BEFORE he went back to San José Dr. Mayfield took keen satisfaction
in introducing Dean Wolcott to the precipitous trails and the secret
fastnesses of the wild land he loved, and in presenting him to the
people on widely separated ranches. Always he said, with possessive
pride, “I want you to shake hands with a mighty good friend of mine,
your new Forest Ranger!”
The regular Ranger stayed a fortnight with his deputy before he went
on his leave and left the easterner in full possession of the job. The
young man told himself that never in all his life--a singularly serene
one, save for the months in France and the episode of Dos Pozos--had he
been so solidly happy.
He headquartered in a snug cottage near Post’s and his housekeeping
was an amused delight to him. He had three cabins at various points
on his trails and gypsy, picnicking sojourns in them were novel and
fascinating. He rejoiced in a daily, almost hourly, sense of increased
vigor; he had a red-blooded feeling of boundless endurance. Always he
had lived--and the entire Wolcott connection, as his cousin in Boston
would have expressed it--had lived--in their mentalities; they had
been--and rather prided themselves on being--absent from the body and
present with the brain; they had stayed upstairs in their minds. Now he
was to know the hearty comfort of coming down and living lustily in his
flesh; to revel frankly and sensuously in the sound young body which
had come back to him. It was good to be too hot (for the sun scorched
sometimes on the bare hillsides) and to go into the deep shade; to be
chilled on a long ride home along the coast and to build up a roaring
fire and bask in it; to be ravenously hungry, when he came late to his
cabins, and to make himself an enormous meal and eat enormously of it;
to be healthily, heartily tired and to tumble into bed and sleep nine
dark and dreamless hours.
It was best of all, he thought, to be part of the large silence of
the mountains and the sea. The Wolcotts were talkers and all their
friends were talkers. They talked entertainingly and well but they
talked most of the time, and they had insisted that the Happy Warrior
should converse unsparingly of all he had seen and done, of all that
had been done to him, of his actions and reactions in the red welter
of conflict. Therefore, devoted as he was to the doctor and much as he
appreciated the time and pains the Ranger had spent upon him, he was
glad to be alone with Snort, with the extra horse whom the Ranger had
left as a sort of spare tire, and the Ranger’s dog, a small, shabby
Airedale of reserved manner. Making his daily rides according to
schedule he formed the habit of passing by the infrequent ranch houses
without a hail: later he would be more clubby with the cordially kind
people within them, but for the present he desired to be like the stout
(and, he recalled, incorrectly named) gentleman of the well-known
sonnet--silent upon a peak in Darien.
There were a great many peaks for him to be silent upon and he rode
tirelessly from one to the other. Ordinarily, his various “beats,” as
the Ranger had jocularly called them, were so arranged that he might
serve himself with human society at least every forty-eight hours,
but he determined upon a week’s fast from the sight and sound of his
fellows. By arriving late at his headquarters--the cabin at Post’s--and
leaving early, by passing Slate’s Springs with its lure of a hot and
comforting meal, making his own slender supper, and lodging in his
sleeping bag on the ground, he was able to manage his seven days
hermiting, and he told himself that--with every muscle in play--it was
still the most perfect rest he had ever known.
He believed that he now understood Snort perfectly, and that Snort was
on the way to understanding him. Rusty, the Ranger’s dog, had a faintly
scornful air of understanding him only too well; he sat disdainfully
aloof and watched the Bostonian at his saddling, his fire building, his
camp making, with an air of weary tolerance, and he was even guilty of
yawning in the young man’s face.
“All right, old top,” Dean Wolcott would say to him, “I dare say I’m a
pale imitation of your master, and that I shall never quite reach the
picturesqueness and dash of the ‘Virginian,’ but you might give me
credit for coming on, you know.”
On the third night of silence he camped on Pine Ridge. He had climbed
the tortuous Golden Stairs in the golden, burning afternoon, and
man and horse and dog were weary and warm. Once, on a narrow and
treacherous bit of trail, a rattler had sounded his warning just ahead
of them, and Snort, with a swift reversion to his earlier manner, had
trumpeted, reared, whirled dangerously, but his rider had sat him
capably until he was calmed, had dismounted and crept forward, reins
over his arm, revolver in hand, located the venomous sound, taken
cool aim, and shot the big snake neatly in two. Then, remembering the
doctor’s warning, had stamped on its head for good measure before he
cut off the twelve rattles. “Well, Rusty, not so bad, eh?” he had
inquired complacently of the Airedale, and the dog had replied with a
brief and grudging wag of his shabby tail.
He had watered his horse, staked him out to graze, made his supper and
fed Rusty, spread his sleeping bag on a foundation of crisp leaves,
lighted his pipe, folded his arms beneath his head; reveled. He was
the only human being in forty precipitous miles; sometimes the dog
gave a sleepy and luxurious sigh; there was the low sound of Snort’s
cropping of the dry grass; twice a twilight bird dropped his six silver
notes into the silence; otherwise, it was incredibly still. Beyond him
there was another mountain which presented a profile to him with a
forest of young pines dark against an apricot sky; far below, faintly
seen, the sea shone again like an abalone shell. Presently the glow
faded and the trees turned black, and a fairy-tale moon came out,
primly attended by one pale star.
He was up at dawn and off at six for his ride to Tassajara, tingling
with zestful well-being. He made a swift detour about the lively
Springs, picked up Tony’s Trail and followed it into the heat of the
afternoon, made an early camp at Willow Creek and was off again in
the morning dew, headed, the long way round, for home. Past Shovel
Handle Creek, through Strawberry Valley, gay as a garden with little
flowers of yellow and magenta and hearty pink, up and up, and up again,
unceasingly, to the summit of Marble Peak. He loosened his cinch,
lighted his pipe, granted himself a half hour for gazing.
He understood perfectly how the gentleman had felt in Darien. It was
beyond words, above words. Not even the Wolcott connection could do it
justice.
Then, greatly to his surprise, he found that he didn’t want to be
silent any longer. He wanted to talk, not to Snort and the tolerant
Airedale, but to some one who would reply. He wanted to point out Lost
Valley, far below and far away; to explain about the Ventana--how once,
the oldest settlers said, it had been closed across the top of that
sharp, square-cut space in the mountain’s upper edge, making a perfect
_ventana_--window; he needed a looker and a listener in order that he
might demonstrate how perfectly he remembered all the peaks and places
the doctor and the Ranger had named to him. It was probable that he
would have been moved to quote a restrained amount of poetry; the
Wolcotts quoted a good deal, not to be bookish or superior, but because
of their nice sense of values; people like Keats and Tennyson had said
these things so handily, had brought the art of poetic expression to
a fine point while the Wolcott connection was busy with the law and
medicine and anthropology....
Now he recalled that the stout (and misnamed) gentleman upon the peak
in Darien could be silent as long as he chose and then address his men
(there was distinct mention of them in the sonnet) and receive their
respectful raptures. He, however, could only address, unavailingly, a
horse and a frankly bored dog, so, with swift decision, he tightened
his cinch again and set off down the mountainside in the direction of
Slate’s. He would change his plan, make port there, hearten himself
with cheerful human intercourse and toothsome fare, and return to
Post’s next day. His beasts seemed to catch his idea and approve it,
and they made excellent speed.
But Slate’s was deserted. No promising smoke curled out of the chimney;
his hail brought no reply, but echoed hollowly against the big barn. It
was evidently one of the rare occasions when the head of the house made
a saddle trip over the long trail to the Post Office at Big Sur, and
his wife might be far afield on some ranch matter. There was nothing
for it but to push on to his headquarters at Post’s, by the long
route, now; he would not reach there until well after dark.
He set out, doggedly and joylessly. He could not even take time for
a rest and a meal; he munched at crackers and raisins as he rode.
Rusty began to lag wearily behind and he caught him by the collar and
dragged him up and across his saddle and held him there, crouched and
disapproving, his tail clamped dismally down. He passed three or four
little deserted houses on long-abandoned ranches; it was strange,
whatever could have brought people into that wilderness; it was pitiful
to think of the losing fight they must have put up before they admitted
themselves beaten and went away. Sometimes he drew rein and studied
them; at one there was a rattlesnake asleep in the sun on the worn sill
of the open door; after a little while, to accentuate his loneliness,
the sun went under a cloud and a damp and penetrating fog rushed in
from the sea; then the little, gray, ghostly houses seemed to shiver
and shrink. He found himself picturing the people who had pioneered in
them--the men who had come back to them at meal-times, aching-tired
and lagging with discouragement, the women who had swept the sagging
floors and tacked up calico curtains; women who had said, red-eyed,
“It’s more’n a month since we’ve had the mail,” and the other sort of
women, who had said--“Look! My seeds are comin’ up a’ready! We’ll have
a truck garden here before you can say ‘Jack Robinson!’”
Visualizing them kept him occupied for several miles and when he had
left them all behind and found the gray emptiness of the world more
and more trying he began to recite to himself--verse, fragments of
orations, scraps of old high school debates....
_My name is Norval; on the Grampian hills
My father feeds his flocks--_
What was the rest of it? Where was it from? He must have learned it
years ago, in grammar school, probably. Well, now, he exulted, this was
something to do; he _would_ remember the next line; he _would_ remember
the poem or whatever the lines came from, the author.
Even Snort, the wire-fibered, fire-breathing Snort, was lagging.
Overridden! Dean Wolcott was thankful Dr. Mayfield needn’t know. And
he, himself?--was he overridden and under-talked? The doctor had been
good enough to caution him, but he--fat-headed fool--hadn’t listened
or heeded. There would be slumps, his friend had said. There was one
now, right enough; perhaps he’d better dismount and make camp in the
next sheltered hollow. No; he must keep on; he might meet the Slate’s
Spring people, and go back with them, or at least, for a few heartening
moments, hear human speech, the blesséd sound of talk.
_My name is Norval; on the Grampian hills--_
Just as soon as he had located and pigeonholed that thing he would be
all right. He was all right now, in his body--no sense of lameness or
weakness; it was just this childish, contemptible lonesomeness when
he wasn’t actually alone--the warm body of his horse beneath him, the
dog--even if he wasn’t a very expansive dog--across his saddle. They
came out of a lush green cañon with ferns and tall brakes and delicate
blooms and a rushing silver stream where the dampness pressed in to the
marrow, climbed a stiff trail. Then he looked down, with a gasp, upon a
chimney with a curl of smoke issuing from it; it was not able to mount
into the air on account of the fog but it made a brave start.
Dean Wolcott had to gather his thoughts before he could place exactly
where he was. This must be the ranch of Mateo Golinda, the Spaniard,
and his American wife. The doctor and the Ranger had spoken to him of
the Golindas and said that he must be sure to call upon them, but he
had forgotten, and then he had entered on his period of silence. He
was so glad that he wanted to swing his hat and shout. Now he was to
be among his kind again, with limitations, of course. The converse
would be crude and the fare would be rough; there would be no point of
mental contact. There would be--he grinned stiffly at the absurdity--no
afternoon tea; chilled and fog-drenched as he was, he would have to
wait for the late supper, if, indeed, it was his good fortune to be
invited to remain.
There was no dizzy sum, no cherished treasure he would not part with
for tea, hot and heartening tea in a delicate cup, and the sort of
talk which nourished the mind. And an open fire. But there would be a
“cookstove,” at least, and it would give out comforting warmth while
the woman was getting supper ... he would be warm....
He had let Rusty down and they were making for the house at a smooth
running walk. He would judge what sort she was, Mrs. Golinda; perhaps
he could ask her to make him--or to let him make himself--a cup of tea;
he could say quite honestly that he was cold and overdone. He knew
people of that sort called tea “eating between meals” or “piecing,”
but he didn’t care what she called it if only he could have it.
He got awkwardly down in the yard and found that he was shivering
uncontrollably and that his teeth were chattering, and he felt odd and
confused. He stood still and made himself rehearse for an instant. He
would march up to the door, he would knock at the door, and she would
come--she _must_ be home, with that smoke charging at the fog!--and he
would take off his hat, and try to keep from shaking and jerking, and
say--“My name is Dean Wolcott. I am the new Forest Ranger. May I--”
But he could not wait to complete his rehearsal. He found himself
moving swiftly upon the small, silvered house. It was very old and
weathered looking; it made him think a little of the houses on the
fog-drenched islands in Maine. He stood upon the gray, worn step and
rapped with blue knuckles, and almost instantly he heard the sound of
quick, light feet coming toward him, and the door flew open.
The woman who stood there was not quite young, but she would never be
old. She wore a smock of dull blue linen and her very smooth brown hair
was sleekly parted and coiled, and she looked at him keenly and gladly.
Her eyes were a dark hazel, fearless and friendly, and very bright.
He opened his lips and tried to keep his teeth from chattering. “My
name--” he began, steadily enough, “my name--” and then confusion and
chaos descended upon him. He might have been back in the hospital
in England, fighting for memory through black clouds. “‘_My name is
Norval_--’” he said, rapidly, and broke off gasping, horrified.
The woman stared at him for the fraction of a second, her eyes
widening; then they narrowed and warmed and fine little lines came
round the corners of them and she laughed aloud, delightedly. “Well,”
she said, “aren’t you a long way from the Grampian hills? Come in! Do
come in--I was just having to drink my tea all alone!”