AT TWO IN THE CAÑON
THOUGH the afternoon was not far spent, the party immediately went into
camp in the gorge. If Mary’s sprain was severe, the doctor told the
others gravely, it would be impossible for her to touch the injured
foot to the ground for many days. The men might carry her back, but
it would be next to impossible, and altogether reckless, to carry her
forward. What were they to do?
Mary was suffering silently beside the campfire, and the others had
withdrawn to a distance to hold their conference. Then came her snappy
voice:
“That’s mighty impolite. I know what you’re talking about. Come over
here by the fire and I’ll relieve your minds.”
When they had congregated about her she said placidly:
“Now, there’s just one thing for you to do. That is to go on, and leave
me here in the cañon with enough grub to last me until you give up hope
of ever finding the Valley of Tomfoolery. Which will be in a few days,
at most, I’m thinking.”
“Mary Temple,” Charmian told her firmly, “we’ll do nothing of the sort.
We’ll stay with you till you can walk or carry you over the back trail
right now--and that ends that. We were only trying to decide which of
the two would be the better plan.”
“Charmian,” said Mary, “will you kindly remember that it is _my_ ankle
that is sprained. I’m running that ankle myself, and whatever I say
that has that ankle for a subject goes. This is not the first time that
I have been in the wilderness, and a little thing like this doesn’t
trouble me in the least. This expedition, foolish though it is, means a
lot to you. And I’m not going to allow you to come this far and have to
give up because of me. You’ll see this thing to the bitter end or I’ll
never move from this country, this cañon, this fireside, or this rock
on which I’m sitting. You, and all of you--even old Marblehead--have
browbeaten me, bullied me, overrun me since we lost those rascals,
Leach and Morley, on the desert. But now at last, because of my
sprained ankle, I am in command of the situation. And I mean to be
obeyed. You’ll leave me here, with provisions and an ample supply of
firewood within arm’s reach, while you continue on to the end of the
Bonehead Country. You’re not going to all this expense and deprivation
and hardship for nothing. The sky’s still clear. Henry’s late winter
seems assured. You may not have another chance in years to even come as
far as you have. And you’re going to shoot the piece while you’re about
it.”
“Why, Mary Temple!” laughed Charmian. “What atrocious slang!”
“It’s time for slang,” Mary declared testily. “Shoot the piece!”
“But, Mary, it’s perfectly--perfectly _hideous_ to leave you here in
this God-forsaken wilderness all alone--and you a woman with a sprained
ankle. Neither the doctor nor Andy will consent to such a thing.”
“They’ll either go one way and leave me, or go the other way and leave
me. This rock on which I’m sitting is my throne, and I won’t move from
it until I have my way. I’ll die right here on this rock, I tell you,
before I’ll give in one inch!”
“But a mountain lion might attack you, Mary Temple!”
“Go on! You talk as if I were good to eat! Lions don’t kill for the fun
of it; they kill for meat. Only rats eat leather.”
Dr. Shonto was regarding her thoughtfully. His examination of her ankle
had puzzled him. It was not swelling, and when he felt the bones he
had been unable to detect any evidence of sprain whatever. But her
contorted features and white lips spoke plainly of pain. Now Mary
surprised him by winking at him desperately, and, wondering, he held
his peace.
“Now all of you but Doctor Shonto go up the cañon, around that bend,
and stay there till we call you,” ordered Mary. “Maybe you can talk
some sense into one another’s heads. I want the doctor to examine my
ankle, and I’m too modest to have the bunch of you staring at me.”
With a queer look at Shonto, Charmian led the way up the cañon for
Henry and Andy, and they went out of sight around the bend.
“Well, Mary, what’s all this about, anyway?” asked the doctor. “You
haven’t sprained your ankle, and you know it as well as I do.”
“Of course not,” replied Mary complacently. “But I’ve broken at least a
couple of ribs.”
“What!”
“I didn’t want Charmian to know.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Doctor,” said Mary, “if you ever tell Charmian that I said what I’m
going to say I’ll never, never speak to you again. _It hurts like
hell!_ There--now you know, I guess.”
“Well, for the love of Mike!” gasped Shonto. “Let me help you into your
tent. Strip to the waist in there, while I rummage through the pack for
my supplies.”
“I don’t need your help,” snapped Mary. “You forget that my ankle isn’t
sprained. I can walk, but I can’t _crawl_. And we’re getting close to
the crawling ground, Henry tells me.”
“Oh, I understand,” said Shonto.
Nevertheless he helped her to her feet and held her arm as she walked
slowly and painfully to her and Charmian’s tent. The doctor pawed
through the pack, found his medicine case, and brought forth a tin
spool of wide adhesive plaster. A little later, stripped to the waist
and blushing furiously, Mary Temple came from the tent and stood before
him.
Shonto’s skilful fingers kneaded her torso as gently as possible, but
Mary’s lips were colourless and beads of perspiration stood out on her
forehead.
“That hurt?”
“Humph! Of course!”
“And that?”
“I guess you know it does as well as I do.”
“Well, Mary, I guess you’ve cracked one of them,” remarked Shonto,
after his careful examination.
He stepped behind her and flattened one end of a strip of adhesive
plaster at the middle of her back, then brought it around to her right
side.
“Now get all the breath out of you,” he ordered. “Deflate your lungs as
much as possible.”
Mary took a deep breath, and then obediently blew lustily through her
white lips until her lungs were free of air. As her chest went down,
Shonto put his strength on the plaster and brought it around the front
of her body, binding her tight. He put on one more strip, then told her
he could do nothing else for her--that the plasters would hold the rib
in place while it was knitting, and that, at her age, nature would not
complete this process until the end of about three weeks.
“Don’t let Charmian know anything about it,” cautioned Mary, coming
from the tent again. “I’ll keep on pretending that I sprained my ankle.
She’d worry if she knew I had a rib broken. And I could manage to walk
back this way, couldn’t I, Doctor?”
“Yes, if you walked slowly and carefully you might get by.”
“That’s what I thought. In fact, I’ve had a broken rib before, and
while it pained me a lot--especially in bed at night--I was able to
move around. So make Charmian think my ankle is sprained and that I
can’t walk a step. Then she’ll think it’s just as well for the rest
of you to go on for a few days as to turn back--seeing that I can’t
walk either way. As I said, however, I can walk, after a fashion, but I
can’t crawl a single inch. You get the idea, don’t you? I don’t want to
break up the expedition.”
“But, Mary,” he reminded her, “you have been against it from the start.
It strikes me that now you have an excellent excuse to call it off.”
“Oh, I’m against everything, Doctor,” she chuckled grimly. “At first,
anyway. I have to be to keep Charmian from going to extremes. Did you
think for one moment, back there at El Trono de Tolerancia, that I’d
allow her to go on this wild-goose chase without me? Not in a thousand
years! And last night, before we went to sleep, she told me something,
with her head resting on my lean old shoulder, that would keep me going
to the end of time if she asked it.”
“And what was that?” asked Shonto.
“Well, that queer country we just passed through seemed to work a sort
of spell over her. Up until we struck the high altitudes this thing
has been more or less of a lark with her. But up there, it seems, the
queer things she saw made her mighty thoughtful. That was a weird,
queer country, you’ll admit yourself. It gave me the creeps; but it
fired Charmian with the realization that this is, after all, a big
undertaking, and that there’s nothing foolish or childish about it.
“Charmian always wanted to do something different--something
outstanding. She hates a commonplace existence. She told me last night
that at last she saw a way to realize her ambition. Other women have
climbed the Alps, she said, explored the Andes, and nosed into all
sorts of queer places. She said that she had the strength and the
courage to do as much as any woman can. And she thought her trip to the
Valley of Arcana would make a good beginning. It really amounted to a
lot, she said, for a girl to be the first, so far as anybody knows, to
enter that hidden valley. It would add something to the geographical
knowledge of the state, and who knew what she might not discover?
“I never before saw her so enthusiastic over anything. And now that she
has come so far, I’d be the last one on earth to turn her back. So you
must go on--you and Charmian and Andy and Marblehead. I can live here
quite comfortably till you get back. I’m used to it--but I know now
that I am too old to have considered coming along.”
“Mary,” said the doctor--and his unhandsome face was aglow with
appreciation--“I am proud to know you. Your devotion to that girl is
wonderful. But I think your present sacrifice is too great. Charmian
will never--”
Mary Temple lifted a lean hand to stop him. “I won’t have it any other
way,” she said. “To-morrow a couple of you men go back to the cache
and pack in all that you can of the provisions we left there. That
will give me an assurance of plenty, and you can start out, loaded to
capacity again, from this point. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry about
me. And what better plan have you to offer, anyway?”
“We could all camp here until you are fit to travel back,” suggested
Shonto, “and then--”
“Absolute nonsense!” Mary objected. “What’s the use in wasting your
opportunity that way? Don’t try to be frivolously chivalrous, Doctor.
This is no time for useless sentiment. Winter is close at hand,
and this is a hard, hard country. It’s time to look at the matter
seriously.”
“I’ll go and talk with the others,” said Shonto abruptly, and swung
away up the cañon.
It was a difficult situation. No one wanted to leave a middle-aged
woman alone in that wild cañon, with a vast, rugged wilderness between
her and the comforts of life. But Mary remained tyrannically obdurate,
so they decided that they would think the matter over during the two or
three days which it would take Andy and Shirttail Henry to go for more
provisions and return.
Early next morning the two set off on the back trail. The doctor busied
himself at making a more or less permanent camp for Mary, provided they
decided in the end to accept her ultimatum. Charmian spent hours at
bringing her diary up to date. Mary, though in pain and obliged to move
about with caution, feigned a limp and kept busy in order to deceive
Charmian.
The afternoon of the third day of Henry and Andy’s absence brought
boredom to all three. The sky still was clear as crystal, with no
suggestion of clouds; and down in the cañon it was warm while the
sun remained overhead. Mary was confined to camp, of course, but she
insisted that Charmian and Shonto go on a short trip of exploration
either up or down the gorge.
The pair set off about two o’clock. The cañon floor was a mass of
nigger-head boulders, through which snaked the rushing green creek. The
walls were all but perpendicular in places and of a height close to two
hundred and fifty feet. Few trees grew near the floor of the cañon, but
there were numberless entanglements of driftwood from which to draw
upon for fuel.
The birds were singing their praise of the comforting sunlight.
Delicate ferns, unmolested by the frost, waved their green fronds
above stones set in the cañon walls, their stems upreared from soft,
vari-coloured mossbanks as lustrous and yielding as Oriental rugs and
sparkling with diamonds of dew. A pensive languor pervaded the cañon,
a sort of armistice between the mellow sun warmth and the gorge’s
lifelong heritage of clammy coldness. It made these human beings moody.
The warmth was the gipsy warmth of early springtime, when the smells
of earth are sweetest, as, deep down within the soil, the sleepy seeds
begin to rub their eyes and stretch in their great awakening to a short
life of ceaseless struggles. The pair were moody because they realized
that it was not spring, that the half-hearted promise of the sun was
altogether insincere. And while they were susceptible to the indolence
of this tantalizing afternoon, the false warmth stirred their blood
and kindled their imaginations to deeds of high emprise and thoughts
of life as it ought to be, but never is. They were filled with vague
feelings of unrest; they spoke but little and dreamed ambitious girlish
and boyish dreams.
“Let’s sit down,” said Charmian, when they were a mile or more from
camp.
An ancient bleached pine log had drifted into a little nook of rocks,
where it was upheld from the floor by short, broken-off, horizontal
limbs to a convenient height for a seat. It looked like a great white
thousand-legged worm with porcupine quills in its back, said Charmian,
as she seated herself between two of the upper-side stumps of limbs.
“What a day!” she continued. “I never was more ambitious in my life,
Doctor, but I just want to sit here and ambish with my eyes half
closed. I didn’t know one could be lazy and ambitious at the same
time. I imagine dope must affect one something like this. Gee, but I
could slay pirates on the Spanish Main this afternoon--that is, if
they’d move the Spanish Main up here to this log and I could keep from
gaping long enough to draw my cutlass. Don’t know that I’d want to
kill pirates, either--I’d rather be a pirate myself and murder honest
people. But either would be an effort--unless I could sit here and slay
’em with the evil eye.”
She made an arm-rest of one of the stumpy branches and sank her round
chin in one hand. The posture pushed up one ruddy cheek and caused
her red lips to show a pout, and that odd little upward flirt at
one corner lent them an unconscious smile. The long dark lashes, so
delicately upturned at the end, drooped downward. Her profile stood out
clean-cut against the flimsy light of the winter sun. Her throat showed
soft and dimpled and dusky. Her hoard of hair had loosened and slipped
downward in artistic disarray. She relaxed, eyes half closed, and her
sinuous body slackened as it settled into unrestrained repose. Her full
bosom rose and fell as softly and smoothly as the oily ground swell of
a lazy tropic bay.
Inman Shonto likened womanly beauty to that of flowers. He knew lily
girls and primrose girls, daisy girls and violet and pansy girls,
even sunflower girls. But here was a rose girl--a great passionate
American beauty rose, bold in colouring, strong and stanch, upright
and unafraid, dominant, outstanding amid the other flowers, but owner
of all the loveliness and grace of the lesser blossoms, as delicate of
texture and as compelling in its tenderness.
The firm, puckered, rather thick lips of Dr. Shonto made a corrugated
horizontal line as he drank in the beauty of the picture the drooping
girl unconsciously posed for him. He thought of his own pale-blue
eyes, his sparse sandy eyebrows, his thin, neutral-coloured hair, his
pitted, Gargantuan nose. But he straightened. He had the body of a
gladiator, the heart of a knight, the soul of a poet, and his intellect
had brought both fame and wealth to his feet. The doctor knew all this;
he knew himself, his possibilities and his limitations. He wanted this
girl--he deserved her--he had given up his important work to go with
her on this impulsively planned expedition and shield her and win her.
She was a combination of all that he desired in a wife. To let Andy
Jerome take her away from him would be an injustice to all concerned.
His brains and his character and his manhood had made an appeal to her,
he felt. Were these attributes enough for her? Was not he possessed of
attributes of sufficient worthiness to offer in exchange for her beauty
and womanly charm? And some women, he knew, were strangely attracted
by an ugly man who offers them virility and a masterful personality.
And nearly all such women, he had noted in his vast experience of life,
were lovely women and intensely feminine.
“Charmian,” he said suddenly, in a voice just loud enough to be heard
above the boisterous laughter of the creek, “I’ve been thinking, since
the night Andy and I first saw you at El Trono de Tolerancia, that
maybe you’re the woman I have been waiting for and longing for ever
since I became a man. I came upon this trip with you to find out if my
intuition had told me right. It has. The last week of you has shown me
that you and I will not be doing our full duty to life unless we are
together.”
Her supple body tensed a trifle, then relaxed again. Her long lashes
had lifted until he saw the silken sheen of her dark eyes, but now they
were dropped once more.
“I’ll admit that I have gone about this thing with practicality,” he
continued. “It is, perhaps, my scientific nature that caused me to.
It’s better that way. It’s safest. Boys don’t make love as I am making
it, but I’m no boy, though I’m none the less sincere. I look upon
successful marriage as the ideal partnership. And you will realize
when you are a little older, as I do, that companionship is the most
important feature of married life. Don’t think that I don’t love you.
I do--deeply. But I’m not offering you the blind, fiery, uncontrolled
passion of a youth in his twenties. I’m offering you the sincere love
of a mature, reasoning man. What do you think of it?”
Charmian Reemy opened her eyes and stole a quick glance at him. The
colour in her face was heightened only a little; and, though her
heart may have beat a little faster, she was not greatly confused.
But a feeling of triumph glowed warm within her. That she, by the not
consciously exercised force of her personality and feminine charm, had
intrigued this man of big achievements into a proposal of marriage was
thrilling.
He was so desperately in earnest that his homely face was transfigured.
Facial ugliness she saw only in the light of great strength. His broad
smile was winning, tolerant, unutterably tender. His eyes were kind,
whimsical, wistful; and there was in them now a lustre that she never
had seen glowing there before.
Inman Shonto was not ugly now. The great soul of the man had enthroned
itself in his countenance. The effect was spellbinding.
Charmian had told herself that, if ever she married again, she would
marry a big man, a man of accomplishment. Her husband had been a
big man in his small way. He had been a money-maker, a George F.
Babbitt, but the girl-wife had not been able to interest herself in his
activities. He had created nothing, discovered nothing, added nothing
to the knowledge or welfare of the race. Walter J. Reemy had been
commonplace in every way--a man whose commonplace mind followed a daily
routine of commonplaceness.
“You and I, Charmian,” the doctor was saying while she dreamed, “can
make our life together an ideal one. Won’t you even consider it?”
She had closed her eyes again, but now she opened them and smiled at
him half bashfully.
“I am considering it,” she said.
Shonto grasped her hand with eagerness and pressed it. “Thank heaven
for that encouragement,” he whispered fervently.
“But--but could I ever understand you?” asked Charmian. “I’m
nothing--nobody--a dreamer. They say that I am pretty. If so, isn’t it
merely that which has attracted you to me, Doctor? If we were married,
wouldn’t you shut yourself away from me, treat me generously and
courteously and devotedly, but at the same time never take me into your
confidence? Don’t you want me merely as an ornament for the mantle of
your success?”
“Why should that be, Charmian?”
“Haven’t you already declined to take me into your confidence about
your work--about the glands? I didn’t ask much, did I? I wasn’t trying
to pry into your secrets--the mysteries of your profession. I was just
looking for a little enlightenment on a subject that has interested me
ever since it was brought to the attention of the general public. And
you shut up like a clam.”
Shonto’s face showed troubled lines.
“I tried to explain, very carefully,” he pointed out, “that, in this
instance, there is a peculiar reason why I cannot tell you what you
want to know. But there may come a time when I shall feel at liberty
to tell you all. Please trust me--and believe me when I say that, if
you can look on my proposal in a favourable light, I will tell you
everything. Don’t you think me worthy of such trust, Charmian?”
There was a pleading note in his tones, though they were none the less
manly, that caused her to say impulsively:
“Of course I trust you. I know you must have an excellent reason for
not talking over your work with me. I’m afraid I’m pretty much of a
kid at times, Doctor. And I’ll--I’ll-- Well, I’ll think about what you
said. Oh, but what a matter-of-fact way we’re taking to talk about such
a subject! I think-- My goodness! Here comes Andy--alone!”