VAGRANCY CAÑON
“CHARMIAN,” said Andy passionately, “do you know that I love you more
than anything else in all the world? I can’t live without you, darling!
Don’t want to live without you! You know I love you, don’t you, dear?
Tell me you know it! You must know it! You can’t help but know! I’ve
loved you from the moment I first set eyes on you, when you stood in
the door in your evening gown at El Trono de Tolerancia. God, how I
love you, Charmian!”
He stopped her, made her face him, and threw his other arm about her.
He was trembling violently, and in the moonlight she saw the twitching
of his parted lips.
“Charmian! Charmian!” he cried brokenly, as he realized that she was
not struggling in his arms. “You love me, don’t you? I know you love
me! God!”
He tightened his hold on her, drew her close to his breast, kissed her
dark hair, then savagely threw her body sidewise and found her lips
with his.
She was shaken--swept away. He was so young, so handsome, so strong, so
intensely masculine. Every primitive instinct of her being went out to
him. She could no more escape the passionate appeal of the male in him
than can the innocent, nature-ruled females of the wilderness escape
at mating time. She had no desire to escape. They were man and woman,
alone under the stars and the moon, in a deep, grim cañon that scarred
the heart of this wild region; and all the sounding brass and tinkling
cymbals of our false and hectic civilization were far away. A man and
a woman, alone and aloof as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, young,
courageous, ripe for love. “Male and female created he them.” She gave
him her warm, firm lips. He kissed her lips and eyes and her dusky
throat, while the blood hammered in his veins as if freshets of old
port wine were rushing through them.
They spoke a thousand words that night, reclining in each other’s arms
on the uncompromising floor of that severe old gorge, but they only
said, “I love you.” They said it in a hundred ways, lips to lips, but
no way was original. Love knows no originality when it is sincere. “I
love you” is all that can be said--three words, “I love you,” but they
are the hinges that swing the door of life.
“And to-morrow you’re going with him to the Valley of Arcana, Charmian!
Will you think of me all the time, dearest? You won’t listen if he
makes love to you, will you, Charmian? I know you won’t--you’re the
dearest, truest, sweetest girl on earth! Oh, why did I have to draw the
long match! Why couldn’t I go with you instead of him? But as soon as
you find the valley, you’ll come right back, won’t you, honey?”
“Of course”--and she smothered the words against his lips.
“I wonder, if I were to tell him that we love each other, if he
wouldn’t consent to let me go instead. If Mary needs help, he, being a
doctor, ought to stay with her. But then I couldn’t ask it. He wouldn’t
expect me to. I know he’d give in to me--but he’d think I wasn’t a
sport. We’ve always played square--the doctor and I. I hope he doesn’t
love you too much, Charmian. Has he told you that he loves you? What
were you saying in the cañon this afternoon?”
“He told me he loved me,” said Charmian softly.
“He did!”--belligerently. “And what--what did you say?”
“I--I promised to consider it, Andy. I couldn’t think of anything else
to say. And that was before you--before to-night, you know.”
“Why didn’t you tell him there was nothing doing?”
“I couldn’t. I didn’t want to-- That is, I--I--he took me so by
surprise. And you hadn’t once mentioned love to me then, Andy. And who
could hurt his feelings--he’s such a dear--such a manly man!”
“But you knew I was going to blurt it out sometime--when I found my
nerve.”
“I know--I felt it, I guess. But--oh, don’t think of Doctor Shonto
to-night. I love you--I love _you_! I don’t want to think of anything
else in all the world!”
The hour was late when they returned to camp, floating in air. The
doctor had long since sought his blankets. They lengthened the
good-night kiss of their new-found love, for in the morning there
would be no opportunity to kiss before the parting.
Charmian, Andy, and Shonto had talked at length over the directions
given to Andy by the defaulting Henry for the continuation of the
journey. Before the girl and Andy had gone down the gorge for their
love-making all arrangements had been made for an early-morning start.
The four were rather silent as they ate breakfast in the frosty
cañon. Mary Temple assumed the initiative in such conversation as was
indulged in, fussing over the out-going pair, as needlessly agitated
as a mother hen, a couple of whose brood are ducklings and persist in
taking to the water. But at last the meal was over, the good-byes were
spoken, the packs and water-bags shouldered, the final love message
wirelessed between Charmian and Andy. And now Mary stood needlessly
shading her eyes with her hand as she watched the couple up the gorge,
so dismal at that early-morning hour, while Andy watched from a seat on
a large boulder, spread-legged, with hands clasped between his knees,
hopelessness in his eyes.
Then shrilly shouted the mother hen after her erring ducklings:
“Doctor! _Doc_-tor! Did you leave Andy plenty of his little pills?”
Poor Mary Temple! She was not gifted with the ability to look into the
future for which she gave Madame Destrehan credit. Had she been able to
she could have envisioned Dr. Shonto trudging wearily back to her and
Andy six days later--alone.
Half a mile up the clammy cañon from the camp Charmian and the doctor
turned abruptly to the right and entered a steep branch cañon that
tentacled from the larger one to the south. Their course was still due
south, according to the bewhiskered deserter, and, as they carried
a dependable compass, it was without misgivings that they abandoned
landmarks which they knew and clambered upward into an unknown country.
The branch cañon was rock-tenoned and perilously steep, though
mercifully dry for a mile above its mouth. It was, said Charmian, the
most outspoken cañon in its querulous complaints over their trespassing
that they had as yet encountered. It seemed that nature had designed
it as the closest attempt to an impossible approach to what was beyond
as lay within her power. Into its V bottom she had in a fit of anger
hurled immense boulders from the heights above. She had uptilted in
her tantrum huge strata of leaflike stone whose edges were sharp
as a butcher’s cleaver. Then, out to make a night of it, she had
poured rubble from the size of an egg to that of a muskmelon down the
reaching slopes, wildly mirthful as a miser raining his shekels from
bags to glittering heaps on the table-top. These rubble slides were
sometimes half a mile in length--nothing but a slanted sea of round,
smooth stones of reddish hue, with not a grain of soil or one single
gasping blade of vegetation. Across these slides the wanderers laboured
heavily, for the stones, always eager to continue their interrupted
rush into the cañon, gave under their feet like dough; often slid under
them, carrying them along on the crest of a new slide; and, thus
releasing the pressure, caused slides above them which threatened to
swoop down and engulf them or mangle their arms and legs; threw them
headlong on occasion; twisted their ankles; endangered every bone;
made progress a nightmare of apprehensions by clutching their feet at
every step, as when the dream-tortured victim tries to flee from some
murderous phantom and terror palsies his legs. Once Shonto pitched
headlong as the rubble sank under his feet like breaking ice. The break
started a slide above him, which extended upward and upward to the lip
of the cañon until their ears were filled with the deafening roar of a
far-reaching avalanche. Large stones were pushed upward above the mass,
and, released, came bounding down alone over the top of the sliding
sea, gaining momentum at every leap, living devils of menace.
For a brief space the two were bewildered, the doctor the more so
because his head had struck a rock in falling and left him dazed. Then
Charmian screamed, and he struggled up and ploughed a way to her side.
Almost before they could plan escape the vanguard of the great slide
was rushing past them and piling up about their ankles.
“The other side!” shouted the doctor.
He grasped her hand and together they plunged recklessly toward the
V bottom of the cañon. It was no longer dry, and this feature had
forced them to traverse the rubble, for the opposite wall was all but
perpendicular, with overhanging crags. There was no footing. Every
frantic step landed them on top of a rolling stone or in the midst of
a nest of them. Their ankles turned; they were pitched drunkenly from
right to left, thrown to their knees, carried downward in a sitting
posture, sometimes backward. The increasing roar was terrifying; a
tidal wave of reddish stones was vomited at them--a charging army
pursuing them, its skirmish line already heckling them, its cannon
balls pounding down from the artillery in the rear.
Charmian pitched forward; would have sprawled on her face upon the
wriggling mass of stones had the doctor lost his crushing grip on her
hand. Her right arm was almost jerked from its socket as their arms
straightened between them and the doctor held on. She thought of her
girlhood game of “crack the whip,” when she had been the “snapper” at
the tail end of the line and had absorbed the greatest part of the
dizzying shock. Next moment she felt herself swept up into his arms,
pack and all; and then--though only Heaven knows how he did it--the man
pitched with his burden into the cañon, lunged through the water, and
started to climb the wall on the opposite side.
Here she struggled free. “I’m all right,” she panted. “I can climb. Oh,
hurry!”
Upwards they struggled, grasping jutting stones and the roots of
bushes. Into the cañon below them poured the avalanche of stones with
the clatter of a billion dice. They struggled on for fifty feet or
more, then the girl dropped in helpless exhaustion; and Shonto, faring
little better, threw himself down beside her.
“We’re safe,” he gulped. “Just--just rest.”
Gradually the roar subsided while they lay there gasping for the air
that seemed to be denied them. Only an occasional angry snarl came from
some section of the slide that tried to renew the wild dervish dance
of destruction. Then all sounds ceased, and the beleaguered travellers
sat up and gazed at the opposite side of the cañon. Everything looked
as it had looked before the doctor fell, except that the bottom of the
cañon was covered with rubble to a depth of maybe twenty feet. The
freshets of a hundred springs to come would carry these on down towards
the floor of the mother cañon below, and all would seem to be as it had
been for centuries past until some leaping deer or prowling cougar or
skulking coyote passed that way and started another slide.
“Gosh!” breathed Charmian. “Ain’t nature wonderful! Thanks for the
lift, dear old thing. Well, who’s scared? Where do we go from here?”
“That’s the difficulty,” said Shonto seriously. “I don’t like to risk
another slide by travelling over the rubble stones again, and if we
keep to this side of the cañon we won’t make half a mile an hour. And
to walk up the floor of the cañon means wet feet and a continual battle
with big boulders and outcroppings.”
But time was of the essence of their contract. They risked the slides
again.
They crossed two more as large as the one on which catastrophe had
threatened, then several of lesser dimensions until they went out
of the district of slides. Now they worked their slow way along the
same steep slope, over roots and rocks and soft black soil, mellow
with decayed chaparral leaves and foamy from the heaving frost. The
travelling was heart-breaking until they stepped into a deer trail by
sheerest accident. Birds cheered them along their way--silent, solemn
birds, but companionable in their flattering curiosity. They were
very small birds with indistinguishable necks, impossible long bills,
big heads, swollen breasts, dull colouring, and manners pontifical
in seriousness. These were the questioning little aborigines that,
on the other side of the divide, Mary Temple had called squirks,
explaining that a squirk was an important little man who looked like a
shabbily clothed preacher, but who made his living by taking orders for
enlargements of portrait photographs.
The cañon dwindled--petered out entirely on the ample breast of a
hill. It that had been so jagged and yawning and formidable down below
now showed no cause for its being--Vagrancy Cañon, Charmian named it
because, she said, it could show no visible means of support. Over
the rounded breast of the eminence they trailed and found themselves
on virtually level land, on the wooded plateau of Shirttail Henry’s
promise. The day was almost spent; they retraced their way back to
the cañon, to where they had seen a spring. Fleecy clouds drifted
across the sky, mobilizing in the west, where the reflection of the
sinking sun on the far-off ocean was re-reflected on their snowy
scallops--orange, cerise, and giddy yellow.
They camped by the little spring.