The Desert Moon mystery — Story, Setting & Ideas

s own business, and so forth.

It would have made a milder man than Sam Stanley fighting mad. Sam went around all that day, swearing to me that he was through; that he had made his last offer of help to the Canneziano family, had sent his last contribution. I know for certain, though, that he sent five hundred dollars to Gabrielle, after that, in answer to a letter she wrote to him. But, if Sam was soft with the women, he was not soft with Canneziano. He had showed up here, beaming and broke, about three years ago. He had left, suddenly, after having seen Sam and no one else, less beaming but quite as broke as he had been when he had come. I thought, maybe, Sam was forgetting that side of the family, and that this might be a good time to remind him.

“Is Canneziano planning to come on later, too, and rest?” I asked.

“Just at present he is in San Quentin, serving a three years’ term. Danielle didn’t say for what deviltry. His term’s up this summer. That is another reason the girls want to come here. Somewhere safe from his persecutions, I think the letter said. Poor little girls,” Sam went on, “I reckon we haven’t any idea of what they’ve been through, all these years.”

“I reckon not,” I agreed. “But they aren’t little girls any more. Seems queer to me, with all the beauty their father was bragging about, that neither of them has married. Twenty-four is getting along.”

“I’ll bet,” Sam answered, “it is because they have never had any decent opportunities. You know how pretty they were as little girls, and how good——”

“Danielle was good enough,” I said. “Gabrielle was a holy terror.”

Sam let that pass. “Considering,” he continued, “the life that they’ve had to lead, and all, I think it speaks pretty well for them that they have come through straight and clean.”

Instead of asking him how he knew that, I said, “You’d be willing, then, to have John marry one of them?”

John, Sam’s adopted son, was the apple of Sam’s eye. He would have the ranch, and Sam’s fortune, other dependents provided for, when Sam died. Whether or not the girl he married would be contented to live on the ranch, and help John carry it on and keep up its traditions, making it one of the proudest spots in Nevada, was a mighty important thing to Sam.

He waited so long before answering my question that I was sure I had hit the nail on the head.

“John,” he finally said, “is old enough to take care of himself.”

With that he turned and went out of my kitchen, not giving me a chance to say that, though I had lived through fifty-six years, I had never yet seen a man at the age he had just mentioned. I did not care. I felt too vimless for even a spat with Sam. I knew that if these Canneziano girls came to the Desert Moon, they would bring trouble with them. I was right. A merciful Providence be thanked that, for a time at least, the knowledge of how terribly right I was, was spared me.

I am not an admirer of men. Looking at most any man, I find myself thinking what a pity it was he had to grow up, since as a little, helpless child he would have made a complete success.

Sam Stanley is different. There is some of the child left in Sam, just as there is, I think, in any good man or woman—a little seasoning of simplicity, really, is all it amounts to—but there is a quality about Sam that makes a person feel that he set out, early in life, to follow the recipe for being a man, and that he has made a thorough job of it. Physically, alone, Sam would make about three of most men, with plenty left over for gravy. But it is not that. It is the something that makes him stroll up, unarmed, to a cowpuncher who is bragging wild with moonshine and clinking with firearms, and say, in that drawling, gentle voice of his, “What’s the trouble here, son?” And the something that makes that cowpuncher get polite first, and evaporate immediately after. And Sam whiteheaded, now, at that.