He was distinctly sobered, but he laughed. “It is like a miracle play.
Death we have, speaking to us from the grave. But Good Deeds, where art
thou? And Kindred? and Joy? and Household Goods? and Friendship? and all
the goodly company?”
But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her
face. She laid her trembling hand on his arm.
“Oh, Chris, let us stop. I am sorry we began it. Let us leave the
quiet dead to their rest. It is wrong. It must be wrong. I confess I
am affected by it. I cannot help it. As my body is trembling, so is
my soul. This speech of the grave, this dead man reaching out from the
mould of a generation to protect me from you. There is reason in it.
There is the living mystery that prevents you from marrying me. Were my
father alive, he would protect me from you. Dead, he still strives to
protect me. His hands, his ghostly hands, are against your life!”
“Do be calm,” Chris said soothingly. “Listen to me. It is all a lark. We
are playing with the subjective forces of our own being, with phenomena
which science has not yet explained, that is all. Psychology is so young
a science. The subconscious mind has just been discovered, one might
say. It is all mystery as yet; the laws of it are yet to be formulated.
This is simply unexplained phenomena. But that is no reason that we
should immediately account for it by labelling it spiritism. As yet we
do not know, that is all. As for Planchette—”
He abruptly ceased, for at that moment, to enforce his remark, he had
placed his hand on Planchette, and at that moment his hand had been
seized, as by a paroxysm, and sent dashing, willy-nilly, across the
paper, writing as the hand of an angry person would write.
“No, I don’t care for any more of it,” Lute said, when the message was
completed. “It is like witnessing a fight between you and my father in
the flesh. There is the savor in it of struggle and blows.”
She pointed out a sentence that read: “You cannot escape me nor the just
punishment that is yours!”
“Perhaps I visualize too vividly for my own comfort, for I can see his
hands at your throat. I know that he is, as you say, dead and dust, but
for all that, I can see him as a man that is alive and walks the earth;
I see the anger in his face, the anger and the vengeance, and I see it
all directed against you.”
She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.
“We won’t bother with it any more,” Chris said. “I didn’t think it would
affect you so strongly. But it’s all subjective, I’m sure, with possibly
a bit of suggestion thrown in—that and nothing more. And the whole
strain of our situation has made conditions unusually favorable for
striking phenomena.”
“And about our situation,” Lute said, as they went slowly up the path
they had run down. “What we are to do, I don’t know. Are we to go on, as
we have gone on? What is best? Have you thought of anything?”
He debated for a few steps. “I have thought of telling your uncle and
aunt.”
“What you couldn’t tell me?” she asked quickly.
“No,” he answered slowly; “but just as much as I have told you. I have
no right to tell them more than I have told you.”
This time it was she that debated. “No, don’t tell them,” she said
finally. “They wouldn’t understand. I don’t understand, for that matter,
but I have faith in you, and in the nature of things they are not
capable of this same implicit faith. You raise up before me a mystery
that prevents our marriage, and I believe you; but they could not
believe you without doubts arising as to the wrong and ill-nature of the
mystery. Besides, it would but make their anxieties greater.”
“I should go away, I know I should go away,” he said, half under his
breath. “And I can. I am no weakling. Because I have failed to remain
away once, is no reason that I shall fail again.”
She caught her breath with a quick gasp. “It is like a bereavement to
hear you speak of going away and remaining away. I should never see you
again. It is too terrible. And do not reproach yourself for weakness.
It is I who am to blame. It is I who prevented you from remaining away
before, I know. I wanted you so. I want you so.
“There is nothing to be done, Chris, nothing to be done but to go on
with it and let it work itself out somehow. That is one thing we are
sure of: it will work out somehow.”
“But it would be easier if I went away,” he suggested.
“I am happier when you are here.”
“The cruelty of circumstance,” he muttered savagely.
“Go or stay—that will be part of the working out. But I do not want you
to go, Chris; you know that. And now no more about it. Talk cannot mend
it. Let us never mention it again—unless ... unless some time, some
wonderful, happy time, you can come to me and say: ‘Lute, all is well
with me. The mystery no longer binds me. I am free.’ Until that time let
us bury it, along with Planchette and all the rest, and make the most of
the little that is given us.
“And now, to show you how prepared I am to make the most of that little,
I am even ready to go with you this afternoon to see the horse—though
I wish you wouldn’t ride any more ... for a few days, anyway, or for a
week. What did you say was his name?”
“Comanche,” he answered. “I know you will like him.”
* * *
Chris lay on his back, his head propped by the bare jutting wall of
stone, his gaze attentively directed across the canyon to the opposing
tree-covered slope. There was a sound of crashing through underbrush,
the ringing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and an occasional and mossy
descent of a dislodged boulder that bounded from the hill and fetched
up with a final splash in the torrent that rushed over a wild chaos of
rocks beneath him. Now and again he caught glimpses, framed in green
foliage, of the golden brown of Lute’s corduroy riding-habit and of the
bay horse that moved beneath her.
She rode out into an open space where a loose earth-slide denied
lodgement to trees and grass. She halted the horse at the brink of the
slide and glanced down it with a measuring eye. Forty feet beneath,
the slide terminated in a small, firm-surfaced terrace, the banked
accumulation of fallen earth and gravel.
“It’s a good test,” she called across the canyon. “I’m going to put him
down it.”
The animal gingerly launched himself on the treacherous footing,
irregularly losing and gaining his hind feet, keeping his fore
legs stiff, and steadily and calmly, without panic or nervousness,
extricating the fore feet as fast as they sank too deep into the sliding
earth that surged along in a wave before him. When the firm footing
at the bottom was reached, he strode out on the little terrace with a
quickness and springiness of gait and with glintings of muscular fires
that gave the lie to the calm deliberation of his movements on the
slide.
“Bravo!” Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.
“The wisest-footed, clearest-headed horse I ever saw,” Lute called back,
as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of
rubble and into the trees again.
Chris followed her by the sound of her progress, and by occasional
glimpses where the foliage was more open, as she zigzagged down the
steep and trailless descent. She emerged below him at the rugged rim
of the torrent, dropped the horse down a three-foot wall, and halted to
study the crossing.
Four feet out in the stream, a narrow ledge thrust above the surface of
the water. Beyond the ledge boiled an angry pool. But to the left, from
the ledge, and several feet lower, was a tiny bed of gravel. A giant
boulder prevented direct access to the gravel bed. The only way to gain
it was by first leaping to the ledge of rock. She studied it carefully,
and the tightening of her bridle-arm advertised that she had made up her
mind.
Chris, in his anxiety, had sat up to observe more closely what she
meditated.
“Don’t tackle it,” he called.
“I have faith in Comanche,” she called in return.
“He can’t make that side-jump to the gravel,” Chris warned. “He’ll
never keep his legs. He’ll topple over into the pool. Not one horse in a
thousand could do that stunt.”
“And Comanche is that very horse,” she answered. “Watch him.”
She gave the animal his head, and he leaped cleanly and accurately to
the ledge, striking with feet close together on the narrow space. On
the instant he struck, Lute lightly touched his neck with the rein,
impelling him to the left; and in that instant, tottering on the
insecure footing, with front feet slipping over into the pool beyond,
he lifted on his hind legs, with a half turn, sprang to the left, and
dropped squarely down to the tiny gravel bed. An easy jump brought him
across the stream, and Lute angled him up the bank and halted before her
lover.
“Well?” she asked.
“I am all tense,” Chris answered. “I was holding my breath.”
“Buy him, by all means,” Lute said, dismounting. “He is a bargain. I
could dare anything on him. I never in my life had such confidence in a
horse’s feet.”
“His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it
is impossible to get him down.”
“Buy him, buy him at once,” she counselled, “before the man changes his
mind. If you don’t, I shall. Oh, such feet! I feel such confidence in
them that when I am on him I don’t consider he has feet at all. And he’s
quick as a cat, and instantly obedient. Bridle-wise is no name for it!
You could guide him with silken threads. Oh, I know I’m enthusiastic,
but if you don’t buy him, Chris. I shall. Remember, I’ve second
refusal.”
Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared
the two horses.
“Of course he doesn’t match Dolly the way Ban did,” she concluded
regretfully; “but his coat is splendid just the same. And think of the
horse that is under the coat!”
Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to
the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying:
“We won’t go straight back to camp.”
“You forget dinner,” he warned.
“But I remember Comanche,” she retorted. “We’ll ride directly over to
the ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep.”
“But the cook won’t,” Chris laughed. “She’s already threatened to leave,
what of our late-comings.”
“Even so,” was the answer. “Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook,
but at any rate we shall have got Comanche.”
They turned the horses in the other direction, and took the climb of the
Nun Canyon road that led over the divide and down into the Napa Valley.
But the climb was hard, the going was slow. Sometimes they topped the
bed of the torrent by hundreds of feet, and again they dipped down and
crossed and recrossed it twenty times in twice as many rods. They rode
through the deep shade of clean-bunked maples and towering redwoods, to
emerge on open stretches of mountain shoulder where the earth lay dry
and cracked under the sun.
On one such shoulder they emerged, where the road stretched level before
them, for a quarter of a mile. On one side rose the huge bulk of the
mountain. On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in
impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom. It was
an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts
of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun’s broader blazes. The
sound of rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum
of mountain bees.
The horses broke into an easy lope. Chris rode on the outside, looking
down into the great depths and pleasuring with his eyes in what he
saw. Dissociating itself from the murmur of the bees, a murmur arose of
falling water. It grew louder with every stride of the horses.
“Look!” he cried.
Lute leaned well out from her horse to see. Beneath them the water slid
foaming down a smooth-faced rock to the lip, whence it leaped clear—a
pulsating ribbon of white, a-breath with movement, ever falling and ever
remaining, changing its substance but never its form, an aerial waterway
as immaterial as gauze and as permanent as the hills, that spanned space
and the free air from the lip of the rock to the tops of the trees far
below, into whose green screen it disappeared to fall into a secret
pool.
They had flashed past. The descending water became a distant murmur that
merged again into the murmur of the bees and ceased. Swayed by a common
impulse, they looked at each other.
“Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive ... and to have you here by my side!”
He answered her by the warm light in his eyes.
All things tended to key them to an exquisite pitch—the movement of
their bodies, at one with the moving bodies of the animals beneath them;
the gently stimulated blood caressing the flesh through and through with
the soft vigors of health; the warm air fanning their faces, flowing
over the skin with balmy and tonic touch, permeating them and bathing
them, subtly, with faint, sensuous delight; and the beauty of the world,
more subtly still, flowing upon them and bathing them in the delight
that is of the spirit and is personal and holy, that is inexpressible
yet communicable by the flash of an eye and the dissolving of the veils
of the soul.
So looked they at each other, the horses bounding beneath them, the
spring of the world and the spring of their youth astir in their blood,
the secret of being trembling in their eyes to the brink of disclosure,
as if about to dispel, with one magic word, all the irks and riddles of
existence.
The road curved before them, so that the upper reaches of the canyon
could be seen, the distant bed of it towering high above their heads.
They were rounding the curve, leaning toward the inside, gazing before
them at the swift-growing picture. There was no sound of warning. She
heard nothing, but even before the horse went down she experienced
the feeling that the unison of the two leaping animals was broken. She
turned her head, and so quickly that she saw Comanche fall. It was not a
stumble nor a trip. He fell as though, abruptly, in midleap, he had died
or been struck a stunning blow.
And in that moment she remembered Planchette; it seared her brain as
a lightning-flash of all-embracing memory. Her horse was back on its
haunches, the weight of her body on the reins; but her head was turned
and her eyes were on the falling Comanche. He struck the road-bed
squarely, with his legs loose and lifeless beneath him.
It all occurred in one of those age-long seconds that embrace an
eternity of happening. There was a slight but perceptible rebound from
the impact of Comanche’s body with the earth. The violence with which
he struck forced the air from his great lungs in an audible groan. His
momentum swept him onward and over the edge. The weight of the rider on
his neck turned him over head first as he pitched to the fall.
She was off her horse, she knew not how, and to the edge. Her lover was
out of the saddle and clear of Comanche, though held to the animal by
his right foot, which was caught in the stirrup. The slope was too steep
for them to come to a stop. Earth and small stones, dislodged by their
struggles, were rolling down with them and before them in a miniature
avalanche. She stood very quietly, holding one hand against her heart
and gazing down. But while she saw the real happening, in her eyes was
also the vision of her father dealing the spectral blow that had smashed
Comanche down in mid-leap and sent horse and rider hurtling over the
edge.
Beneath horse and man the steep terminated in an up-and-down wall, from
the base of which, in turn, a second slope ran down to a second wall.
A third slope terminated in a final wall that based itself on the
canyon-bed four hundred feet beneath the point where the girl stood and
watched. She could see Chris vainly kicking his leg to free the foot
from the trap of the stirrup. Comanche fetched up hard against an
outputting point of rock. For a fraction of a second his fall was
stopped, and in the slight interval the man managed to grip hold of a
young shoot of manzanita. Lute saw him complete the grip with his other
hand. Then Comanche’s fall began again. She saw the stirrup-strap draw
taut, then her lover’s body and arms. The manzanita shoot yielded its
roots, and horse and man plunged over the edge and out of sight.
They came into view on the next slope, together and rolling over and
over, with sometimes the man under and sometimes the horse. Chris no
longer struggled, and together they dashed over to the third slope. Near
the edge of the final wall, Comanche lodged on a buttock of stone. He
lay quietly, and near him, still attached to him by the stirrup, face
downward, lay his rider.
“If only he will lie quietly,” Lute breathed aloud, her mind at work on
the means of rescue.
But she saw Comanche begin to struggle again, and clear on her vision,
it seemed, was the spectral arm of her father clutching the reins and
dragging the animal over. Comanche floundered across the hummock, the
inert body following, and together, horse and man, they plunged from
sight. They did not appear again. They had fetched bottom.
Lute looked about her. She stood alone on the world. Her lover was gone.
There was naught to show of his existence, save the marks of Comanche’s
hoofs on the road and of his body where it had slid over the brink.
“Chris!” she called once, and twice; but she called hopelessly.
Out of the depths, on the windless air, arose only the murmur of bees
and of running water.
“Chris!” she called yet a third time, and sank slowly down in the dust
of the road.
She felt the touch of Dolly’s muzzle on her arm, and she leaned her head
against the mare’s neck and waited. She knew not why she waited, nor for
what, only there seemed nothing else but waiting left for her to do.