THE SPIRIT MOUNTAIN
"From now on," said the girl, shaking out her skirts before sitting
down, "I am going to be a mystery."
"You are already," replied Bennington, for the first time aware that
such was the fact.
"No fencing. I have a plain business proposition to make. You and I are
going to be great friends. I can see that now."
"I hope so."
"And you, being a--well, an open-minded young man" (Now what does she
mean by that? thought Bennington), "will be asking all about myself. I
am going to tell you nothing. I am going to be a mystery."
"I'm sure----"
"No, you're not sure of anything, young man. Now I'll tell you this:
that I am living down the gulch with my people."
"I know--Mr. Lawton's."
She looked at him a moment. "Exactly. If you were to walk straight
ahead--not out in the air, of course--you could see the roof of the
house. Now, after we know each other better, the natural thing for you
to do will be to come and see me at my house, won't it?"
Bennington agreed that it would.
"Well, you mustn't."
Bennington expressed his astonishment.
"I will explain a very little. In a month occurs the Pioneer's Picnic
at Rapid. You don't know what the Pioneer's Picnic is? Ignorant boy!
It's our most important event of the year. Well, until that time I am
going to try an experiment. I am going to see if--well, I'll tell you;
I am going to try an experiment on a man, and the man is you, and I'll
explain the whole thing to you after the Pioneer's Picnic, and not a
moment before. Aren't you curious?"
"I am indeed," Bennington assured her sincerely.
She took on a small air of tyranny. "Now understand me. I mean what I
say. If you want to see me again, you must do as I tell you. You must
take me as I am, and you must mind me."
Bennington cast a fleeting wonder over the sublime self-confidence
which made this girl so certain he would care to see her again. Then,
with a grip at the heart, he owned that the self-confidence was well
founded.
"All right," he assented meekly.
"Good!" she cried, with a gleam of mischief. "Behold me! Old Bill
Lawton's gal! If you want to be pards, put her thar!"
"And so you are a girl after all, and no sun fairy," smiled Bennington
as he "put her thar."
"My cloud has melted," she replied quietly, pointing toward the brow of
Harney.
They chatted of small things for a time. Bennington felt intuitively
that there was something a little strange about this girl, something a
little out of the ordinary, something he had never been conscious of in
any other girl. Yet he could never seize the impression and examine it.
It was always just escaping; just taking shape to the point of
visibility, and then melting away again; just rising in the
modulations of her voice to a murmur that the ear thought to seize as
a definite chord, and then dying into a hundred other cadences. He
tried to catch it in her eyes, where so much else was to be seen.
Sometimes he perceived its influence, but never itself. It passed as a
shadow in the lower deeps, as though the feather mass of a great sea
growth had lifted slowly on an undercurrent, and then as slowly had
sunk back to its bed, leaving but the haunting impression of something
shapeless that had darkened the hue of the waters. It was most like a
sadness that had passed. Perhaps it was merely an unconscious trick of
thought or manner.
After a time she asked him his first name, and he told her.
"I'd like to know your's too, Miss Lawton," he suggested.
"I wish you wouldn't call me Miss Lawton," she cried with sudden
petulance.
"Why, certainly not, if you don't want me to, but what am I to call
you?"
"Do you know," she confided with a pretty little gesture, "I have
always disliked my real name. It's ugly and horrid. I've often wished
I were a heroine in a book, and then I could have a name I really
liked. Now here's a chance. I'm going to let you get up one for me, but
it must be pretty, and we'll have it all for our very own."
"I don't quite see----" objected the still conventional de Laney.
"Your wits, your wits, haven't you any wits at _all_?" she cried with
impatience over his unresponsiveness.
"Well, let me see. It isn't easy to do a thing like that on the spur of
the moment, Sun Fairy. A fairy's a fay, isn't it? I might call you
Fay."
"Fay," she repeated in a startled tone.
Bennington remembered that this was the name of the curly-haired young
man who had lent him the bucking horse, and frowned.
"No, I don't believe I like that," he recanted hastily.
"Take time and think about it," she suggested.
"I think of one that would be appropriate," he said after some little
time. "It is suggested by that little bird there. It is Phoebe."
"Do you think it is appropriate," she objected. "A Phoebe bird or a
Phoebe girl always seemed to me to be demure and quiet and thoughtful
and sweet-voiced and fond of dim forests, while I am a frivolous,
laughing, sunny individual who likes the open air and doesn't care for
shadows at all."
"Yet I feel it is appropriate," he insisted. He paused and went on a
little timidly in the face of his new experience in giving expression
to the more subtle feelings. "I don't know whether I can express it or
not. You are laughing and sunny, as you say, but there is something in
you like the Phoebe bird just the same. It is like those cloud
shadows." He pointed out over the mountains. Overhead a number of
summer clouds were winging their way from the west, casting on the
earth those huge irregular shadows which sweep across it so swiftly,
yet with such dignity; so rushingly, and yet so harmlessly. "The hills
are sunny and bright enough, and all at once one of the shadows crosses
them, and it is dark. Then in another moment it is bright again."
"And do you really see that in me?" she asked curiously. "You are a
dear boy," she continued, looking at him for some moments with
reflective eyes. "It won't do though," she said, rising at last. "It's
too 'fancy.'"
"I don't know then," he confessed with some helplessness.
"I'll tell you what I've always _wanted_ to be called," said she, "ever
since I was a little girl. It is 'Mary.'"
"Mary!" he cried, astonished. "Why, it is such a common name."
"It is a beautiful name," she asserted. "Say it over. Aren't the
syllables soft and musical and caressing? It is a lovely name. Why I
remember," she went on vivaciously, "a girl who was named Mary, and who
didn't like it. When she came to our school she changed it, but she
didn't dare to break it to the family all at once. The first letter
home she signed herself 'Mae.' Her father wrote back, 'My dear
daughter, if the name of the mother of Jesus isn't good enough for you,
come home.'" She laughed at the recollection.
"Then you have been away to school?" asked the young man.
"Yes," she replied shortly.
She adroitly led him to talk of himself. He told her naively of New
York and tennis, of brake parties and clubs, and even afternoon teas
and balls, all of which, of course, interested a Western girl
exceedingly. In this it so happened that his immaturity showed more
plainly than before. He did not boast openly, but he introduced
extraneous details important in themselves. He mentioned knowing
Pennington the painter, and Brookes the writer, merely in a casual
fashion, but with just the faintest flourish. It somehow became known
that his family had a crest, that his position was high; in short, that
he was a de Laney on both sides. He liked to tell it to this girl,
because it was evidently fresh and new to her, and because in the
presence of her inexperience in these matters he gained a confidence in
himself which he had never dared assume before.
She looked straight in front of her and listened, throwing in a
comment now and then to assist the stream of his talk. At last, when he
fell silent, she reached swiftly out and patted his cheek with her
hand.
"You are a dear big _boy_," she said quietly. "But I like it--oh, so
much!"
From the tree tops below the clear warble of the purple finch
proclaimed that under the fronds twilight had fallen. The vast green
surface of the hills was streaked here and there with irregular peaks
of darkness dwindling eastward. The sun was nearly down.
A sudden gloom blotted out the fretwork of the pine shadows that had,
during the latter part of the afternoon, lain athwart the rock. They
looked up startled.
The shadow of Harney had crept out to them, and, even as they looked,
it stole on, cat-like, across the lower ridges toward the East. One
after another the rounded hills changed hue as it crossed them. For a
moment it lingered in the tangle of woods at the outermost edge, and
then without further pause glided out over the prairie. They watched it
fascinated. The sparkle was quenched in the Cheyenne; the white gleam
of the Bad Lands became a dull gray, scarce distinguishable from the
gray of the twilight. Though a single mysterious cleft a long yellow
bar pointed down across the plains, paused at the horizon, and slowly
lifted into the air. The mountain shadow followed it steadily up into
the sky, growing and growing against the dullness of the east, until at
last over against them in the heavens was the huge phantom of a
mountain, infinitely greater, infinitely grander than any mountain ever
seen by mortal eyes, and lifting higher and higher, commanded upward by
that single wand of golden light. Then suddenly the wand was withdrawn
and the ghost mountain merged into the yellow afterglow of evening.
The girl had watched it breathless. At its dissolution she seized the
young man excitedly by the arm.
"The Spirit Mountain!" she cried. "I have never seen it before; and now
I see it--with you."
She looked at him with startled eyes.
"With you," she repeated.
"What is it? I don't understand."
She did not seem to hear his question.
"What is it?" he asked again.
"Why--nothing." She caught her breath and recovered command of herself
somewhat. "That is, it is just an old legend that I have often heard,
and it startled me for a minute."
"Will you tell me the legend?"
"Not now; some time. We must go now, for it will soon be dark."
They wandered along the ridge toward Deerfoot Gulch in silence. She had
taken her sunbonnet off, and was enjoying the cool of the evening. He
carried the rifle over the crook of his arm, and watched her pensive
face. The poor little chipmunk lay stiffening in the cleft of the rock,
forgotten. The next morning a prying jay discovered him and carried him
away. He was only a little chipmunk after all--a very little
chipmunk--and nobody and nothing missed him in all the wide world, not
even his mate and his young, for mercifully grief in the animal world
is generally short-lived where tragedies are frequent. His life meant
little. His death----
At the dip of the gulch they paused.
"I live just down there," she said, "and now, good-night."
"Mayn't I take you home?"
"Remember your promise."
"Oh, very well."
She looked at him seriously. "I am going to ask you to do what I have
never asked any man before," she said slowly--"to meet me. I want you
to come to the rock to-morrow afternoon. I want to hear more about New
York."
"Of course I'll come," he agreed delightedly. "I feel as if I had known
you years already."
They said good-bye. She walked a few steps irresolutely down the
hillside, and then, with a sudden impulsive movement, returned. She
lifted her face gravely, searchingly to his.
"I like you," said she earnestly. "You have kind eyes," and was gone
down through the graceful alder saplings.
Bennington stood and watched the swaying of the leaf tops that marked
her progress until she emerged into the lower gulch. There she turned
and looked back toward the ridge, but apparently could not see him,
though he waved his hand. The next instant Jim Fay strolled into the
"park" from the direction of Lawton's cabin. Bennington saw her spring
to meet him, holding out both hands, and then the two strolled back
down the gulch talking earnestly, their heads close together.
Why should he care? "Mary, Mary, Mary!" he cried within himself as he
hurried home. And in remote burial grounds the ancient de Laneys on
both sides turned over in their lead-lined coffins.