AT first, when she set out on the trail for Marble Peak, Ginger hurried
a little. She had a guilty fear that the doctor might have read her
mutinous purpose in her face and ridden after her to make sure, but
when ten minutes had passed she knew she was not being followed, and
she ceased to urge her mount. The fire fighters had exhausted the
camp’s supply of good horses and this was an old and spiritless beast,
hardly more than adequate for the daily trip with supplies.
“Easy, now, Pedro,” she patted the lean neck. “We’ll take it easy, old
boy.” She saw she would have to nurse him along very carefully to make
the ride, but once they came up with Dean he could rest, and she felt
rather ruthless. Her only real concern was getting to Dean, and she
felt as she had felt that day in Boston, waiting in the hushed little
hotel for an answer to her note. Yet there was a great and shining
difference. That had been undertaken as a duty of decent reparation;
beyond the fact that she was going to ask his pardon or at least to
state her regret for her crude and callous behavior at Dos Pozos, she
had not mentally set the stage.
This was no penitential pilgrimage but a glad and glorious journey,
ending, as journeys should, in lovers’ meeting, and this time she had
indeed set the stage; she had been doing it ever since she had felt the
sudden tightening of his arms about her as they danced in the Lodge to
the wheedling, coaxing music of the old slave tune. “Come out!” he had
said, imperatively. “Come down to the creek; I must talk to you. Will
you come, Ginger? You _must_ come!” She remembered every commonplace
syllable and invested it with poesy and ardor, and she planned rosily
for the scene of their reunion and reconciliation. She wished a little
that she might have worn her riding suit of deep cream linen with the
scarlet tie and hat band instead of her seasoned corduroy, but corduroy
was the only wear for work of this sort, and Dean Wolcott himself,
the new Dean Wolcott, wore corduroy now; he had put on the official
uniform of the outdoor working west. And besides, she told herself
contentedly, she was bringing him other adornments; she took stock,
with a proud humility which was new and strange to Ginger McVeagh, of
her more careful speech, her gentler judgments, the clever choosing
of her clothes, her honest appreciation of the things of his world.
Her heart warmed at the memory of Dean Wolcott’s sympathy with Elmer
Bunty’s great moment, the other night, riding madly up on the lady
horse to bring the news of the forest fire, of the way in which he
had kept his Scout in the limelight for an instant. Dr. Mayfield had
told her that the child would never live to grow up; he gave him, in
fact, hardly more than a year, but Ginger, riding the high wave of
happiness, told herself that she would prove her friend wrong for once
in his wise life. Elmer Bunty should go to Dos Pozos to be cuddled by
old Manuela and fed by Ling, to drink golden milk and sleep out in the
tonic air all through the calendar; death on a pale horse riding should
be routed--she felt strong and victorious as she thought of it. Great
surges of joy went over her as they had done when she sat in her perch
at Carnegie Hall, hearing her first symphonies.
But no surges of joy of any size whatever were going over Pedro; the
wretched animal was plodding miserably, his head hanging, and the girl
drew rein, dismounted, and pulled off the saddle with guilty haste. She
would give him a half hour of rest while she ate her supper, and then
go on at a very moderate pace, walking where the grade was steepest.
The horse managed a precarious roll where the trail widened a trifle
and stayed level for a brief space, and then he cropped without
enthusiasm at the sere grass. Ginger ate her substantial sandwich
with hearty young hunger and regarded the rest of her supply somewhat
wistfully: she could have finished it, to the last crumb, but she was
sure Dean Wolcott would need extra rations. It was an amazing thing:
at Dos Pozos, when he had been weak and wasted, she had been hard; now
that he was as fit as she was herself, she yearned over him. She had
met his weakness with scornful strength, and now she met his strength
with a rich and mothering tenderness.
Dusk was creeping up the cañon when she flung the saddle on Pedro
again. “We’ll do it in two hours,” she told herself, “taking it
slowly.” It was hard to be hobbled by a stumbling, tired, old horse
when she wanted a Pegasus, a steed who could--
She halted sharply, the bridle in her hand. A horse was coming down
the trail, running, plunging, the stones scattering before his flying
feet, and it sounded like disaster of some sort. People did not ride
down the Marble Peak trail at a pace like that. An instant later Snort
came into view and with him came reassurance, for he was without saddle
and bridle and a long grazing rope swung behind him. One never tied
Snort securely, the girl remembered, because of his dangerous habit of
pulling back, and he had evidently become terrorized at the approach
of the fire, discovered that his rope was merely wound in and out of a
stout bush, and taken to his heels.
He halted now, at sight of her, trumpeting as wildly as ever in the
days of ’Rome Ojeda, clearly considered the inadvisability of trying
to pass her and her mount, wheeled, started up the trail again in
the direction from which he had come, remembered the thing that had
frightened him, turned again and plunged down the steep incline which
led to the cañon’s floor. She could hear him crashing, fighting his way
through the tangle of brush and low-growing shrubs and tripping vines,
snorting as he went.
He was down at last, but hysterical with nerves; he could be heard
dashing forward, dashing back, stumbling, plunging into traps and
fighting his way out again; shrilly sounding his fear.
Ginger nodded with satisfaction. Here was a task; here was a thing to
do for Dean. There would be a tremendous satisfaction in bringing Snort
back to him.... The stage for their meeting was hastily reset. Not on
the tired and stumbling Pedro, after all, but mounted on the historic
steed who had parted them and was to bring them together again.
“I’ve brought Snort back to you!”
It made good imagining, the look on his face when he should see the two
of them.
She tied the uninterested Pedro securely and hung her saddle with the
canteens and sacks and the packet of sandwiches over a limb, took her
little hatchet in hand and climbed carefully down into the cañon. It
was too dimly lighted to make out the animal at the bottom, but he was
clearly to be heard, and she called to him, soothingly, coaxingly,
cajolingly, and he stopped plunging to listen for an instant.
“Good old boy, Snort ... good ... old ... boy!” The velvet voice
steadied him. She could hear his great gasping breaths but he was not
trumpeting; it was going to be easy, after all, and she was conscious,
tolerantly amused at herself, of a little regret. The longer the chase,
the harder the struggle, the more she was doing; the handsomer her
service, the more dramatic her entrance. Dusk was coming rapidly up
above and the green depths were in dark shadow; she should have brought
her flash light. If the pixie steed refused to be taken in hand at
once, if there ensued even a slight delay, they would be in darkness.
With a sigh of impatience at her heedlessness, Ginger turned and
scrambled up the steep incline again, slipping, pulling herself up by
vines and roots, reached the trail, dug out the flash, and started down
again.
This time, a little breathless, hurrying, careless of the failing
light, she did not watch her footholds and a large and permanent
looking stone turned under her, almost tripping her, and went hurtling
down.
“It won’t--it won’t--it _won’t_ hit him!” she told herself vehemently,
in prayerful assertion, but, if it did not, it grazed him closely
enough to have the same result, for she could hear him rearing and
crashing in a way that made his former panic seem like composure by
comparison. Presently, the sounds warned her, he had headed back toward
Marble Peak and the conflagration.
And now the episode left off being an amusing little adventure and
assumed the outlines of a grim task. Ginger shook off her temper and
her disgust at her own carelessness, and looked intently about her. It
would be half an hour, and perhaps more, before she brought Snort up,
and she must make sure of finding her station on the trail, and Pedro.
She mentally catalogued an oddly square rock, a grotesquely twisted
root, took off her scarlet bandanna and tied it to a low limb, before
she made her cautious descent.
Two hours, dark and difficult ones, were to pass before she found her
landmarks again. Her little wish to do her lover a service had come
largely true: she had toiled in his cause as she had never toiled
before in all her vigorous young life.
Snort had reverted swiftly to type; he was ’Rome Ojeda’s horse, and not
Dean Wolcott’s. Memories of remorseless punishments for misdemeanors
like this came back to him; clearly he weighed in his mind the relative
tragedies of proceeding into the heart of the burning district and of
permitting himself to be caught. He would turn, snorting with fear as a
gust of wind brought hot smoke and stinging sparks, and start backward,
yet when Ginger, edging and inching craftily closer, the velvet of her
voice roughening with huskiness--“Steady, boy, Snort ... good ... old
... boy ...”--put out her hand to take his rope he would wheel again,
choosing the red danger ahead.
Ginger’s hat went in the first quarter of an hour and her hair was
dragged down and filled with leaves and bits of broken vines and there
was a red scratch on her cheek; she was hot, breathless, dripping. The
easy and comfortable thing which she would have called her religion was
a quaint quilting of Alexander McVeagh’s rugged Scotch Presbyterianism
and old Manuela’s handy and available _santos_, Aleck’s sane and
hearty creed of playing the game, and her own childishly cherished
habit of wishing on white horses and red-headed girls, on loads of hay
and shooting stars, and she brought it out now and aired it and shook
it into service and kept up her courage, for there was a brief period
when it seemed that she would not only fail in bringing the wild horse
to her lover but would inevitably lose herself.
“Steady, Snort, old boy ... good ... old ... boy!” she would croon,
adding, between tight shut teeth--“_Devil--demon--fiend!_ Oh, if I only
knew what it was that Balaam did to the horse in _The Virginian_ I’d
do it to you--when I catch you--only _harder_!--No, I wouldn’t, Snort,
poor old boy, dear old boy.... Good ... old ... boy....”
The climax came suddenly, after all. Snort twisted his rope round a
tree, went three times round himself, and was prisoned, pulling back,
snorting shrilly, throwing himself twice, but standing still at last,
showing the whites of his eyes in the moonlight which now poured down
into the cañon in a silver flood, his heaving sides lathered with
sweat.
Ginger sat limply down close by and leaned her head back against a cool
rock. “I tried just as hard as that, to get away from him--and stay
away from him--” she said, grimly. “But I’m going back, and you’re
going with me.” She sighed, utterly tired and utterly content. “It sure
does look,” she spoke as ’Rome Ojeda would have spoken, “it sure does
look like he’s gentled us both!”
Presently, when girl and beast were breathing normally again, she led
him back to the point where she had left the trail, and Pedro made his
one valuable contribution to the expedition by whinnying loudly and
guiding them up.
Ginger flung the saddle blanket over Snort’s steaming back, turned up
her collar, and sat down, the runaway’s rope in her hand, to wait for
the first graying of the dawn.
“I have brought Snort back to you.”
After all, she was going to be able to say it. She folded her arms
across her knees and laid her throbbing head on them, and slept a
little in snatches, dreaming high-colored, stirring dreams.