GINGER came to him in the morning, riding over the crest of the hill
with the sunrise. It was as if she had found the new day, somewhere in
the black misery of the night, and given it to him.
He was saddling Mabel and he stopped and stared at her, bewildered,
unbelieving.
“I have brought Snort back to you,” she said, just as she had planned
to say. Her hair was twisted into a knot but there were still leaves
and bits of vines clinging to it, and the bramble scratch was red on
her brown cheek. “I was coming to help you, when I found him. The
doctor wouldn’t let me come, but I came. I was hours catching Snort,
but I was coming to you all the time. I’ve been coming to you all
night--all year!” She rode close to him and slipped into his arms,
and they clung to each other wordlessly. It was their peak in Darien,
and they were silent upon it. Silence flowed over them, clarifying,
healing, and when it passed it took away with it forever their
stubborn pride, the bitterness and the bleak misunderstanding.
“I did try to find you,” said Ginger, lifting her face and looking
gravely into his eyes. “In the east, I mean. I went to Boston to find
you and tell you--and ask you--I sent a note to you at your house,
and I waited in a little hotel. I waited twenty-seven minutes; I know
how long it was because I was watching the clock. Then the messenger
came back and told me your home was closed and all your family gone to
Florida.”
“You came to find me! You did come!” He bent his head again; it was
beyond language; there was nothing he could say about it in words. “But
I wasn’t in Florida. I was at the School of Forestry, trying to make
myself--fit for you. And I was coming to Dos Pozos before I went back.
I was coming to you. You believe that, don’t you? You knew it.”
“Yes, I knew it,” said Ginger, contentedly. “I tried to pretend that
I didn’t, but I knew it, all the time.” She dropped her head to his
shoulder and stood leaning against him so closely that she seemed to
be part of him, to belong to him. Never in the bright days of last
summer, in the days of the house built upon the golden sands, had she
given herself to him like this.
The morning which she had brought with her grew warm about them and
it was very still. He wondered a little at the perfect stillness of
the young day: then he realized that it was because the lone lion had
stopped calling.
Then Ginger remembered, and looked about her, startled. “Where is your
Scout? Oh--I see! He is asleep.” She could see the quiet figure on the
bed of great ferns with the shabby little dog charging rigidly beside
it.
“Yes,” he said, unsteadily, grief and remembrance rushing over him
again. “He is--asleep. My good Scout is--asleep.” Then he told her,
not in careful phrasing, like a Wolcott, but brokenly, raggedly, his
red-rimmed eyes stinging, his smoke-grimed face working, and they
walked across the crisp grass and over the bending brakes and stood
beside him, looking down.
Ginger was a little above Dean on the hillside; she looked at him
pitifully and then down at Elmer Bunty and back again at her lover.
Then she put her arms about him. “I wish you could cry,” she said. She
pulled his head with its fine fair hair down upon her breast. “I wish
you could cry--_here_.”
* * * * *
Mateo Golinda shouted to them presently and rode over the crest.
He had come up at daybreak, as he had promised, and he had seen,
understandingly, all that had happened with the latest fire, and he had
grave words of praise for the Ranger. Then he rode swiftly on ahead of
them; he would ask his wife to have ready a stirrup cup as they passed,
and he would go on to the doctor’s camp, and tell them there. He would
find Pedro on the trail and take him home.
* * * * *
It was just as the Scout would have wished it to be; just as he had
envisaged it. “Tied on his faithful horse”; not Pontiac, Chief of
the Ottawas, could have come with greater dignity back to sorrowing
followers. Mabel, the lady horse, submitted docilely to the strange
burden, seeming to understand and to have a solemn pride in the
undertaking; there was a statelier carriage of the homely old head.
Rusty, the Airedale, heeled steadily; sometimes he lifted his nose and
gave a thin and mournful howl, but in the main he padded down the long
trail in silence.
Margaret Golinda was waiting for them with hot coffee and with serene
and steady cheer; she was as sure, as strong as the hills.
Her bright and friendly eyes grew dim when she looked at the burden the
lady horse was carrying. “But it was a glorious way for him to go,” she
said. “The doctor told me what was coming; if he had lived.”
“I wouldn’t believe it,” said Dean Wolcott. “I wouldn’t have let it
come! I would have fought it!”
She smiled. “This was a better fight. And you must remember this: you
gave him all the life he ever had.” Then she turned to Ginger and held
out her hands to her. “And you are--the girl?”
“Yes,” said Ginger, gladly, meeting the brown hard grip.
“I knew you were--somewhere. I’m glad he has you, _now_.” She stood
in the doorway of her wise, little gray house and watched them riding
away, the small solemn cavalcade.
They talked but little, Ginger and her lover. There was too much grief
in the air--and too much quiet and believing joy, but she told him
about Mary Wiley.
“And this winter,” she said, “I will be with Mary Wiley again.”
“This winter,” he said quietly, “you will be with me.”
There was something in the brief sentence that made her heart turn
over; it was the authority, the conviction; it was all that the small
group of words meant, all that it stood for. This winter she would be
with him. East or west, going to symphonies and settlements and seeing
new plays, or riding the range and bringing in the cattle; it didn’t in
the least matter where they would be or what they would be doing: this
winter--and all the winters in the world and all the summers--she would
be with him.
So they came at length to the doctor’s camp, riding in single file,
the Ranger, and the girl, and the Scout, “tied on his faithful
horse,” and the shabby, tired, little dog trotting behind, and the
gay, kindly people came out to meet them with sober faces and with
tears.... “Betcher all the squaws cried like _any_thing”--he had said,
dramatizing the last hour of his life, and it was indeed “much more
exciting than just hearses and hacks.”
At last he was filling the stage, Elmer Bunty, of whom the Scout Master
had said that a really determined daddy longlegs could put him to
flight--Elmer Bunty, the ’Fraid-Cat; Elmer Bunty, who had fought the
good fight; the _good scout_. All the prosperous, poised people stood
about him sorry and grave, to do him homage.
* * * * *
Ginger forgot her grief and her gladness for an instant when she saw
her Aunt Fan coming toward her. She was limping painfully still and her
short chugging steps were unsteady, and there was no sea-shell tint on
her round face, and her eyes were red with weeping. “Oh, Aunt Fan,” she
said remorsefully, “I’m sorry you worried so! I thought _you’d_ know I
was going to find Dean, and that you wouldn’t----”
“I haven’t been crying about you,” said Mrs. Featherstone, with
asperity. “I worried, of course, but I knew you could take care of
yourself, and I had other things to think about. It’s--” she gulped
back a sob--“it’s Jim!”
“Aunt Fan--I’m _sorry_! What is it? What has happened?”
“It hasn’t happened yet; it’s going to happen, just as soon as I get
there.” She pulled out one of her flippant, little sport handkerchiefs
of pink linen embroidered in blue and dabbed at her eyes. “I had
a telegram, a night letter, telephoned down to Pfeiffer’s. He’s
sick--terribly sick, and the doctor wants to operate, and there’s a
chance--a big chance--that he won’t--come through.” Her chin quivered
uncontrollably. “His heart--his heart--” She had to stop.
They stood looking at her and listening to her in deep-eyed sympathy,
the Ranger and the girl. Ginger took one of her hands and kept patting
it softly.
“_He_ thinks he won’t come through it,” Mrs. Featherstone went on,
after an instant. “And he wants me to come--as quick as the Limited’ll
bring me, for he won’t let them operate till I get there. And he wants
me to marry him again. He says if he doesn’t come through--” she choked
on it--“he wants to go knowing I’m his wife; he wants me to have--what
he’s got.” She gave a sudden decisive sniff and threw up her head.
“And I guess it might just as well come to me as to those two sisters
of his that are rolling--simply _rolling_--already, and always treated
me like the dirt under their feet!” She came out of her personal
preoccupation for a moment and considered her niece and her lover.
“Well!--So you’ve made it up, have you? You’ve come to your senses?”
They told her, without resentment, that they had come to their senses.
“Well, I’m sure _I’ve_ done what I could. I certainly haven’t left a
stone unturned-- Look here--” she addressed herself exclusively to the
young man--“you’ll transplant her from that ranch, the very first thing
you do, won’t you? You’ll take her east, won’t you? I won’t have to--”
“I’ll take her east, yes,” said Dean Wolcott. “I’ll take her east
with me as soon as I’ve finished here, but I’ll bring her west again
whenever she says the word.”
“Oh, _Lord_!” said Ginger’s Aunt Fan in exasperation. “If you’re going
to be as soft as that she’d better have married ’Rome Ojeda. Well, if
ever you want to see _me_, you can stop off in San Francisco!”
Then she grew tender and her very blue eyes looked as they did when
she was thinking about food and making mental menus for herself, and
she laid hold of them both with her plump, pretty hands. “My dears,
I’m glad for you; I _am_ glad. I think you’ve got something to hold
to, and see that you hold on to it! Henry and I had it, once, and Jim
and I thought”--her face contracted swiftly. “I must fly and pack. The
doctor’s driving me in to Monterey to catch the train so I can start
east in the morning. I don’t know what I’m going to do; I won’t know
till I get there.” She shook her head. “The minute I get into New York
I’ll have a good, straight talk with that surgeon and see if things are
really as desperate-- Of course, the idea of marrying Jim again never
entered my head. But if I don’t, and he does die, I suppose I’ll never
forgive myself. And if I _do_--and he _doesn’t_”--her eyes snapped blue
fire--“I’ll never forgive him!”
* * * * *
Elmer Bunty, the Scout, lay in state in a vacant cabin and the Airedale
charged outside the door. The very blond girl went in with an armful
of wild flowers and tall ferns, and when she came out again her eyes
were red-rimmed. She saw Dean and Ginger and nodded to them, smiling
mistily, and when the young man was not looking she held up two fingers
to Ginger’s gaze, uncrossed.
* * * * *
Dean Wolcott had to go back to his headquarters at Post’s; there were
reports to be made, telephones to the Chief Ranger at King City, to
the Scout Master in San Francisco. He would come to her again in the
evening.
The doctor was unsaddling Mabel, the lady horse, and he had warm words
for his Ranger; Mateo Golinda had told him things which would make an
eastern name long remembered in that wild county of the west. He had
warm and hearty words for the two of them, his tired eyes kindling.
He remembered Rosalía Valdés McVeagh and her tearful old song, but he
believed that “_the coming of wintry weather_” would find them ready
and strong. He went away from them smiling to himself, and not looking
back.
They were alone, then, save for the grave and tolerant horses, and
Ginger went swiftly into his arms. “I don’t want to say good-by even
for three hours,” she said, rebelliously. “But you’ll be coming back;
always you’ll be coming back, and always it will be as it was on
Aleck’s bridge.”
Snort came nearer and nosed jealously at Dean Wolcott’s shoulder,
and he spared a hand for him. Then he looked down and kissed the red
scratch on Ginger’s cheek where it rested against his dull sleeve. It
was dust-colored, dust-covered. Suddenly he threw back his head and
laughed aloud, gladly, triumphantly. Accolade of victory; sign and
symbol of battles and beatitudes. “Corduroy,” he said, touching the
fabric of his coat and of hers, “_corde du roi!_”
“Of course,” Ginger said, wondering a little, but too deeply content to
wonder very much, “corduroy.”
THE END
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.