The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson

Edition and rights: Complete original English text from Project Gutenberg ebook #1725. This edition is identified as public domain in the USA; the original author died in 1910, satisfying the ordinary Pakistan copyright term. This is the original work, not an AI retelling.

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THE INDIAN SUMMER OF DRY VALLEY JOHNSON


Dry Valley Johnson shook the bottle. You have to shake the bottle
before using; for sulphur will not dissolve. Then Dry Valley saturated
a small sponge with the liquid and rubbed it carefully into the roots
of his hair. Besides sulphur there was sugar of lead in it and tincture
of nux vomica and bay rum. Dry Valley found the recipe in a Sunday
newspaper. You must next be told why a strong man came to fall a victim
to a Beauty Hint.

Dry Valley had been a sheepman. His real name was Hector, but he had
been rechristened after his range to distinguish him from “Elm Creek”
Johnson, who ran sheep further down the Frio.

Many years of living face to face with sheep on their own terms wearied
Dry Valley Johnson. So, he sold his ranch for eighteen thousand dollars
and moved to Santa Rosa to live a life of gentlemanly ease. Being a
silent and melancholy person of thirty-five—or perhaps thirty-eight—he
soon became that cursed and earth-cumbering thing—an elderlyish
bachelor with a hobby. Some one gave him his first strawberry to eat,
and he was done for.

Dry Valley bought a four-room cottage in the village, and a library on
strawberry culture. Behind the cottage was a garden of which he made a
strawberry patch. In his old grey woolen shirt, his brown duck
trousers, and high-heeled boots he sprawled all day on a canvas cot
under a live-oak tree at his back door studying the history of the
seductive, scarlet berry.

The school teacher, Miss De Witt, spoke of him as “a fine, presentable
man, for all his middle age.” But, the focus of Dry Valley’s eyes
embraced no women. They were merely beings who flew skirts as a signal
for him to lift awkwardly his heavy, round-crowned, broad-brimmed felt
Stetson whenever he met them, and then hurry past to get back to his
beloved berries.

And all this recitative by the chorus is only to bring us to the point
where you may be told why Dry Valley shook up the insoluble sulphur in
the bottle. So long-drawn and inconsequential a thing is history—the
anamorphous shadow of a milestone reaching down the road between us and
the setting sun.

When his strawberries were beginning to ripen Dry Valley bought the
heaviest buggy whip in the Santa Rosa store. He sat for many hours
under the live oak tree plaiting and weaving in an extension to its
lash. When it was done he could snip a leaf from a bush twenty feet
away with the cracker. For the bright, predatory eyes of Santa Rosa
youth were watching the ripening berries, and Dry Valley was arming
himself against their expected raids. No greater care had he taken of
his tender lambs during his ranching days than he did of his cherished
fruit, warding it from the hungry wolves that whistled and howled and
shot their marbles and peered through the fence that surrounded his
property.

In the house next to Dry Valley’s lived a widow with a pack of children
that gave the husbandman frequent anxious misgivings. In the woman
there was a strain of the Spanish. She had wedded one of the name of
O’Brien. Dry Valley was a connoisseur in cross strains; and he foresaw
trouble in the offspring of this union.

Between the two homesteads ran a crazy picket fence overgrown with
morning glory and wild gourd vines. Often he could see little heads
with mops of black hair and flashing dark eyes dodging in and out
between the pickets, keeping tabs on the reddening berries.

Late one afternoon Dry Valley went to the post office. When he came
back, like Mother Hubbard he found the deuce to pay. The descendants of
Iberian bandits and Hibernian cattle raiders had swooped down upon his
strawberry patch. To the outraged vision of Dry Valley there seemed to
be a sheep corral full of them; perhaps they numbered five or six.
Between the rows of green plants they were stooped, hopping about like
toads, gobbling silently and voraciously his finest fruit.

Dry Valley slipped into the house, got his whip, and charged the
marauders. The lash curled about the legs of the nearest—a greedy
ten-year-old—before they knew they were discovered. His screech gave
warning; and the flock scampered for the fence like a drove of
_javelis_ flushed in the chaparral. Dry Valley’s whip drew a toll of
two more elfin shrieks before they dived through the vine-clad fence
and disappeared.

Dry Valley, less fleet, followed them nearly to the pickets. Checking
his useless pursuit, he rounded a bush, dropped his whip and stood,
voiceless, motionless, the capacity of his powers consumed by the act
of breathing and preserving the perpendicular.

Behind the bush stood Panchita O’Brien, scorning to fly. She was
nineteen, the oldest of the raiders. Her night-black hair was gathered
back in a wild mass and tied with a scarlet ribbon. She stood, with
reluctant feet, yet nearer the brook than to the river; for childhood
had environed and detained her.

She looked at Dry Valley Johnson for a moment with magnificent
insolence, and before his eyes slowly crunched a luscious berry between
her white teeth. Then she turned and walked slowly to the fence with a
swaying, conscious motion, such as a duchess might make use of in
leading a promenade. There she turned again and grilled Dry Valley
Johnson once more in the dark flame of her audacious eyes, laughed a
trifle school-girlishly, and twisted herself with pantherish quickness
between the pickets to the O’Brien side of the wild gourd vine.

Dry Valley picked up his whip and went into his house. He stumbled as
he went up the two wooden steps. The old Mexican woman who cooked his
meals and swept his house called him to supper as he went through the
rooms. Dry Valley went on, stumbled down the front steps, out the gate
and down the road into a mesquite thicket at the edge of town. He sat
down in the grass and laboriously plucked the spines from a prickly
pear, one by one. This was his attitude of thought, acquired in the
days when his problems were only those of wind and wool and water.

A thing had happened to the man—a thing that, if you are eligible, you
must pray may pass you by. He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer
of the Soul.

Dry Valley had had no youth. Even his childhood had been one of dignity
and seriousness. At six he had viewed the frivolous gambols of the
lambs on his father’s ranch with silent disapproval. His life as a
young man had been wasted. The divine fires and impulses, the glorious
exaltations and despairs, the glow and enchantment of youth had passed
above his head. Never a thrill of Romeo had he known; he was but a
melancholy Jaques of the forest with a ruder philosophy, lacking the
bitter-sweet flavour of experience that tempered the veteran years of
the rugged ranger of Arden. And now in his sere and yellow leaf one
scornful look from the eyes of Panchita O’Brien had flooded the
autumnal landscape with a tardy and delusive summer heat.

But a sheepman is a hardy animal. Dry Valley Johnson had weathered too
many northers to turn his back on a late summer, spiritual or real.
Old? He would show them.

By the next mail went an order to San Antonio for an outfit of the
latest clothes, colours and styles and prices no object. The next day
went the recipe for the hair restorer clipped from a newspaper; for Dry
Valley’s sunburned auburn hair was beginning to turn silvery above his
ears.

Dry Valley kept indoors closely for a week except for frequent sallies
after youthful strawberry snatchers. Then, a few days later, he
suddenly emerged brilliantly radiant in the hectic glow of his belated
midsummer madness.

A jay-bird-blue tennis suit covered him outwardly, almost as far as his
wrists and ankles. His shirt was ox-blood; his collar winged and tall;
his necktie a floating oriflamme; his shoes a venomous bright tan,
pointed and shaped on penitential lasts. A little flat straw hat with a
striped band desecrated his weather-beaten head. Lemon-coloured kid
gloves protected his oak-tough hands from the benignant May sunshine.
This sad and optic-smiting creature teetered out of its den, smiling
foolishly and smoothing its gloves for men and angels to see. To such a
pass had Dry Valley Johnson been brought by Cupid, who always shoots
game that is out of season with an arrow from the quiver of Momus.
Reconstructing mythology, he had risen, a prismatic macaw, from the
ashes of the grey-brown phoenix that had folded its tired wings to
roost under the trees of Santa Rosa.

Dry Valley paused in the street to allow Santa Rosans within sight of
him to be stunned; and then deliberately and slowly, as his shoes
required, entered Mrs. O’Brien’s gate.

Not until the eleven months’ drought did Santa Rosa cease talking about
Dry Valley Johnson’s courtship of Panchita O’Brien. It was an
unclassifiable procedure; something like a combination of cake-walking,
deaf-and-dumb oratory, postage stamp flirtation and parlour charades.
It lasted two weeks and then came to a sudden end.

Of course Mrs. O’Brien favoured the match as soon as Dry Valley’s
intentions were disclosed. Being the mother of a woman child, and
therefore a charter member of the Ancient Order of the Rat-trap, she
joyfully decked out Panchita for the sacrifice. The girl was
temporarily dazzled by having her dresses lengthened and her hair piled
up on her head, and came near forgetting that she was only a slice of
cheese. It was nice, too, to have as good a match as Mr. Johnson paying
you attentions and to see the other girls fluttering the curtains at
their windows to see you go by with him.

Dry Valley bought a buggy with yellow wheels and a fine trotter in San
Antonio. Every day he drove out with Panchita. He was never seen to
speak to her when they were walking or driving. The consciousness of
his clothes kept his mind busy; the knowledge that he could say nothing
of interest kept him dumb; the feeling that Panchita was there kept him
happy.

He took her to parties and dances, and to church. He tried—oh, no man
ever tried so hard to be young as Dry Valley did. He could not dance;
but he invented a smile which he wore on these joyous occasions, a
smile that, in him, was as great a concession to mirth and gaiety as
turning hand-springs would be in another. He began to seek the company
of the young men in the town—even of the boys. They accepted him as a
decided damper, for his attempts at sportiveness were so forced that
they might as well have essayed their games in a cathedral. Neither he
nor any other could estimate what progress he had made with Panchita.

The end came suddenly in one day, as often disappears the false
afterglow before a November sky and wind.

Dry Valley was to call for the girl one afternoon at six for a walk. An
afternoon walk in Santa Rosa was a feature of social life that called
for the pink of one’s wardrobe. So Dry Valley began gorgeously to array
himself; and so early that he finished early, and went over to the
O’Brien cottage. As he neared the porch on the crooked walk from the
gate he heard sounds of revelry within. He stopped and looked through
the honeysuckle vines in the open door.

Panchita was amusing her younger brothers and sisters. She wore a man’s
clothes—no doubt those of the late Mr. O’Brien. On her head was the
smallest brother’s straw hat decorated with an ink-striped paper band.
On her hands were flapping yellow cloth gloves, roughly cut out and
sewn for the masquerade. The same material covered her shoes, giving
them the semblance of tan leather. High collar and flowing necktie were
not omitted.

Panchita was an actress. Dry Valley saw his affectedly youthful gait,
his limp where the right shoe hurt him, his forced smile, his awkward
simulation of a gallant air, all reproduced with startling fidelity.
For the first time a mirror had been held up to him. The corroboration
of one of the youngsters calling, “Mamma, come and see Pancha do like
Mr. Johnson,” was not needed.

As softly as the caricatured tans would permit, Dry Valley tiptoed back
to the gate and home again.

Twenty minutes after the time appointed for the walk Panchita tripped
demurely out of her gate in a thin, trim white lawn and sailor hat. She
strolled up the sidewalk and slowed her steps at Dry Valley’s gate, her
manner expressing wonder at his unusual delinquency.

Then out of his door and down the walk strode—not the polychromatic
victim of a lost summertime, but the sheepman, rehabilitated. He wore
his old grey woolen shirt, open at the throat, his brown duck trousers
stuffed into his run-over boots, and his white felt sombrero on the
back of his head. Twenty years or fifty he might look; Dry Valley cared
not. His light blue eyes met Panchita’s dark ones with a cold flash in
them. He came as far as the gate. He pointed with his long arm to her
house.

“Go home,” said Dry Valley. “Go home to your mother. I wonder lightnin’
don’t strike a fool like me. Go home and play in the sand. What
business have you got cavortin’ around with grown men? I reckon I was
locoed to be makin’ a he poll-parrot out of myself for a kid like you.
Go home and don’t let me see you no more. Why I done it, will somebody
tell me? Go home, and let me try and forget it.”

Panchita obeyed and walked slowly toward her home, saying nothing. For
some distance she kept her head turned and her large eyes fixed
intrepidly upon Dry Valley’s. At her gate she stood for a moment
looking back at him, then ran suddenly and swiftly into the house.

Old Antonia was building a fire in the kitchen stove. Dry Valley
stopped at the door and laughed harshly.

“I’m a pretty looking old rhinoceros to be gettin’ stuck on a kid,
ain’t I, ’Tonia?” said he.

“Not verree good thing,” agreed Antonia, sagely, “for too much old man
to likee _muchacha_.”

“You bet it ain’t,” said Dry Valley, grimly. “It’s dum foolishness;
and, besides, it hurts.”

He brought at one armful the regalia of his aberration—the blue tennis
suit, shoes, hat, gloves and all, and threw them in a pile at Antonia’s
feet.

“Give them to your old man,” said he, “to hunt antelope in.”

Just as the first star presided palely over the twilight Dry Valley got
his biggest strawberry book and sat on the back steps to catch the last
of the reading light. He thought he saw the figure of someone in his
strawberry patch. He laid aside the book, got his whip and hurried
forth to see.

It was Panchita. She had slipped through the picket fence and was
half-way across the patch. She stopped when she saw him and looked at
him without wavering.

A sudden rage—a humiliating flush of unreasoning wrath—came over Dry
Valley. For this child he had made himself a motley to the view. He had
tried to bribe Time to turn backward for himself; he had—been made a
fool of. At last he had seen his folly. There was a gulf between him
and youth over which he could not build a bridge even with yellow
gloves to protect his hands. And the sight of his torment coming to
pester him with her elfin pranks—coming to plunder his strawberry vines
like a mischievous schoolboy—roused all his anger.

“I told you to keep away from here,” said Dry Valley. “Go back to your
home.”

Panchita moved slowly toward him.

Dry Valley cracked his whip.

“Go back home,” said Dry Valley, savagely, “and play theatricals some
more. You’d make a fine man. You’ve made a fine one of me.”

She came a step nearer, silent, and with that strange, defiant, steady
shine in her eyes that had always puzzled him. Now it stirred his
wrath.

His whiplash whistled through the air. He saw a red streak suddenly
come out through her white dress above her knee where it had struck.

Without flinching and with the same unchanging dark glow in her eyes,
Panchita came steadily toward him through the strawberry vines. Dry
Valley’s trembling hand released his whip handle. When within a yard of
him Panchita stretched out her arms.

“God, kid!” stammered Dry Valley, “do you mean—?”

But the seasons are versatile; and it may have been Springtime, after
all, instead of Indian Summer, that struck Dry Valley Johnson.


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