a can along the street once with revolver bullets as a child whips a hoop to the admiration of every idle man in town, and ended the demonstration by shooting a stranger’s plug hat off his head without disturbing his hair. Her whirling thoughts showed her Jim’s old .44 in the left-hand end of the bottom drawer of the dresser.

She must wait, she told herself--and her heart gave a great bound--she must wait until she had them together! She laughed out with sudden raucous cruelty in the still cool night. Jim stirred in his sleep but didn’t waken. She raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him, while her thoughts raced and danced, piling themselves into the bubble.

And then it burst and left her weak with compassion, seeing them together in her mind’s eye; seeing them as clearly as the daylight that was climbing over Gray Dome Mountain. That fragile, empty, smart little thing and Long Jim Briggs! Gaunt, weathered, grizzled old Jim--and her! She’d no more be able to shoot than to enter into her dead mother’s womb and be born again.

Feeling as old as the granite hills that ramparted the cañon, and with something too of their plain ineluctable dignity, she arose and dressed herself and built the breakfast fire in the stove.

When Jim came out to her she got slowly to her feet, closed the damper and faced him.

“Jim,” she said, “that girl don’t want you. Take a good look at yourself in the mirror over there, and then think of her. She’ll throw you away like a sucked orange when the money’s gone.”

Long Jim Briggs stood up with his head in the rafters of the tiny room and stared like an idiot.

“I smelled her perfumery on your coat,” said Rosie shortly, and comprehension dawned slowly in his face.

“Holy jumping June bugs!” he said from somewhere down in his boots. “So that’s what you thought! Wait a minute. I was hidin’ it in the wood house. I wanted to surprize you.”

In a moment he returned with a package. With awkward swift movements he ripped off the wrapping paper and shook out the folds of a brilliant electric blue plush dress of a fashion fallen into forgotten desuetude ten years before.

He displayed it pridefully down the front of his long person, head a-cock and a twinkle in his eye.

“That’s all there was between us! Smell it!” The room reeked of orange blossoms. “She made it for me nights, to make some extra money. It’s the kind you kep’ a picture of from a fashion book. I got it off your dresser. Do you--do you like it, Rosie?”

She tried to speak, but could only nod her head. He patted her shoulder awkwardly. The dress swam before her eyes like a pane of blue glass in the rain.

“It’s goin’ to be the swellest weddin’,” he said huskily, “that little old Gray Dome ever seen. An’ then--” he cleared his throat with a rumble like summer thunder--“we’re goin’ to Denver an’ buy a house on Capitol Hill an’ the finest auto in town, an’ a nigger to run it an’ drive around an’ tell ’em all to go to hell!”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the July 1, 1928 issue of Adventure magazine.]