Carter looked his impatience, yet yielded another point to the other's
distress. "If Mrs. Carter wished to see me, I allow she'd send."
"Then she never will! she never will!" Bender cried, hitting the crux of
their problem. "For she's jes' as proud as you."
With that he plunged into the environing darkness, leaving Carter still
at the fire. From its glow his face presently raised to the valley's
rim, dim and ghostly under a new moon, ridged with shadowy trees. It
was only six miles to Glaves's place, a hop, skip, and jump in that
country of distances. For some minutes he stood like a stag on gaze;
then, with a slow shake of the head, he followed Bender.
"An' he ain't coming back till winter," the small boy informed Helen.
"He'll be that busy with his railroading."
After two days of embittered brooding, Helen had come to consider
herself as being in the self-same mood that had ruled her the January
morning when Mrs. Leslie broke in on her months of loneliness. But this
startling news explained certain contradictions in her psychology--for
instance, her startings and flushings whenever her north window had
shown a moving dot on the valley trail these last two days. Moreover,
her pallor was hardly consistent with the assertion, thrice repeated
within the hour, that even if he did come she would never, never,
_never_ forgive him _now_! Not that she conceded said contradictions.
On the contrary, she put up a gorgeous bluff with herself, affected
indifference, and--borrowed Jimmy's pony that evening and rode down to
the ford.
Bender had built a rough bridge to serve traffic till the drive should
clear the ford. Reining in at the nearer end, Helen looked down on the
pool, the famous pool wherein her betrothal had received baptism by
total immersion--at least she looked on the place where the pool had
been, for shallows and sand-bar were merged in one swirl of yellow
water. But the clay bank with its bordering willows was still there,
and shone ruddily under the westering sun just as on that memorable
evening. Here, on the straight reach, the logs floated under care of an
occasional patrol. A rough fellow in blue jeans and red jerkin gave her
a curious stare as he passed, whereafter there was no witness to her wet
eyes, her rain of tears, convulsive sobbing, the break-up of her
indifference--that is, none but her pony. Reaching curiously around,
the beast investigated the grief huddled upon his neck with soft muzzle,
rubbing and sniffing "cheer up," and she had just straightened to return
his mute sympathy when a voice broke in on the bitter and sweet of her
reverie.
"Well met, fair lady!"
Turning, startled, she came face to face with Molyneux. The heavy mud
of the bottoms had silenced his wheels, and now he sat smiling at the
sudden fires that dried up and hid her tears. "Not there yet," he
answered her question as to his return home. "Do you imagine I could go
by without calling? The school was closed, but a kid--a Flynn, by his
upper lip--told me that you had ridden this way; and as it was Friday
evening I judged you were going north to Leslie's, and so drove like
Jehu on the trail of Ahab. Better turn your horse loose and get in with
me. He'll go home all right. Why not?"
Again she shook her head. "Didn't Mr. Danvers write you--?"
Remembering that a letter would have crossed him on the Atlantic, she
stopped.
"What's the matter? No one dead? Worse?" He laughed in her serious
face when she had told. "Oh, well, that's not so bad. After all,
Leslie was an awful chump. If a man isn't strong enough to hold a
woman's love he shouldn't expect to keep her."
He was yet, of course, in ignorance of all that had transpired in his
absence--the house-party and the complete revulsion it had wrought in
Helen's feelings. He knew nothing of her shame, vivid remorse, passion
of thankfulness for her escape. To him she was still the woman,
desperate in her loneliness, who had challenged his love two short
months ago. Withal, what possessed him to afford that glimpse of his
old nature? It coupled him instantly in her mind with her late
unpleasant experience.
Not understanding her silence, he ran gayly on: "I can now testify to
the truth of the saying, 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder.' How is
it with you? Have I lost or gained?"
Laughing nervously, she answered: "Neither. We are still the same good
friends."
He shook his head, frowning. "Not enough. I want love--must, _will_
have it."
Any lingering misapprehension of the state of her feelings which she may
have entertained now instantly vanished. How she regretted the weakness
which entitled him to speak thus! She knew now. Never, under any
conditions, could she have married him, but, warned by dearly boughten
experience, she dared not so inform him. Frightened, she fenced and
parried, calling to her aid those shifts for men's fooling that
centuries of helplessness have bred in woman's bone.
"Well, well!" she laughed. "I thought you more gallant. I on
horseback, you in a buggy. Love at such long distance! I wouldn't have
believed it of you!"
It was a bad lead, drawing him on instead of away. "That is easily
remedied. Get in with me--or, I'll tie up to that poplar."
She checked his eagerness with a quick invention. "No, no! I was only
joking. No, I say! There's a man, a river-driver, just behind that
bluff." How she wished there were! Praying that some one might come
and so afford her safe escape, she switched the conversation to his
journey, and when that subject wore out enthused over the sunset. How
beautiful was the sky--the shadows that fell like a pall over the
bottoms--the lights slow crawling up the headlands!
Preferring her delicate coloring to the blushes of the west, he feasted
on her profile, delicately outlined against a golden cloud, until she
turned. Then he brought her back to the point. "Well--have you
forgotten?"
"What?" She knew too well, but the question killed a moment.
"The answer you promised me?"
She would dearly have loved to give it, to cry aloud: "I love! I love!
I love--him, not you!" Ay, she would have flaunted it in all the proud
cruelty of love--had she dared. Instead, she answered: "You forget! I
am a married woman."
"No, I don't," he urged. "That is easily settled. Three months'
residence across the line, in Dakota, and you are free of him."
"But not of myself."
"What do you mean?"
Alarmed by the sudden suffusion of venous blood on his face and neck,
the reddish glow of his eye, she forged hasty excuses. "You see, I
never thought of it--in that way. I must have time to get used to the
idea. Won't you give me a week?" Her winning smile conquered. He had
stepped his ponies alongside, and, snatching her hand, he covered it
with kisses.
"By God, Helen, you must say yes! I'm mad--mad with love of you. If
you refuse--"
"Hush!" She snatched away her hand as a man came in sight from behind a
bluff, coming up-stream. "It is Mr. Bender!" she exclaimed--so
thankfully. Then, mindful of her part, she added: "What a nuisance! I
wonder if he--saw you?"
"Oh, he'll go by."
"No, no! Leave me the shreds of my character. You must go. _Must!_ I
said, sir."
"Very well. But remember--one week." Nodding significantly, he drove
off, leaving her struggling with mixed feelings of relief and
apprehension. She wondered if Bender had seen Molyneux kiss her hand.
Though in a few minutes of shy conversation Bender showed no knowledge
of the cause that had set her to rubbing the back of her hand against
her skirt, it nevertheless formed the subject of a rough scrawl that
Baldy, the tote-trail teamster, delivered to Jenny in Lone Tree two days
later. "You said I was to tell if I saw or heard anything more. Well,
he is back, and--" Followed the kisses, and the scrawl ended, "If you
kin do anything like you thought you ked, do it quick, else I shall have
to tell the boss and give him a chance to look after his own."
Jenny did "do it quick," and thereby initiated a sequence of cause and
event that was to entirely change the complexion of a dozen lives. An
extract from her letter to Helen explains itself: "'Twas on the tip of
my tongue to tell it to you every time he druv you home last winter, but
'twas so much easier for me to have you all believing as it was the man
that went back to England. But 'twasn't, Miss Helen; 'twas him--Capen
Molyneux."
Poor Jenny! She alone knew the magnitude of the man's offence against
her weak innocence, but, small stoic, she had hugged the knowledge to
her soul while waiting in dull patience for the punishment she never
doubted. Immunity would have challenged the existence of the God on
whom, despite small heresies of speech, she devoutly leaned. She read
his sentence in that most tremendous curse of the oppressor, the One
Hundredth and Ninth Psalm, the bitter cry of David: "For he hath
rewarded me evil ... hatred for my love. When he shall be judged, let
him be condemned; and his prayer become sin.... Let his children be
continually vagabonds, seek their bread in desolate places. Let the
extortioner catch all that he hath; the stranger despoil his labor. Let
there be none to extend mercy to him.... Let his posterity be cut off
and his generation blotted out ... that He may cut off the memory of
them from the earth." Ay, she had believed that it would come to pass
in some way--by lightning-flash, sudden sickness, a weary death. But
she had never imagined herself as the instrument which this letter was
to make her. What the confession cost her! Tears, shameful agonizings!
Small wonder that, in her trembling confusion, she mis-shuffled notes
and slid Helen's into Bender's envelope.
*XIX*
*THE WAGES OF SIN*
On the afternoon following Baldy's delivery of the shuffled notes, the
May sun diffused a tempered warmth upon Molyneux's veranda, thereby
intensifying certain comfortable reflections which accompanied his
after-dinner pipe. He had material cause of satisfaction. To begin, his
father's death placed him in possession of a sum which--a mere pittance
in England--loomed large as a fortune in the thrifty settlements. Next,
Messrs. Coxhead & Boxhead, exploiters of the Younger Son, and his London
solicitors, had forwarded through that morning's mail indentures of
apprenticeship to colonial farming of three more innocents at one
thousand dollars a head per annum. This more than made up for the
defection of Danvers, who, having learned how little there was to be
learned in the business, was adventuring farming for himself. It also
permitted the retention of the bucolic Englishman and wife, who
respectively managed Molyneux's farm and house.
With their service assured, the life was more than tolerable, infinitely
superior to that which he would have led at home. There he would have
been condemned to the celibate lot of the younger son--to be a "filler"
at dinners and dances, useful as the waiters, ineligible and innocuous
to the plainest of his girl partners as an Eastern eunuch; or, accepting
the alternative, trade, vulgar trade, his pampered wits would have come
into competition with abilities that had been whetted to a fine edge
through centuries on time's hard stone. Like a leaden plummet, he would
have plunged through the social strata to his natural place in the
scheme of things. Here, however, he was of some importance, a magnate on
means that would hardly have kept up his clothes and clubs at home. A
landed proprietor, moreover, he escaped the stigma of trade, and the
resultant prejudice, should he ever return to live in England.
Then the life glowed with the colors of romance. His farm occurred on
the extreme western edge of that vast forest which blackens the Atlantic
seaboard, and so marches west and north over a thousand rugged miles to
the limit of trees on the verge of the Barren Lands. Within gunshot the
old ferocious struggle for life continued as of yore. Through timbered
glades the wolf pursued and made his kill; echo answered the clash of
horns as big elk fought for a doe; over lonely woodland lakes, black
with water-fowl, the hoo-haugh crane spread ten feet of snowy pinion;
across dark waters the loon's weird lament replied to the owl's midnight
questioning. In winter the moose came down from their yards to feed at
his prairie hay-stacks; any night he could come out on the veranda and
thrill to a long howl or the scream of a lynx.
Opening before him now, the view was pleasantly beautiful. His house, a
comfortable frame building, and big barn and corrals, all sat within the
embrace of a half-moon that prairie-fires had bitten out from the heart
of a poplar bluff. Southward his tilled fields ran like strips of brown
carpet over the green earth rolls. Beyond them spread the Park Lands,
with his cattle feeding knee-deep in the rank pasture between clump
poplar. Further still, his horses scented the wind from the crest of a
knoll, forming a dull blotch against the soft blue sky. These were
growing into money while he smoked, and what of free grazing, free hay,
and labor that reversed the natural order of things and paid for the
privilege of working, he could see himself comfortably wealthy in not
too many seasons. He would still be young enough for a run through
Maiden Lane, London's Mecca for the stage and _demi-mondaine_. However,
he put that thought behind him as being inconsistent with contemplation
of the last thing necessary for perfect happiness--a pretty wife.
Through the haze of sunlit tobacco reek, he saw himself in possession of
even that golden asset, and thereafter his reflections took the exact
color of those of the rich man before death came in the night: "Soul,
soul! Thou hast much goods laid up in store! Eat, drink, take thine
ease, and be merry!"
"It is really time that I settled," he murmured. "Thirty-four, my next
birthday. By Jove! six more years and I shall be forty!"
The thought deflected his meditation into channels highly becoming to a
person of the age he was contemplating, and from virtuous altitudes he
looked back with something of the reproving tolerance that kindly age
accords to youthful indiscretion. He maintained the
"you-were-a-sad-dog" point of view till a sudden thought stung his
virtuous complacency through to the quick. "Oh, well"--he ousted
reproach with exculpatory murmur--"if the girl had only let me, I would
have got her away from here and have done something handsome for her
afterwards. But it was just as well--seeing that it passed off so
quietly. I wonder how she managed it? Nobody seems to know." Then,
ignoring the fact that every seeding brings its harvest, not knowing
that the measure of that cruel sowing was even then coming home to him
on a fast trot, he smothered conviction under the trite reflection, "A
fellow must sow his wild oats."
Still the thought had marred his reverie, and, tapping his pipe on the
chair-rung, he rose. He intended a visit to the barn, where his man was
dipping seed wheat in bluestone solution to kill the smut; but just then
a wagon, which had been rattling along the Lone Tree trail, turned into
his private lane.
"It is Glaves," he muttered. "And his wife. What can they want? Must
have a message--from her; otherwise they would never come here."
His thought did not malign the trustee, who had positively refused the
commission till assured that its performance would sever Helen's
relations with his natural foes. Yet he did not like it, and though
retribution might have presented herself in more tragic guise, she could
not have assumed a more forbidding face than that which he now turned
down to Molyneux.
Than they two there have been no more violent contrast. Beak-nosed,
hollow-eyed, the hoar of fifty winters environed the trustee's face,
which wind and weather had warped, seamed, and wrinkled into the
semblance of a scorched hide. He was true to the frontier type; and
beside his bronzed ruggedness, the Englishman, though much the larger
man, seemed, with his soft hands, smooth skin, and polished manner, to
be small and effeminate.
As might be expected, the trustee refused Molyneux's invitation to put
in and feed. "No; me an' the wife is going up to see her brother, north
of Assissippii, an' we have thirty miles to make afore sundown."
He did, however, return curt answers to a few questions, though it would
be a mistake to set his scant conversational efforts to the account of
politeness. Rather they were the meed of malignance, for, while
talking, he secretly exulted over the thought of Molyneux's coming
disappointment. They would be gone a week, he said. The mails? Mrs.
Carter would attend to sech letters as straggled in. She'd be there
alone? Yes. Lonesome? Mebbe, but she was that well-plucked she'd
laughed at the idea of spending her nights at Flynn's. A fine girl,
sirree! Having accorded five minutes to Helen's perfections, the
trustee drove off, but turned, as he rattled out of the yard, and nudged
his wife, grinning, to look at Molyneux.
Stark and still as one of his own veranda-posts, the man stood and
stared down at Jenny's pitiful letter. Across the top Helen had written,
"This explains itself," and that scrap of writing represented three
letters now torn up and consigned to the flames. The first antedated
her receipt of Jenny's letter, and had run: "I want you to believe me
innocent of coquetry, and you must pardon me if I have, by speech or
action, seemed to sanction the hope you expressed the other day. I now
perceive that it was my desperate loneliness that caused me to lean so
heavily upon your friendship. I might have told you this personally but
for certain experiences which have made me timid." There was
more--regret, pleasant hope that the future might bring with it friendly
relations, wishes for his happiness. This letter she had withdrawn from
the mail to burn, along with one that was full of reproach, and a third
that sizzled with indignation.
Suffused with dark, venous blood, Molyneux faced discovered sin. If
ever, this was the accepted time for his attempts at reconstruction to
bring forth fruit. He had pictured himself remorseful, but now that the
wage of sin was demanded, he flinched like a selfish child, reneged in
the game he had played with the gods. It was not in him to play a
losing hand to the logical end. Instead of remorse, anger possessed him,
for, tearing the letter, he cried in a gust of passion:
"She sha'n't throw me a second time! By God, she sha'n't!"
Needs not to follow his turbulent thought as he hurried out to the
barn--his flushes, the paroxysms that set his face in the colors of
apoplexy. Sufficient that flooding passion swept clean the
superstructure of false morality, sophistical idealism, that he had
erected on the rotten foundation of his vicious heredity. A minute of
action explains a volume of psychology. Hitching his ponies, he drove
madly southward, one idea standing clearly out in his whirl of
thought--she would be alone that night.
Just about the time that Molyneux swung out on the Lone Tree trail,
Helen arrived home from school with the eldest Flynn boy, who had
volunteered to help her with the chores, her undertaking of which had
made possible Mrs. Glaves's rare holiday. Under distress of their
bursting udders, the cows had come in of their own accord from the fat,
rank pastures, and now called for easement, with low, persistent
"mooing," while she changed her dress. When she finally came out, with
sleeves rolled above elbows that had regained their plump whiteness,
they even fought for precedence, horning each other aside until the
bell-cow made good her prerogative as leader; then frothing streams soon
drew tinkling music from her pail. For his part, the boy fed pigs and
calves, carried in the milk, then departed, leaving her to skim and
strain, and wash pans and pails, itself no light task in view of Mrs.
Glaves's difficult standards of cleanliness. That done and her supper
eaten, she placed a lamp on the table and sat down to think over the
events of the day.
A little fatigued, she leaned a smooth cheek on her hand, staring at the
lamp, whose golden light toned while it revealed the changes these
distressful months had wrought in her appearance. Her eyes were weary,
her face tired; but if she was paler than of yore, the pallor was
becoming, in that it was altogether a mental product and accorded well
with her plump, well-nourished body. Her mouth, if wofully pouted in
agreement with her sad thought, was scarlet and pretty as ever. In every
way she was good as new.
At first she had found it extremely difficult to realize the full
meaning of the letter which the Cougar had brought in from the camp
early that morning. For Bender would trust it in no other hand; whereby
he discovered not only his wisdom, but also an unexpected fund of tact
in his rough messenger. Anticipating some display of emotion, the
Cougar discharged his office in the privacy of Helen's own room; and if
her red eyes afterwards excited Jimmy Glaves's insatiable curiosity,
only the Cougar witnessed her breakdown--sorrowful tremblings, blushes,
tearful anger. Not that she had doubted the girl's word. Only it had
seemed monstrous, incredible, impossible, until, through the day, jots
and tittles of evidence had filtered out of the past. She had connected
Jenny's gloomings on the occasions that Molyneux drove her (Helen) home
with his refusals to enter and warm himself after their cold drives.
Even from the far days of the child's trouble, small significances had
come to piece out the solid proof. So now nothing was left for her but
bitter self-communion.
These days it did seem as though the fates were bent on squeezing the
last acrid drop into her cup; for to the consciousness of error was now
added knowledge of the utter worthlessness of her tempter. She burned
as she recalled their solitary rides; writhed slim fingers in a passion
of thankfulness as she thought of her several escapes; was taxing
herself for her folly when a sudden furious baying outside brought her,
startled, to her feet.
It was merely the house-dog exchanging defiances with a lone coyote;
but--after she had satisfied herself of the fact--it yet brought home
upon her a vivid sense of her lonely position. Sorry now that she had
not gone home with the Flynn boy, she glanced nervously about the room,
which, if small, was yet large enough to own shadowy corners. On top of
the pigeon-holed mailing-desk, moreover, a few books were piled in such
a way as to cast a shadow, the silhouette of a man's profile, upon the
wall. Lean, hard, indescribably cruel, its thin lips split in a
merciless grin as she moved the lamp, then suddenly lengthened into the
semblance of a hand and pointing finger. Then she laughed, nervously,
yet laughed because it indicated one of the hundred summonses, writs of
execution, and findings in judgment that were pasted up on the walls.
"By these summons," Victoria Regina called upon her subject, James
Glaves, to pay the moneys and taxed costs herein set forth under pain of
confiscation of his goods and chattels. Usually recording debt and
disaster, the instruments certified, in Jimmy's case, to numerous
victories over implement trusts, cordage monopolies, local or foreign
Shylocks. "Execution proof," in that his wife owned their real property
in her own right, he could sit and smoke at home, the cynosure of the
country-side, in seasons when the sheriff travelled with the thresher
and took in all the grain. To each document he could append a story,
the memory of such a one having caused Helen's laugh.
Indicating this particular specimen with his pipe-stem one evening, he
had remarked: "Yon jest tickled the jedge to death. 'Mr. Glaves,' he
says, when he handed it down, 'they've beat you on the jedgment, now
it's up to you to fool 'em on the execution.' An' you bet I did."
Reassured, Helen returned to her musings, only to start up, a minute
later, with a nervous glance over her shoulder at the window. Is there
anything in thought transference? At that moment Molyneux was rattling
down into the dark valley, and is it possible that his heated imaginings
bridged the miles and impressed themselves upon her nervous mental
surfaces? Or was it merely a coincidence of thought that caused her to
see his face pressed against the black pane. Be this as it may, she
could not regain her composure. Taking the lamp, she locked herself in
her bedroom; then she sought that last refuge of frightened femininity,
the invulnerable shield of the bedclothes.
*XX*
*--IS DEATH*
Though Silver Creek still ran fat and full, its sources were now nearly
drained of flood-waters; any day might see it suddenly shrink to its
usual summer trickle. Anticipating the event, Bender went miles
down-stream that morning to superintend the building of the first dam,
and so did not see the Cougar till that worthy came into camp at night
from his own place at the tail of the drive.
This, the hour for changing shifts, was the liveliest of camp life--the
social hour, one might term it, replete with a certain rough comfort.
With them, from up and down river, the reliefs poured in, a stream of
red shirts, drowning with oaths, song, and laughter the rattle of
tin-ware in the cook-tent. Spread over fifteen miles of river, the
arrival was equally irregular, and those who had already eaten were
grouped about a huge camp-fire, the red glow of which enriched weathered
skins and softened the corrugations of iron faces. After the cold and
wet of the day, its warmth spelled luxury in capitals--luxury such as no
millionaire may command from his palatial clubs, for pleasure may only
be measured in degrees of health with accompanying intensity of
sensation. As they moved and turned like huge red capons on an
old-style spit, bringing fresh areas of soaked clothing under the blaze,
they smoked and revamped the day's haps, its dips, jams, duckings, while
the river--the river that yielded their hard bread in exchange for
annual toll of a life or two--rebuked with angry growl their jokes and
jestings.
A candle in Bender's tent showed the giant squatted upon his blankets,
chin on hands, big torso hunched between knees and elbows. A night and
day of heavy brooding had sunk his eyes; despair had cross-ploughed and
deepened the furrows across his blue, scarred face. The attitude bespoke
deepest dejection, and his look, when the Cougar entered, caused the
latter's weird fierceness to flux in vast sympathy.
"Well?" Bender inquired.
The Cougar pulled a paper out of his shirt-bosom. "Here's your letter
that she got by mistake."
It was only a scrap to say that she would do her best--she had done it,
too, poor girl!--that and an admonition to be careful in drying his
clothes at nights. Usually the warning would have dissolved Bender's
grimness, but it caused no relaxation of his gravity.
"How did she take it?"
"Hard. Cried an' said as 'twas more'n she deserved at the little gal's
hands. Blamed herself--dreadful cut up. Seems, too, as 'twasn't
necessary, as she'd already mailed Mr. Man his walking-papers."
"Too late--now. It's done."
The Cougar looked awkwardly down upon him. Pity had been foreign to
their rough comradeship; it was, indeed, nearest of kin to shame; the
words of sympathy choked in his throat. "Come, come!" he presently
growled. "Chipper up! 'Tain't any worse than it was."
A convulsion seized and shook the big body. "You don't know, Cougar.
You don't know what it is--" He stopped, aghast at the sudden appalling
change in the other. He had straightened from his crouch, and his eyes
flared like blue, alcohol flames in his livid face. As at the touch of a
secret spring, the man's fierce taciturnity raised, exposing the
tortured soul behind.
"I--don't?" The whisper issued like a dry wind from drawn lips.
"Me?--that saw my wife an' baby--" Though frontiersmen tell, shivering,
of the horror he mentioned, no pen has been found callous enough to set
it forth on paper. "God, man!" His arms snapped outward and his head
fell forward in the attitude of the crucifixion.
"Cougar!" Bender grasped his shoulder. "Cougar! Cougar, man! I'd
forgotten."
But as one in a trance the man went on: "It's always with me--through
these years--day an' night. I'd have killed myself--long ago--on'y
whenever I'd think of that, she'd come--sweet an' smiling--with a shake
of her pretty head. She wouldn't let me do it." The thought of her
smile seemed to calm him, and he continued, more quietly: "I never could
make out why 'twas done to her. A sky-pilot tol' me onct as 'twas the
will o' God, but I shocked him clean out of his boots.
"'I'll know on the Jedgment Day, will I?' I asks him. 'Shorely,' he
answers, pat. 'An' I'll be close in to the great white throne you was
talking about?' He nods. 'Then do you know what I'll do?' I asks him
again. 'If I find out as how that God o' yourn ordered that done to my
little gal, I'll stick a knife into Him an' turn it round.'
"At that he turned green an' tried to saddle the dirty business onto the
devil. But, Lordy, he didn't know. She does, though, else she wouldn't
come smiling. She knows; so I've allus reckoned as if she could bear
her pain I can worry through to the end. There! there! I'm all right
again. You didn't go to do it. An', after all, I don't know but that
you are right. For while my gal's at peace, yourn has to live out her
pain. It's puzzling--all of it. Now there's _him_. Where does he come
in? What about him?"
"What about him?" Bender's bulk seemed to swell in the dim light to
huge, amorphous proportions. "That's simple. He's got to marry her."
What the conclusion had cost him!--the suffering, self-sacrifice. To
the sophisticated, both sacrifice and conclusion may seem absurd,
provoking the question as to just how wrong may be righted by the
marriage of a clean girl with an impure man; yet it was strictly in
accord with backwoods philosophy. As yet the scepticism of modernity
had not infected the plains, nor had the leprosy of free thought rotted
their creeds and institutions. To Bender's simplicity, marriage
appealed as the one cure for such ills as Jenny's, while both he and the
Cougar had seen the dose administered with aid of a Colt's forty-five.
So, absurd or not, the conclusion earned the latter's instant approval.
There was something pathetic, too, in the serious way in which, after
discussing ways and means, they spoke of Jenny's future. "She'll be a
lady," the Cougar commented. "Too big to look at you an' me."
Bender's nod incarnated self-effacement, but he bristled when the Cougar
suggested that Molyneux might not treat her rightly, and his scowl
augured a quick widowhood in such premises. "We'll go up for him
to-morrow."
"An' after it's all over?"
"Oregon for you an' me--the camps an' the big timber."
The big timber! The Cougar's bleak face lit up with sudden warmth.
Giant pines of Oregon woods; rose-brown shade of cathedral redwoods; the
roaring unrest of lacy cataracts; peace of great rivers that float the
rafts and drives from snow-capped Rockies down to the blue Pacific;
these, and the screaming saw-mills that spew their product over the
meridians, the pomp of that great piracy; the sights, sounds, resinous
odors that the Cougar would never experience again were vividly
projected into his consciousness.
"Man!" He drew a deep breath. "It can't come too quick for me. I'm
sick of these plains, where a man throws a shadow clean to the horizon.
I'm hungry for the loom of the mountains." After a pause, he added,
"Coming back to yourself--have you eaten to-day?"
The language he accorded to Bender's negative would shake the type from
a respectable printer's fingers, yet, in essence, was exactly equivalent
to the "You poor dear!" of an anxious wife or mother. Striding off, he
quickly returned with coffee and food, which Bender was ordered to eat
under pain of instant loss of his liver, lights, and sundry other useful
organs. Then, being besotted in his belief in action as a remedy for
mental disorders, he suggested a visit to the turn above the bridge
where the logs had jammed twice that afternoon.
Another day would put the last log under the bridge and see the
temporary structure dismantled and afloat; but though only the tail of
the drive remained above, the jams had backed it up for a couple of
miles, so that the logs now filled the river from bank to bank. They
floated silently, or nearly so, for the soft thud of collisions, mutter
of grinding bark, merged with the low roar of the stream. But a
brilliant northern moon lit the serried array; when the men crossed they
could pick the yellow sawed ends from the black of the mass.
Under urge of the same thought, they paused on the other side and looked
back along the northern trail. With the exception of the cook, whose
pots proclaimed his labors with shrill tintinnabulation, the camp now
slept, its big watch-fire burning red and low. Beneath that bright moon
scrub, bluff, scour, ravine, and headland stood out, lacking only the
colors of day, and they could see the trail's twin ruts writhing like
black snakes across the ashen bottoms into the gorge by which it gained
the prairies.
The Cougar's quick eye first discerned a moving blot, but Bender gave it
identity. "That's shore Molyneux's rig. He'd a loose spoke when he
went by t'other day. Hear it rattle."
It was clear and sharp as the clatter of a boy's stick along a wooden
paling, and the Cougar whispered: "It's sure him. Where kin he be
going? Do you reckon--"
The same thought was in Bender's mind. "An' she there alone. No one
ever starts out for Lone Tree this time o' night." After a grim pause,
he added, "But that's where he's going."
A strident chuckle told that the Cougar had caught his meaning. "That's
right. Saved us trouble, hain't he? Kind of him. Jes' step into the
shadow till he's fairly on the bridge."
If they had remained in the moonlight he would never have seen them.
Dusk had brought no surcease of his mad thought; rather its peace
stimulated his excitement by shutting him out from the visible world.
What were his thoughts? It takes a strong man to face his contemplated
villanies. From immemorial time your scoundrel has been able to justify
his acts by some sort of crooked reasoning, and Molyneux was no
exception to the rule. "Why do you muddy the water when I am drinking?"
the wolf asked of the lamb. "How could I, sir, seeing that the stream
flows from you to me?" the lamb filed in exception. "None of your
insolence!" the wolf roared as he made his kill.
In the same way Molyneux excluded from thought everything that
conflicted with his intention--the first rudeness that lost him Helen's
maiden confidence, his insidious attempts to wean her from her husband,
her undoubted right to reject his advances. He twisted his own crime to
her demerit. "She didn't know about that when she was drawing me on!"
he exclaimed, whenever Jenny's letter thrust into his meditation. "Why
should it cut any ice now? It is just an excuse to throw me a second
time. But she sha'n't do it, by God! no, she sha'n't, she sha'n't!
She's a coquette!--a damned coquette! I'll--" Then a red rage, a
heaving, tumultuous passion, would drown articulate thought so that his
intention never took form in words. But one thing is certain--he was
thoroughly dangerous. In that mood Helen would have fared as illy at
his hands as the lamb at the paws of the wolf.
The sudden stoppage of his ponies, midway of the bridge, broke up his
reverie. As the moon struck full in his own face, he saw the two men
only as shadows; but there was no mistaking Bender's bulk, and, after a
single startled glance, Molyneux hailed him. "Is that you, Mr. Bender?"
"It's me, all right. Where might _you_ be heading for?"
It was the usual trail greeting, preliminary to conversation, but
Molyneux sensed a difference of tone, savor of command, menace of
authority, that galled his haughty spirit. Vexed by the impossibility
of explanation, his disdain of the settler tribe in general would not
permit him to lie; from which conflict of feeling his stiff answer was
born.
"I don't see that it is any of your business."
"You don't?" Equally stiff, the reply issued from the huge, dim shape.
"Well, I'll make it mine. You're going to Lone Tree."
Puzzled, Molyneux glanced from Bender's indefiniteness to the Cougar's
dim crouch. He was not afraid. In him the courage of his vices was
reinforced by enormous racial and family pride--the combination that
made the British fool the finest of officers until mathematics and
quick-firing artillery replaced the sword and melee. Mistaking the
situation, he attempted to carry it off with a laugh.
"What have you chaps been drinking? Here; pass the bottle."
"Not till we wet your wedding," the Cougar interjected, dryly.
Astonished now, as well as puzzled, Molyneux yet rejected a sudden
suspicion as impossible. Out of patience, galled by this mysterious
opposition, he said, testily: "Are you crazy? I do not intend--"
"--To go to Lone Tree," Bender interrupted. "Yes, we know. You was
heading up for Glaves's place."
Seriously disconcerted, Molyneux hid it under an ironical laugh. "I
must say that I marvel at your intimate knowledge of my affairs. And
since you are so well posted, perhaps you can tell me why I am going to
Lone Tree?"
"I kin that." The huge, dim figure, with its crouched, attendant
shadow, moved a pace nearer, then the man's stern bass launched on the
quivering moonlight, reciting to an accompaniment of rushing waters this
oldest of woodland sagas. Beginning at the night he picked Jenny up on
the trail, he told all--Jed Hines's cruel fury; birth and burial of his,
Molyneux's child; the outcast girl's subsequent illness; Helen's
kindness; the doctor's philanthropy; the kindly conspiracy that
protected her from social infamy. "An' us that saw her through her
trouble," he finished, "are bound to see her righted."
If the lime-lights of history and fiction were thrown more often upon
motives and psychology, and less on deeds and action, characters would
not appear in such hard colors of black and white. It were false to
paint Molyneux irredeemably black. "_Your child!_" He winced at the
phrase, and, perhaps for the first time, an inkling of the enormity of
his offence was borne in upon him. _His_ child? It was the flesh of
his own loins that had suffered midnight burial at the hands of Carter
and the kindly priest! The thought struck with enormous force--then
faded. For back of him was that vicious generation whose most cultured
exponent wrote to his own son that a seduction or two was necessary to
the education of a gentleman. Through pride of family, the dead hands
of haughty and licentious forebears reached to throttle remorse.
Was he to be called to account by common settlers, the _savages_ of the
scornful English phrase? Anger colored his next remark: "Waited till
you were good and ready, didn't you? Your diligence falls short of your
zeal, my friends, or--"
"Don't flatter yourself," Bender sternly interrupted. "You kin thank her
for the delay. If we'd known, you'd long ago have been either dead or
married. But she kep' her own counsel till she thought as some one
else's welfare called her to speak. 'Twasn't needed. T'other'd already
found you out for herself."
Molyneux blinked under the savage contempt, but answered, stiffly
enough: "Now listen. I deny nothing, though she received attentions
from one of my pupils, and it might very well have been--"
"You lie!"
The lie never comes so unpleasantly as when asserting a truth; so,
though he knew that he had lied, Molyneux's eyes glinted wickedly, his
hand tightened on his whip. A glance right and left showed him the
river, only a light hand-rail between him and dark waters. There was
not room to turn; the giant blocked the way. Under constraint, he spoke
quietly: "Neither do I profess sorrow. What is done is done. If the
girl had taken me into her confidence--"
"Likely, wasn't it?"
A line of Jenny's letter, a damnable fact, flashed into Molyneux's mind,
but he went on: "--I'd have taken care of her--am willing to do so yet,
in a certain way. Marriage, of course, is out of the question. We are
unfitted for each other--"
"No one's denying that."