scarlet sky. The brush fire sent a line of smoke straight up, a long
milky thread, that slowly disentangled itself and mounted to a final
outspreading. Each member of the group was still, the girl lying a
dark oblong under her blanket, her face upturned to the stars which
blossomed slowly in the huge, unclouded heaven. At the root of the
butte, hidden against its shadowy base, the mountain man lay
motionless, but his eyes were open and they rested on her, not closing
or straying.
When no one saw him he kept this stealthy watch. In the daytime, with
the others about, he still was careful to preserve his brusque
indifference, to avoid her, to hide his passion with a jealous
subtlety. But beneath the imposed bonds it grew with each day,
stronger and more savage as the way waxed fiercer. It was not an
obsession of occasional moments, it was always with him. As pilot her
image moved across the waste before him. When he fell back for words
with Daddy John, he was listening through the old man's speech, for the
fall of her horse's hoofs. Her voice made his heart stop, the rustle
of her garments dried his throat. When his lowered eyes saw her hand
on the plate's edge, he grew rigid, unable to eat. If she brushed by
him in the bustle of camp pitching, his hands lost their strength and
he was sick with the sense of her. Love, courtship, marriage, were
words that no longer had any meaning for him. All the tenderness and
humanity he had felt for her in the days of her father's sickness were
gone. They were burned away, as the water and the grass were. When he
saw her solicitude for David, his contempt for the weak man hardened
into hatred. He told himself that he hated them both, and he told
himself he would crush and kill them both before David should get her.
The desire to keep her from David was stronger than the desire to have
her for himself. He did not think or care what he felt. She was the
prey to be won by cunning or daring, whose taste or wishes had no place
in the struggle. He no longer looked ahead, thought, or reasoned. The
elemental in him was developing to fit a scene in which only the
elemental survived.
They broke camp at four the next morning. For the last few days the
heat had been unbearable, and they decided to start while the air was
still cool and prolong the noon halt. The landscape grew barer. There
were open areas where the soil was soft and sifted from the wheels like
sand, and dried stretches where the alkali lay in a caked, white crust.
In one place the earth humped into long, wavelike swells each crest
topped with a fringe of brush, fine and feathery as petrified spray.
At mid-day there was no water in sight. Courant, standing on his
saddle, saw no promise of it, nothing but the level distance streaked
with white mountain rims, and far to the south a patch of yellow--bare
sand, he said, as he pointed a horny finger to where it lay.
They camped in the glare and opened the casks. After the meal they
tried to rest, but the sun was merciless. The girl crawled under the
wagon and lay there on the dust, sleeping with one arm thrown across
her face. The two men sat near by, their hats drawn low over their
brows. There was not a sound. The silence seemed transmuted to a
slowly thickening essence solidifying round them. It pressed upon them
till speech was as impossible as it would be under water. A broken
group in the landscape's immensity, they were like a new expression of
its somber vitality, motionless yet full of life, in consonance with
its bare and brutal verity.
Courant left them to reconnoiter, and at mid afternoon came back to
announce that farther on the trail bent to an outcropping of red rock
where he thought there might be water. It was the hottest hour of the
day. The animals strained at their harness with lolling tongues and
white-rimmed eyeballs, their sweat making tracks on the dust. To
lighten the wagon Daddy John walked beside it, plodding on in his
broken moccasins, now and then chirruping to Julia. The girl rode
behind him, her blouse open at the neck, her hair clinging in a black
veining to her bedewed temples. Several times he turned back to look
at her as the only other female of the party to be encouraged. When
she caught his eye she nodded as though acknowledging the salutation of
a passerby, her dumbness an instinctive hoarding of physical force.
The red rock came in sight, a nicked edge across the distance. As they
approached, it drew up from the plain in a series of crumpled points
like the comb of a rooster. The detail of the intervening space was
lost in the first crepuscular softness, and they saw nothing but a
stretch of darkening purple from which rose the scalloped crest painted
in strange colors. Courant trotted forward crying a word of hope, and
they pricked after him to where the low bulwark loomed above the
plain's swimming mystery.
When they reached it he was standing at the edge of a caverned
indentation. Dead grasses dropped against the walls, withered weeds
thickened toward the apex in a tangled carpet. There had once been
water there, but it was gone, dried, or sunk to some hidden channel in
the rock's heart. They stood staring at the scorched herbage and the
basin where the earth was cracked apart in its last gasping throes of
thirst.
David's voice broke the silence. He had climbed to the front seat, and
his face, gilded with the sunlight, looked like the face of a dead man
painted yellow.
"Is there water?" he said, then saw the dead grass and dried basin, and
met the blank looks of his companions.
Susan's laconic "The spring's dry," was not necessary. He fell forward
on the seat with a moan, his head propped in his hands, his fingers
buried in his hair. Courant sent a look of furious contempt over his
abject figure, then gave a laugh that fell on the silence bitter as a
curse. Daddy John without a word moved off and began unhitching the
mules. Even in Susan pity was, for the moment, choked by a swell of
disgust. Had she not had the other men to measure him by, had she not
within her own sturdy frame felt the spirit still strong for conflict,
she might still have known only the woman's sympathy for the feebler
creature. But they were a trio steeled and braced for invincible
effort, and this weakling, without the body and the spirit for the
enterprise, was an alien among them.
She went to the back of the wagon and opened the mess chest. As she
picked out the supper things she began to repent. The lean, bent
figure and sunken head kept recurring to her. She saw him not as David
but as a suffering outsider, and for a second, motionless, with a
blackened skillet in her hand, had a faint, clairvoyant understanding
of his soul's desolation amid the close-knit unity of their endeavor.
She dropped the tin and went back to the front of the wagon. He was
climbing out, hanging tremulous to the roof support, a haggard
spectacle, with wearied eyes and skin drawn into fine puckerings across
the temples. Pity came back in a remorseful wave, and she ran to him
and lifted his arm to her shoulder. It clasped her hard and they
walked to where at the rock's base the sage grew high. Here she laid a
blanket for him and spread another on the top of the bushes, fastening
it to the tallest ones till it stretched, a sheltering canopy, over
him. She tried to cheer him with assurances that water would be found
at the next halting place. He was listless at first, seeming not to
listen, then the life in her voice roused his sluggish faculties, his
cheeks took color, and his dull glance lit on point after point in its
passage to her face, like the needle flickering toward the pole.
"If I could get water enough to drink, I'd be all right," he said.
"The pains are gone."
"They _must_ find it soon," she answered, lifting the weight of his
fallen courage, heavy as his body might have been to her arms. "This
is a traveled road. There _must_ be a spring somewhere along it."
And she continued prying up the despairing spirit till the man began to
respond, showing returning hope in the eagerness with which he hung on
her words. When he lay sinking into drowsy quiet, she stole away from
him to where the camp was spread about the unlit pyre of Daddy John's
sage brush. It was too early for supper, and the old man, with the
accouterments of the hunt slung upon his person and his rifle in his
hand, was about to go afield after jack rabbit.
"It's a bad business this," he said in answer to the worry she dared
not express. "The animals can't hold out much longer."
"What are we to do? There's only a little water left in one of the
casks."
"Low's goin' to strike across for the other trail. He's goin' after
supper, and he says he'll ride all night till he gets it. He thinks if
he goes due that way," pointing northward, "he can strike it sooner
than by goin' back."
They looked in the direction he pointed. Each bush was sending a
phenomenally long shadow from its intersection with the ground. There
was no butte or hummock to break the expanse between them and the
faint, far silhouette of mountains. Her heart sank, a sinking that
fatigue and dread of thirst had never given her.
"He may lose us," she said.
The old man jerked his head toward the rock.
"He'll steer by that, and I'll keep the fire going till morning."
"But how can he ride all night? He must be half dead now."
"A man like him don't die easy. It's not the muscle and the bones,
it's the grit. He says it's him that made the mistake and it's him
that's goin' to get us back on the right road."
"What will he do for water?"
"Take an empty cask behind the saddle and trust to God."
"But there's water in one of our casks yet."
"Yes, he knows it, but he's goin' to leave that for us. And we got to
hang on to it, Missy. Do you understand that?"
She nodded, frowning and biting her underlip.
"Are you feelin' bad?" said the old man uneasily.
"Not a bit," she answered. "Don't worry about me."
He laid a hand on her shoulder and looked into her face with eyes that
said more than his tongue could.
"You're as good a man as any of us. When we get to California we'll
have fun laughing over this."
He gave the shoulder a shake, then drew back and picked up his rifle.
"I'll get you a rabbit for supper if I can," he said with his cackling
laugh. "That's about the best I can do."
He left her trailing off into the reddened reaches of the sage, and she
went back to the rock, thinking that in some overlooked hollow, water
might linger. She passed the mouth of the dead spring, then skirted
the spot where David lay, a motionless shape under the canopy of the
blanket. A few paces beyond him a buttress extended and, rounding it,
she found a triangular opening inclosed on three sides by walls, their
summits orange with the last sunlight. There had once been water here
for the grasses, and thin-leafed plants grew rank about the rock's
base, then outlined in sere decay what had evidently been the path of a
streamlet. She knelt among them, thrusting her hands between their
rustling stalks, jerking them up and casting them away, the friable
soil spattering from their roots.
The heat was torrid, the noon ardors still imprisoned between the
slanting walls. Presently she sat back on her heels, and with an
earthy hand pushed the moist hair from her forehead. The movement
brought her head up, and her wandering eyes, roving in morose
inspection, turned to the cleft's opening. Courant was standing there,
watching her. His hands hung loose at his sides, his head was drooped
forward, his chin lowered toward his throat. The position lent to his
gaze a suggestion of animal ruminance and concentration.
"Why don't you get David to do that?" he said slowly.
The air in the little cleft seemed to her suddenly heavy and hard to
breathe. She caught it into her lungs with a quick inhalation.
Dropping her eyes to the weeds she said sharply, "David's sick. He
can't do anything. You know that."
"He that ought to be out in the desert there looking for water's lying
asleep under a blanket. That's your man."
He did not move or divert his gaze. There was something singularly
sinister in the fixed and gleaming look and the rigidity of his
watching face. She plucked at a weed, saw her hand's trembling and to
hide it struck her palms together shaking off the dust. The sound
filled the silent place. To her ears it was hardly louder than the
terrified beating of her heart.
"That's the man you've chosen," he went on. "A feller that gives out
when the road's hard, who hasn't enough backbone to stand a few days'
heat and thirst. A poor, useless rag."
He spoke in a low voice, very slowly, each word dropping distinct and
separate. His lowering expression, his steady gaze, his deliberate
speech, spoke of mental forces in abeyance. It was another man, not
the Courant she knew.
She tried to quell her tremors by simulating indignation. If her
breathing shook her breast into an agitation he could see, the look she
kept on him was bold and defiant.
"Don't speak of him that way," she cried scrambling to her feet. "Keep
what you think to yourself."
"And what do _you_ think?" he said and moved forward toward her.
She made no answer, and it was very silent in the cleft. As he came
nearer the grasses crackling under his soft tread were the only sound.
She saw that his face was pale under the tan, the nostrils slightly
dilated. Stepping with a careful lightness, his movements suggested a
carefully maintained adjustment, a being quivering in a breathless
balance. She backed away till she stood pressed against the rock. She
felt her thoughts scattering and made an effort to hold them as though
grasping at tangible, escaping things.
He stopped close to her, and neither spoke for a moment, eye hard on
eye, then hers shifted and dropped.
"You think about him as I do," said the man.
"No," she answered, "no," but her voice showed uncertainty.
"Why don't you tell the truth? Why do you lie?"
"No," this time the word was hardly audible, and she tried to impress
it by shaking her head.
He made a step toward her and seized one of her hands. She tried to
tear it away and flattened herself against the rock, panting, her face
gone white as the alkaline patches of the desert.
"You don't love him. You never did."
She shook her head again, gasping. "Let me out of here. Let go of me."
"You liar," he whispered. "You love me."
She could not answer, her knees shaking, the place blurring on her
sight. Through a sick dizziness she saw nothing but his altered face.
He reached for the other hand, spread flat against the stone, and as
she felt his grasp upon it, her words came in broken pleading:
"Yes, yes, it's true. I do. But I've promised. Let me go."
"Then come to me," he said huskily and tried to wrench her forward into
his arms.
She held herself rigid, braced against the wall, and tearing one hand
free, raised it, palm out, between his face and hers.
"No, no! My father--I promised him. I can't tell David now. I will
later. Don't hold me. Let me go."
The voice of Daddy John came clear from outside. "Missy! Hullo,
Missy! Where are you?"
She sent up the old man's name in a quavering cry and the mountain man
dropped her arm and stepped back.
She ran past him, and at the mouth of the opening, stopped and leaned
on a ledge, getting her breath and trying to control her trembling.
Daddy John was coming through the sage, a jack rabbit held up in one
hand.
"Here's your supper," he cried jubilant. "Ain't I told you I'd get it?"
She moved forward to meet him, walking slowly. When he saw her face,
concern supplanted his triumph.
"We got to get you out of this," he said. "You're as peaked as one of
them frontier women in sunbonnets," and he tried to hook a
compassionate hand in her arm. But she edged away from him, fearful
that he would feel her trembling, and answered:
"It's the heat. It seems to draw the strength all out of me."
"The rabbit'll put some of it back. I'll go and get things started.
You sit by David and rest up," and he skurried away to the camp.
She went to David, lying now with opened eyes and hands clasped beneath
his head. When her shadow fell across him he turned a brightened face
on her.
"I'm better," he said. "If I could get some water I think I'd soon be
all right."
She stood looking down on him with a clouded, almost sullen, expression.
"Did you sleep long?" she asked for something to say.
"I don't know how long. A little while ago I woke up and looked for
you, but you weren't anywhere round, so I just lay here and looked out
across to the mountains and began to think of California. I haven't
thought about it for a long while."
She sat down by him and listened as he told her his thoughts. With a
renewal of strength the old dreams had come back--the cabin by the
river, the garden seeds to be planted, and now added to them was the
gold they were to find. She hearkened with unresponsive apathy. The
repugnance to this mutually shared future which had once made her
recoil from it was a trivial thing to the abhorrence of it that was now
hers. Dislikes had become loathings, a girl's whims, a woman's
passions. As David babbled on she kept her eyes averted, for she knew
that in them her final withdrawal shone coldly. Her thoughts kept
reverting to the scene in the cleft, and when she tore them from it and
forced them back on him, her conscience awoke and gnawed. She could no
more tell this man, returning to life and love of her, than she could
kill him as he lay there defenseless and trusting.
At supper they measured out the water, half a cup for each. There
still remained a few inches in the cask. This was to be hoarded
against the next day. If Courant on his night journey could not strike
the upper trail and a spring they would have to retrace their steps,
and by this route, with the animals exhausted and their own strength
diminished, the first water was a twelve hours' march off. Susan and
Courant were silent, avoiding each other's eyes, torpid to the outward
observation. But the old man was unusually garrulous, evidently
attempting to raise their lowered spirits. He had much to say about
California and the gold there, speculated on their chances of fortune,
and then carried his speculations on to the joys of wealth and a future
in which Susan was to say with the Biblical millionaire, "Now soul take
thine ease." She rewarded him with a quick smile, then tipped her cup
till the bottom faced the sky, and let the last drop run into her mouth.
The night was falling when Courant rode out. She passed him as he was
mounting, the canteen strapped to the back of his saddle. "Good-by,
and good luck," she said in a low voice as she brushed by. His
"good-by" came back to her instilled with a new meaning. The reserve
between them was gone. Separated as the poles, they had suddenly
entered within the circle of an intimacy that had snapped round them
and shut them in. Her surroundings fell into far perspective, losing
their menace. She did not care where she was or how she fared. An
indifference to all that had seemed unbearable, uplifted her. It was
like an emergence from cramped confines to wide, inspiring spaces. He
and she were there--the rest was nothing.
Sitting beside David she could see the rider's figure grow small, as it
receded across the plain. The night had come and the great level
brooded solemn under the light of the first, serene stars. In the
middle of the camp Daddy John's fire flared, the central point of
illumination in a ring of fluctuant yellow. Touched and lost by its
waverings the old man's figure came and went, absorbed in outer
darkness, then revealed his arms extended round sheaves of brush.
David turned and lay on his side looking at her. Her knees were drawn
up, her hands clasped round her ankles. With the ragged detail of her
dress obscured, the line of her profile and throat sharp in clear
silhouette against the saffron glow, she was like a statue carved in
black marble. He could not see what her glance followed, only felt the
consolation of her presence, the one thing to which he could turn and
meet a human response.
He was feverish again, his thirst returned in an insatiable craving.
Moving restlessly he flung out a hand toward her and said querulously:
"How long will Low be gone?"
"Till the morning unless he finds water by the way."
Silence fell on him and her eyes strained through the darkness for the
last glimpse of the rider. He sighed deeply, the hot hand stirring
till it lay spread, with separated fingers on the hem of her dress. He
moved each finger, their brushing on the cloth the only sound.
"Are you in pain?" she asked and shrunk before the coldness of her
voice.
"No, but I am dying with thirst."
She made no answer, resting in her graven quietness. The night had
closed upon the rider's figure, but she watched where it had been.
Over a blackened peak a large star soared up like a bright eye spying
on the waste. Suddenly the hand clinched and he struck down at the
earth with it.
"I can't go without water till the morning."
"Try to sleep," she said. "We must stand it the best way we can."
"I can't sleep."
He moaned and turned over on his face and lying thus rolled from side
to side as if in anguish that movement assuaged. For the first time
she looked at him, turning upon him a glance of questioning anxiety.
She could see his narrow, angular shape, the legs twisted, the arms
bent for a pillow, upon which his head moved in restless pain.
"David, we've got to wait."
"The night through? Stay this way till morning? I'll be dead. I wish
I was now."
She looked away from him seized by temptation that rose from contrition
not pity.
"If you cared for me you could get it. Low's certain to find a spring."
"Very well. I will," she said and rose to her feet.
She moved softly to the camp the darkness hiding her. Daddy John was
taking a cat nap by the fire, a barrier of garnered sage behind him.
She knew his sleep was light and stole with a tiptoe tread to the back
of the wagon where the water cask stood. She drew off a cupful, then,
her eye alert on the old man, crept back to David. When he saw her
coming he sat up with a sharp breath of satisfaction, and she knelt
beside him and held the cup to his lips. He drained it and sank back
in a collapse of relief, muttering thanks that she hushed, fearful of
the old man. Then she again took her seat beside him. She saw Daddy
John get up and pile the fire high, and watched its leaping flame throw
out tongues toward the stars.
Midnight was past when David woke and again begged for water. This
time she went for it without urging. When he had settled into rest she
continued her watch peaceful at the thought that she had given him what
was hers and Courant's. Reparation of a sort had been made. Her mind
could fly without hindrance into the wilderness with the lonely
horseman. It was a luxury like dearly bought freedom, and she sat on
lost in it, abandoned to a reverie as deep and solemn as the night.
CHAPTER IV
She woke when the sun shot its first rays into her eyes. David lay
near by, breathing lightly, his face like a pale carven mask against
the blanket's folds. Down below in the camp the fire burned low, its
flame looking ineffectual and tawdry in the flushed splendor of the
sunrise. Daddy John was astir, moving about among the animals and
pausing to rub Julia's nose and hearten her up with hopeful words.
Susan mounted to a ledge and scanned the distance. Her figure caught
the old man's eye and he hailed her for news. Nothing yet, she
signaled back, then far on the plain's rose-brown limit saw a dust blur
and gave a cry that brought him running and carried him in nimble
ascent to her side. His old eyes could see nothing. She had to point
the direction with a finger that shook.
"There, there. It's moving--far away, as if a drop of water had been
spilled on a picture and made a tiny blot."
They watched till a horseman grew from the nebulous spot. Then they
climbed down and ran to the camp, got out the breakfast things and
threw brush on the fire, speaking nothing but the essential word, for
hope and fear racked them. When he was within hail Daddy John ran to
meet him, but she stayed where she was, her hands making useless darts
among the pans, moistening her lips that they might frame speech easily
when he came. With down-bent head she heard his voice hoarse from a
dust-dried throat: he had found the trail and near it a spring, the
cask he carried was full, it would last them for twelve hours. But the
way was heavy and the animals were too spent for a day's march in such
heat. They would not start till evening and would journey through the
night.
She heard his feet brushing toward her through the sage, and smelled
the dust and sweat upon him as he drew up beside her. She was forced
to raise her eyes and murmur a greeting. It was short and cold, and
Daddy John marveled at the ways of women, who welcomed a man from such
labors as if he had been to the creek and brought up a pail of water.
His face, gaunt and grooved with lines, made her heart swell with the
pity she had so freely given David, and the passion that had never been
his. There was no maternal softness in her now. The man beside her
was no helpless creature claiming her aid, but a conqueror upon whom
she leaned and in whom she gloried.
After he had eaten he drew a saddle back into the rock's shade, spread
a blanket and threw himself on it. Almost before he had composed his
body in comfort he was asleep, one arm thrown over his head, his sinewy
neck outstretched, his chest rising and falling in even breaths.
At noon Daddy John in broaching the cask discovered the deficit in the
water supply. She came upon the old man with the half-filled
coffee-pot in his hand staring down at its contents with a puzzled
face. She stood watching him, guilty as a thievish child, the color
mounting to her forehead. He looked up and in his eyes she read the
shock of his suspicions. Delicacy kept him silent, and as he rinsed
the water round in the pot his own face reddened in a blush for the
girl he had thought strong in honor and self-denial as he was.
"I took it," she said slowly.
He had to make allowances, not only to her, but to himself. He felt
that he must reassure her, keep her from feeling shame for the first
underhand act he had ever known her commit. So he spoke with all the
cheeriness he could command:
"I guess you needed it pretty bad. Turning out as it has I'm glad you
done it."
She saw he thought she had taken it for herself, and experienced relief
in the consciousness of unjust punishment.
"You were asleep," she said, "and I came down and took it twice."
He did not look at her for he could not bear to see her humiliation.
It was his affair to lighten her self-reproach.
"Well, that was all right. You're the only woman among us, and you've
got to be kept up."
"I--I--couldn't stand it any longer," she faltered now, wanting to
justify herself. "It was too much to bear."
"Don't say no more," he said tenderly. "Ain't you only a little girl
put up against things that 'ud break the spirit of a strong man?"
The pathos of his efforts to excuse her shook her guarded self-control.
She suddenly put her face against his shoulder in a lonely dreariness.
He made a backward gesture with his head that he might toss off his hat
and lay his cheek on her hair.
"There, there," he muttered comfortingly. "Don't go worrying about
that. You ain't done no harm. It's just as natural for you to have
taken it as for you to go to sleep when you're tired. And there's not
a soul but you and me'll ever know it, and we'll forget by to-night."
His simple words, reminiscent of gentler days, when tragic problems lay
beyond the confines of imagination, loosed the tension of her mood, and
she clasped her arms about him, trembling and shaken. He patted her
with his free hand, the coffee-pot in the other, thinking her agitation
merely an expression of fatigue, with no more knowledge of its complex
provocation than he had of the mighty throes that had once shaken the
blighted land on which they stood.
David was better, much better, he declared, and proved it by helping
clear the camp and pack the wagon for the night march. He was kneeling
by Daddy John, who was folding the blankets, when he said suddenly:
"If I hadn't got water I think I'd have died last night."
The old man, stopped in his folding to turn a hardening face on him.
"Water?" he said. "How'd you get it?"
"Susan did. I told her I couldn't stand it, and she went down twice to
the wagon and brought it to me. I was at the end of my rope."
Daddy John said nothing. His ideas were readjusting themselves to a
new point of view. When they were established his Missy was back upon
her pedestal, a taller one than ever before, and David was once and for
all in the dust at its feet.
"There's no one like Susan," the lover went on, now with returning
forces, anxious to give the mead of praise where it was due. "She
tried to talk me out of it, and then when she saw I couldn't stand it
she just went quietly off and got it."
"I guess you could have held out till the morning if you'd put your
mind to it," said the old man dryly, rising with the blankets.
For the moment he despised David almost as bitterly as Courant did. It
was not alone the weakness so frankly admitted; it was that his action
had made Daddy John harbor secret censure of the being dearest to him.
The old man could have spat upon him. He moved away for fear of the
words that trembled on his tongue. And another and deeper pain
tormented him--that his darling should so love this feeble creature
that she could steal for him and take the blame of his misdeeds. This
was the man to whom she had given her heart! He found himself wishing
that David had never come back from his search for the lost horses.
Then the other man, the real man that was her fitting mate, could have
won her.
At sunset the train was ready. Every article that could be dispensed
with was left, a rich find for the Indians whose watch fires winked
from the hills. To the cry of "Roll out," and the snap of the long
whip, the wagon lurched into motion, the thirst-racked animals
straining doggedly as it crunched over sage stalks and dragged through
powdery hummocks. The old man walked by the wheel, the long lash of
his whip thrown afar, flashing in the upper light and descending in a
lick of flame on the mules' gray flanks. With each blow fell a phrase
of encouragement, the words of a friend who wounds and wounding himself
suffers. David rode at the rear with Susan. The two men had told him
he must ride if he died for it, and met his offended answer that he
intended to do so with sullen silence. In advance, Courant's figure
brushed between the bushes, his hair a moving patch of copper color in
the last light.
Darkness quickly gathered round them. The bowl of sky became an
intense Prussian blue that the earth reflected. In this clear, deep
color the wagon hood showed a pallid arch, and the shapes of man and
beast were defined in shadowless black. In the west a band of
lemon-color lingered, and above the stars began to prick through, great
scintillant sparks, that looked, for all their size, much farther away
than the stars of the peopled places. Their light seemed caught and
held in aerial gulfs above the earth, making the heavens clear, while
the night clung close and undisturbed to the plain's face. Once from
afar the cry of an animal arose, a long, swelling howl, but around the
train all was still save for the crackling of the crushed sage stalks,
and the pad of hoofs.
It was near midnight when Susan's voice summoned Daddy John. The wagon
halted, and she beckoned him with a summoning arm. He ran to her,
circling the bushes with a youth's alertness, and stretched up to hear
her as she bent from the saddle. David must go in the wagon, he was
unable to ride longer. The old man swept him with a look of
inspection. The starlight showed a drooping figure, the face hidden by
the shadow of his hat brim. The mules were at the limit of their
strength, and the old man demurred, swearing under his breath and
biting his nails.
"You've got to take him," she said, "if it kills them. He would have
fallen off a minute ago if I hadn't put my arm around him."
"Come on, then," he answered with a surly look at David. "Come on and
ride, while the rest of us get along the best way we can."
"He can't help it," she urged in an angry whisper. "You talk as if he
was doing it on purpose."
David slid off his horse and made for the wagon with reeling steps.
The other man followed muttering.
"Help him," she called. "Don't you see he can hardly stand?"
At the wagon wheel Daddy John hoisted him in with vigorous and ungentle
hands. Crawling into the back the sick man fell prone with a groan.
Courant, who had heard them and turned to watch, came riding up.
"What is it?" he said sharply. "The mules given out?"
"Not they," snorted Daddy John, at once all belligerent loyalty to
Julia and her mates, "it's this d--d cry baby again," and he picked up
the reins exclaiming in tones of fond urgence:
"Come now, off again. Keep up your hearts There's water and grass
ahead. Up there, Julia, honey!"
The long team, crouching in the effort to start the wagon, heaved it
forward, and the old man, leaping over the broken sage, kept the pace
beside them. Courant, a few feet in advance, said over his shoulder:
"What's wrong with him now?"
"Oh, played out, I guess. She," with a backward jerk of his head,
"won't have it any other way. No good telling her it's nerve not body
that he ain't got."
The mountain man looked back toward the pathway between the slashed and
broken bushes. He could see Susan's solitary figure, David's horse
following.
"What's _she_ mind for?" he said.
"Because she's a woman and they're made that way. She's more set on
that chump than she'd be on the finest man you could bring her if you
hunted the world over for him."
They fared on in silence, the soft soil muffling their steps. The
wagon lurched on a hummock and David groaned.
"Are you meaning she cares for him?" asked Courant.
"All her might," answered the old man. "Ain't she goin' to marry the
varmint?"
It was an hour for understanding, no matter how bitter. Daddy John's
own dejection made him unsparing. He offered his next words as
confirmation of a condition that he thought would kill all hope in the
heart of the leader.
"Last night he made her get him water--the store we had left if you
hadn't found any. Twict in the night while I was asleep she took and
gave it to him. Then when I found it out she let me think she took it
for herself," he spat despondently. "She the same as lied for him. I
don't want to hear no more after that."
The mountain man rode with downdrooped head. Daddy John, who did not
know what he did, might well come to such conclusions. _He_ knew the
secret of the girl's contradictory actions. He looked into her
perturbed spirit and saw how desperately she clung to the letter of her
obligation, while she repudiated the spirit. Understanding her
solicitude for David, he knew that it was strengthened by the
consciousness of her disloyalty. But he felt no tenderness for these
distracted feminine waverings. It exhilarated him to think that while
she held to the betrothed of her father's choice and the bond of her
given word, her hold would loosen at his wish. As he had felt toward
enemies that he had conquered--crushed and subjected by his will--he
felt toward her. It was a crowning joy to know that he could make her
break her promise, turn her from her course of desperate fidelity, and
make her his own, not against her inclination, but against her pity,
her honor, her conscience.
The spoor left by his horse the night before was clear in the
starlight. He told Daddy John to follow it and drew up beside the
track to let the wagon pass him. Motionless he watched the girl's
approaching figure, and saw her rein her horse to a standstill.
"Come on," he said softly. "I want to speak to you."
She touched the horse and it started toward him. As she came nearer he
could see the troubled shine of her eyes.
"Why are you afraid?" he said, as he fell into place beside her.
"We're friends now."
She made no answer, her head bent till her face was hidden by her hat.
He laid his hand on her rein and brought the animal to a halt.
"Let the wagon get on ahead," he whispered. "We'll follow at a
distance."
The whisper, so low that the silence was unbroken by it, came to her, a
clear sound carrying with it a thrill of understanding. She trembled
and--his arm against hers as his hand held her rein--he felt the
subdued vibration like the quivering of a frightened animal. The wagon
lumbered away with the sifting dust gushing from the wheels. A stirred
cloud rose upon its wake and they could feel it thick and stifling in
their nostrils. She watched the receding arch cut down the back by the
crack in the closed canvas, while he watched her. The sound of crushed
twigs and straining wheels lessened, the stillness gathered between
these noises of laboring life and the two mounted figures. As it
settled each could hear the other's breathing and feel a mutual throb,
as though the same leaping artery fed them both. In the blue night
encircled by the waste, they were as still as vessels balanced to a
hair in which passion brimmed to the edge.
"Come on," she said huskily, and twitched her reins from his hold.
The horses started, walking slowly. A strip of mangled sage lay in
front, back of them the heavens hung, a star-strewn curtain. It seemed
to the man and woman that they were the only living things in the
world, its people, its sounds, its interests, were in some undescried
distance where life progressed with languid pulses. How long the
silence lasted neither knew. He broke it with a whisper:
"Why did you get David the water last night?"
Her answer came so low he had to bend to hear it.
"He wanted it. I had to."
"Why do you give him all he asks for? David is nothing to you."
This time no answer came, and he stretched his hand and clasped the
pommel of her saddle. The horses, feeling the pull of the powerful
arm, drew together. His knee pressed on the shoulder of her pony, and
feeling him almost against her she bent sideways, flinching from the
contact.
"Why do you shrink from me, Missy?"
"I'm afraid," she whispered.
They paced on for a moment in silence. When he tried to speak his lips
were stiff, and he moistened them to murmur:
"Of what?"
She shrunk still further and raised a hand between them. He snatched
at it, pulling it down, saying hoarsely:
"Of me?"
"Of something--I don't know what. Of something terrible and strange."
She tried to strike at her horse with the reins, but the man's hand
dropped like a hawk on the pommel and drew the tired animal back to the
foot pace.
"If you love me there's no need of fear," he said, then waited, the
sound of her terrified breathing like the beating of waves in his ears,
and murmured lower than before, "And you love me. I know it."
Her face showed in dark profile against the deep sky. He stared at it,
then suddenly set his teeth and gave the pommel a violent jerk that
made the horse stagger and grind against its companion. The creaking
of the wagon came faint from a wake of shadowy trail.
"You've done it for weeks. Before you knew. Before you lied to your
father when he tried to make you marry David."
She dropped the reins and clinched her hands against her breast, a
movement of repression and also of pleading to anything that would
protect her, any force that would give her strength to fight, not the
man alone, but herself. But the will was not within her. The desert
grew dim, the faint sounds from the wagon faded. Like a charmed bird,
staring straight before it, mute and enthralled, she rocked lightly to
left and right, and then swayed toward him.
The horse, feeling the dropped rein, stopped, jerking its neck forward
in the luxury of rest, its companion coming to a standstill beside it.
Courant raised himself in his saddle and gathered her in an embrace
that crushed her against his bony frame, then pressed against her face
with his, till he pushed it upward and could see it, white, with closed
eyes, on his shoulder. He bent till his long hair mingled with hers
and laid his lips on her mouth with the clutch of a bee on a flower.
They stood a compact silhouette, clear in the luminous starlight. The
crack in the canvas that covered the wagon back widened and the eye
that had been watching them, stared bright and wide, as if all the life
of the feeble body had concentrated in that one organ of sense. The
hands, damp and trembling, drew the canvas edges closer, but left space
enough for the eye to dwell on this vision of a shattered world. It
continued to gaze as Susan slid from the encircling arms, dropped from
her horse, and came running forward, stumbling on the fallen bushes, as
she ran panting out the old servant's name. Then it went back to the
mountain man, a black shape in the loneliness of the night.
CHAPTER V
A slowly lightening sky, beneath it the transparent sapphire of the
desert wakening to the dawn, and cutting the blue expanse the line of
the new trail. A long butte, a bristling outline on the paling north,
ran out from a crumpled clustering of hills, and the road bent to meet
it. The air came from it touched with a cooling freshness, and as they
pressed toward it they saw the small, swift shine of water, a little
pool, grass-ringed, with silver threads creeping to the sands.
They drank and then slept, sinking to oblivion as they dropped on the
ground, not waiting to undo their blankets or pick out comfortable
spots. The sun, lifting a bright eye above the earth's rim, shot its
long beams over their motionless figures, "bundles of life," alone in a
lifeless world.
David alone could not rest. Withdrawn from the others he lay in the
shadow of the wagon, watching small points in the distance with a
glance that saw nothing. All sense of pain and weakness had left him.
Physically he felt strangely light and free of sensation. With his
brain endowed with an abnormal activity he suffered an agony of spirit
so poignant that there were moments when he drew back and looked at
himself wondering how he endured it. He was suddenly broken away from
everything cherished and desirable in life. The bare and heart-rending
earth about him was as the expression of his ruined hopes. And after
these submergences in despair a tide of questions carried him to
livelier torment: Why had she done it? What had changed her? When had
she ceased to care?
All his deadened manhood revived. He wanted her, he owned her, she was
his. Sick and unable to fight for her she had been stolen from him,
and he writhed in spasms of self pity at the thought of the cruelty of
it. How could he, disabled, broken by unaccustomed hardships, cope
with the iron-fibered man whose body and spirit were at one with these
harsh settings? _He_ was unfitted for it, for the heroic struggle, for
the battle man to man for a woman as men had fought in the world's dawn
into which they had retraced their steps. He could not make himself
over, become another being to appeal to a sense in her he had never
touched. He could only plead with her, beg mercy of her, and he saw
that these were not the means that won women grown half savage in
correspondence with a savage environment.
Then came moments of exhaustion when he could not believe it. Closing
his eyes he called up the placid life that was to have been his and
Susan's, and could not think but that it still must be. Like a child
he clung to his hope, to the belief that something would intervene and
give her back to him; not he, he was unable to, but something that
stood for justice and mercy. All his life he had abided by the law,
walked uprightly, done his best. Was he to be smitten now through no
fault of his own? It was all a horrible dream, and presently there
would be an awakening with Susan beside him as she had been in the
first calm weeks of their betrothal. The sweetness of those days
returned to him with the intolerable pang of a fair time, long past and
never to come again. He threw his head back as if in a paroxysm of
pain. It could not be and yet in his heart he knew it was true. In
the grip of his torment he thought of the God that watching over Israel
slumbered not nor slept. With his eyes on the implacable sky he tried
to pray, tried to drag down from the empty gulf of air the help that
would bring back his lost happiness.
At Susan's first waking movement he started and turned his head toward
her. She saw him, averted her face, and began the preparations for the
meal. He lay watching her and he knew that her avoidance of his glance
was intentional. He also saw that her manner of preoccupied bustle was
affected. She was pale, her face set in hard lines. When she spoke
once to Daddy John her voice was unlike itself, hoarse and throaty, its
mellow music gone.
They gathered and took their places in silence, save for the old man,
who tried to talk, but meeting no response gave it up. Between the
three others not a word was exchanged. A stifling oppression lay on
them, and they did not dare to look at one another. The girl found it
impossible to swallow and taking a piece of biscuit from her mouth
threw it into the sand.
The air was sultry, light whisps of mist lying low over the plain. The
weight of these vaporous films seemed to rest on them heavy as the
weight of water, and before the meal was finished, Susan, overborne by
a growing dread and premonition of tragedy, rose and left her place,
disappearing round a buttress of the rock. Courant stopped eating and
looked after her, his head slowly moving as his eye followed her. To
anyone watching it would have been easy to read this pursuing glance,
the look of the hunter on his quarry. David saw it and rose to his
knees. A rifle lay within arm's reach, and for one furious moment he
felt an impulse to snatch it and kill the man. But a rush of
inhibiting instinct checked him. Had death or violence menaced her he
could have done it, but without the incentive of the immediate horror
he could never rise so far beyond himself.
Susan climbed the rock's side to a plateau on its western face. The
sun beat on her like a furnace mouth. Here and there black filigrees
of shade shrank to the bases of splintered ledges. Below the plain lay
outflung in the stupor of midday. On its verge the mountains
stretched, a bright blue, shadowless film. A mirage trembled to the
south, a glassy vision, crystal clear amid the chalky streakings and
the rings of parched and blanching sinks. Across the prospect the
faint, unfamiliar mist hung as if, in the torrid temperature, the earth
was steaming.
She sat down on a shelf of rock not feeling the burning sunshine or the
heat that the baked ledges threw back upon her. The life within her
was so intense that no impressions from the outside could enter, even
her eyes took in no image of the prospect they dwelt on. Courant's
kiss had brought her to a place toward which, she now realized, she had
been moving for a long time, advancing upon it, unknowing, but impelled
like a somnambulist willed toward a given goal. What was to happen she
did not know. She felt a dread so heavy that it crushed all else from
her mind. They had reached a crisis where everything had stopped, a
dark and baleful focus to which all that had gone before had been
slowly converging. The whole journey had been leading to this climax
of suspended breath and fearful, inner waiting.
She heard the scraping of ascending feet, and when she saw David stared
at him, her eyes unblinking in stony expectancy. He came and stood
before her, and she knew that at last he had guessed, and felt no fear,
no resistance against the explanation that must come. He suddenly had
lost all significance, was hardly a human organism, or if a human
organism, one that had no relation to her. Neither spoke for some
minutes. He was afraid, and she waited, knowing what he was going to
say, wishing it was said, and the hampering persistence of his claim
was ended.
At length he said tremulously:
"Susan, I saw you last night. What did you do it for? What am I to
think?"
That he had had proof of her disloyalty relieved her. There would be
less to say in this settling of accounts.
"Well," she answered, looking into his eyes. "You saw!"
He cried desperately, "I saw him kiss you. You let him. What did it
mean?"
"Why do you ask? If you saw you know."
"I don't know. I want to know. Tell me, explain to me." He paused,
and then cried with a pitiful note of pleading, "Tell me it wasn't so.
Tell me I made a mistake."
He was willing, anxious, for her to lie. Against the evidence of his
own senses he would have made himself believe her, drugged his pain
with her falsehoods. What remnant of consideration she had vanished.
"You made no mistake," she answered. "It was as you saw."
"I don't believe it. I can't. You wouldn't have done it. It's I
you're promised to. Haven't I your word? Haven't you been kind as an
angel to me when the others would have let me die out here like a dog?
What did you do it for if you didn't care?"
"I was sorry," and then with cold, measured slowness, "and I felt
guilty."
"That's it--you felt guilty. It's not your doing. You've been led
away. While I've been sick that devil's been poisoning you against me.
He's tried to steal you from me. But you're not the girl to let him do
that. You'll come back to me--the man that you belong to, that's loved
you since the day we started."
To her at this naked hour, where nothing lived but the truth, the
thought that he would take her back with the other man's kisses on her
lips, made her unsparing. She drew back from him, stiffening in
shocked repugnance, and speaking with the same chill deliberation.
"I'll never come back to you. It's all over, that love with you. I
didn't know. I didn't feel. I was a child with no sense of what she
was doing. Now everything's different. It's he I must go with and be
with as long as I live."
The hideousness of the discovery had been made the night before. Had
her words been his first intimation they might have shocked him into
stupefied dumbness and made him seem the hero who meets his fate with
closed lips. But hours long he had brooded and knew her severance from
him had taken place. With the mad insistance of a thought whirling on
in fevered repetition he had told himself that he must win her back,
urge, struggle, plead, till he had got her where she was before or lose
her forever.
"You can't. You can't do it. It's a temporary thing. It's the desert
and the wildness and because he could ride and get water and find the
trail. In California it will be different. Out there it'll be the
same as it used to be back in the States. You'll think of this as
something unreal that never happened and your feeling for him--it'll
all go. When we get where it's civilized you'll be like you were when
we started. You couldn't have loved a savage like that then. Well,
you won't when you get where you belong. It's horrible. It's
unnatural."
She shook her head, glanced at him and glanced away. The sweat was
pouring off his face and his lips quivered like a weeping child's.
"Oh, David," she said with a deep breath like a groan, "_this_ is
natural for me. The other was not."
"You don't know what you're saying. And how about your promise? _You_
gave that of your own free will. Was it a thing you give and take back
whenever you please? What would your father think of your breaking
your word--throwing me off for a man no better than a half-blood
Indian? Is that your honor?" Then he was suddenly fearful that he had
said too much and hurt his case, and he dropped to a wild pleading:
"Oh, Susan, you can't, you can't. You haven't got the heart to treat
me so."
She looked down not answering, but her silence gave no indication of a
softened response. He seemed to throw himself upon its hardness in
hopeless desperation.
"Send him away. He needn't go on with us. Tell him to go back to the
Fort."
"Where would we be now without him?" she said and smiled grimly at the
thought of their recent perils with the leader absent.
"We're on the main trail. We don't need him now. I heard him say
yesterday to Daddy John we'd be in Humboldt in three or four days. We
can go on without him, there's no more danger."
She smiled again, a slight flicker of one corner of her mouth. The
dangers were over and Courant could be safely dispensed with.
"He'll go on with us," she said.
"It's not necessary. We don't want him. I'll guide. I'll help. If
he was gone I'd be all right again. Daddy John and I are enough. If I
can get you back as you were before, we'll be happy again, and I _can_
get you back if he goes."
"You'll never get me back," she answered, and rising moved away from
him, aloof and hostile in the deepest of all aversions, the woman to
the unloved and urgent suitor. He followed her and caught at her dress.
"Don't go. Don't leave me this way. I can't believe it. I can't
stand it. If I hadn't grown into thinking you were going to be my wife
maybe I could. But it's just unbearable when I'd got used to looking
upon you as mine, almost as good as married to me. You can't do it.
You can't make me suffer this way."
His complete abandonment filled her with pain, the first relenting she
had had. She could not look at him and longed to escape. She tried to
draw her dress from his hands, saying:
"Oh, David, don't say any more. There's no good. It's over. It's
ended. I can't help it. It's something stronger than I am."
He saw the repugnance in her face and loosened his hold, dropping back
from her.
"It's the end of my life," he said in a muffled voice.
"I feel as if it was the end of the world," she answered, and going to
the pathway disappeared over its edge.
She walked back skirting the rock's bulk till she found a break in its
side, a small gorge shadowed by high walls. The cleft penetrated deep,
its mouth open to the sky, its apex a chamber over which the cloven
walls slanted like hands with finger tips touching in prayer. It was
dark in this interior space, the floor mottled with gleaming sun-spots.
Across the wider opening, unroofed to the pale blue of the zenith, the
first slow shade was stretching, a creeping gray coolness, encroaching
on the burning ground. Here she threw herself down, looking out
through the entrance at the desert shimmering through the heat haze.
The mist wreaths were dissolving, every line and color glassily clear.
Her eyes rested vacantly on it, her body inert, her heart as heavy as a
stone.
David made no movement to follow her. He had clung to his hope with
the desperation of a weak nature, but it was ended now. No
interference, no miracle, could restore her to him. He saw--he had to
see--that she was lost to him as completely as if death had claimed
her. More completely, for death would have made her a stranger. Now
it was the Susan he had loved who had looked at him with eyes not even
indifferent but charged with a hard hostility. She was the same and
yet how different! Hopeless!--Hopeless! He wondered if the word had
ever before voiced so abject a despair.
He turned to the back of the plateau and saw the faint semblance of a
path leading upward to higher levels, a trail worn by the feet of other
emigrants who had climbed to scan with longing eyes the weary way to
the land of their desire. As he walked up it and the prospect widened
on his sight, its message came, clearer with every mounting step. Thus
forever would he look out on a blasted world uncheered by sound or
color. The stillness that lapped him round was as the stillness of his
own dead heart. The mirage quivered brilliant in the distance, and he
paused, a solitary shape against the exhausted sky, to think that his
dream of love had had no more reality. Beautiful and alluring it had
floated in his mind, an illusion without truth or substance.
He reached the higher elevation, barren and iron hard, the stone hot to
his feet. On three sides the desert swept out to the horizon, held in
its awful silence. Across it, a white seam, the Emigrant Trail wound,
splindling away into the west, a line of tortuous curves, a loop, a
straight streak, and then a tiny thread always pressing on to that
wonderful land which he had once seen as a glowing rim on the world's
remotest verge. It typified the dauntless effort of man, never
flagging, never broken, persisting to its goal. He had not been able
to thus persist, the spirit had not reached far enough to know its aim
and grasp it. He knew his weakness, his incapacity to cope with the
larger odds of life, a watcher not an actor in the battle, and
understanding that his failure had come from his own inadequacy he
wished that he might die.
On one side the eminence broke away in a sheer fall to the earth below.
At its base a scattering of sundered bowlders and fragments lay, veiled
by a growth of small, bushy shrubs to which a spring gave nourishment.
Behind this the long spine of the rock tapered back to the parent ridge
that ran, a bristling rampart, east and west. He sat down on the edge
of the precipice watching the trail. He had no idea how long he
remained thus. A shadow falling across him brought him back to life.
He turned and saw Courant standing a few feet from him.
Without speech or movement they eyed one another. In his heart each
hated the other, but in David the hate had come suddenly, the hysteric
growth of a night's anguish. The mountain man's was tempered by a
process of slow-firing to a steely inflexibility. He hated David that
he had ever been his rival, that he had ever thought to lay claim to
the woman who was his, that he had ever aspired to her, touched her,
desired her. He hated him when he saw that, all unconsciously, he had
still a power to hold her from the way her passion led. And back of
all was the ancient hatred, the heritage from ages lost in the
beginnings of the race, man's of man in the struggle for a woman.
David rose from his crouching posture to his knees. The other, all his
savage instincts primed for onslaught, saw menace in the movement, and
stood braced and ready. Like Susan he understood that David had
guessed the secret. He could judge him only by his own measure, and he
knew the settling of the score had come. There was no right or justice
in his claim, only the right of the stronger to win what he wanted, but
that to him was the supreme right.
David's sick fury shot up into living flame. He judged Susan innocent,
a tool in ruthless hands. He saw the destroyer of their lives, a devil
who had worked subtly for his despoilment. The air grew dark and in
the center of the darkness, his hate concentrated on the watching face,
and an impulse, the strongest of his life, nerved him with the force to
kill. For once he broke beyond himself, rose outside the restrictions
that had held him cowering within his sensitive shell. His rage had
the vehemence of a distracted woman's, and he threw himself upon his
enemy, inadequate now as always, but at last unaware and unconscious.
They clutched and rocked together. From the moment of the grapple it
was unequal--a sick and wounded creature struggling in arms that were
as iron bands about his puny frame. But as a furious child fights for
a moment successfully with its enraged elder, he tore and beat at his
opponent, striking blindly at the face he loathed, writhing in the grip
that bent his body and sent the air in sobbing gasps from his lungs.
Their trampling was muffled on the stone, their shadows leaped in
contorted waverings out from their feet and back again. Broken and
twisted in Courant's arms, David felt no pain only the blind hate, saw
the livid plain heaving about him, the white ball of the sun, and
twisting through the reeling distance the pale thread of the Emigrant
Trail, glancing across his ensanguined vision like a shuttle weaving
through a blood-red loom.
They staggered to the edge of the plateau and there hung. It was only
for a moment, a last moment of strained and swaying balance. Courant
felt the body against his weaken, wrenched himself free, and with a
driving blow sent it outward over the precipice. It fell with the arms
flung wide, the head dropped backward, and from the open mouth a cry
broke, a shrill and dreadful sound that struck sharp on the plain's
abstracted silence, spread and quivered across its surface like
widening rings on the waters of a pool. The mountain man threw himself
on the edge and looked down. The figure lay limp among the bushes
thirty feet below. He watched it, his body still as a panther's
crouched for a spring. He saw one of the hands twitch, a loosened
sliver of slate slide from the wall, and cannoning on projections, leap
down and bury itself in the outflung hair. The face looking up at him
with half-shut eyes that did not wink as the rock dust sifted into
them, was terrible, but he felt no sensation save a grim curiosity.
He stole down a narrow gulley and crept with stealthy feet and
steadying hands toward the still shape. The shadows were cool down
there, and as he touched the face its warmth shocked him. It should
have been cold to have matched its look and the hush of the place. He
thrust his hand inside the shirt and felt at the heart. No throb rose
under his palm, and he sent it sliding over the upper part of the body,
limp now, but which he knew would soon be stiffening. The man was dead.
Courant straightened himself and sent a rapid glance about him. The
bushes among which the body lay were close matted in a thick screen.
Through their roots the small trickle of the spring percolated,
stealing its way to the parched sands outside. It made a continuous
murmuring, as if nature was lifting a voice of low, insistent protest
against the desecration of her peace.
The man standing with stilled breath and rigid muscles listened for
other sounds. Reassured that there were none, his look swept right and
left for a spot wherein to hide the thing that lay at his feet. At its
base the rock wall slanted outward leaving a hollow beneath its eave
where the thin veneer of water gleamed from the shadows. He took the
dead man under the arms and dragged him to it, careful of branches that
might snap under his foot, pausing to let the echoes of rolling stones
die away--a figure of fierce vitality with the long, limp body hanging
from his hands. At the rock he crouched and thrust his burden under
the wall's protecting cope, the trickle of the water dying into a
sudden, scared silence. Stepping back he brushed the bushes into
shape, hiding their breakage, and bent to gather the scattered leaves
and crush them into crevices. When it was done the place showed no
sign of the intruder, only the whispering of the streamlet told that
its course was changed and it was feeling for a new channel.
Then he crept softly out to the plain's edge where the sunlight lay
long and bright. It touched his face and showed it white, with lips
close set and eyes gleaming like crystals. He skirted the rock, making
a soft, quick way to where the camp lay. Here the animals stood, heads
drooped as they cropped the herbage round the spring. Daddy John sat
in the shade of the wagon, tranquilly cleaning a gun. The mountain
man's passage was so soundless that he did not hear it. The animals
raised slow eyes to the moving figure, then dropped them indifferently.
He passed them, his step growing lighter, changing as he withdrew from
the old man's line of vision, to a long, rapid glide. His blood-shot
eyes nursed the extending buttresses, and as he came round them, with
craned neck and body reaching forward, they sent a glance into each
recess that leaped round it like a flame.
Susan had remained in the same place. She made no note of the passage
of time, but the sky between the walls was growing deeper in color, the
shadows lengthening along the ground. She was lying on her side
looking out through the rift's opening when Courant stood there. He
made an instant's pause, a moment when his breath caught deep, and,
seeing him, she started to her knees with a blanching face. As he came
upon her she held out her hands, crying in uprising notes of terror,
"No! No! No!" But he gathered her in his arms, stilled her cries
with his kisses, and bending low carried her back into the darkened
cavern over which the rocks closed like hands uplifted in prayer.
CHAPTER VI
Till the afternoon of the next day they held the train for David. When
evening fell and he did not come Daddy John climbed the plateau and
kindled a beacon fire that threw its flames against the stars. Then he
took his rifle and skirted the rock's looming bulk, shattering the
stillness with reports that let loose a shivering flight of echoes.
All night they sat by the fire listening and waiting. As the hours
passed their alarm grew and their speculations became gloomier and more
sinister. Courant was the only one who had a plausible theory. The
moving sparks on the mountains showed that the Indians were still
following them and it was his opinion that David had strayed afar and
been caught by a foraging party. It was not a matter for desperate
alarm as the Diggers were harmless and David would no doubt escape from
them and join a later train. This view offered the only possible
explanation. It was Courant's opinion and so it carried with the other
two.
Early in the evening the girl had shown no interest. Sitting back from
the firelight, a shawl over her head, she seemed untouched by the
anxiety that prompted the old man's restless rovings. As the night
deepened Daddy John had come back to Courant who was near her. He
spoke his fears low, for he did not want to worry her. Glancing to see
if she had heard him, he was struck by the brooding expression of her
face, white between the shawl folds. He nodded cheerily at her but her
eyes showed no responsive gleam, dwelling on him wide and unseeing. As
he moved away he heard her burst into sudden tears, such tears as she
had shed at the Fort, and turning back with arms ready for her
comforting, saw her throw herself against Courant's knees, her face
buried in the folds of her shawl. He stood arrested, amazed not so
much by the outburst as by the fact that it was to Courant she had
turned and not to him. But when he spoke to her she drew the shawl
tighter over her head and pressed her face against the mountain man's
knees. Daddy John had no explanation of her conduct but that she had
been secretly fearful about David and had turned for consolation to the
human being nearest her.
The next day her anxiety was so sharp that she could not eat and the
men grew accustomed to the sight of her mounted on the rock's summit,
or walking slowly along the trail searching with untiring eyes. When
alone with her lover he kissed and caressed her fears into abeyance.
As he soothed her, clasped close against him, her terrors gradually
subsided, sinking to a quiescence that came, not alone from his calm
and practical reassurances, but from the power of his presence to drug
her reason and banish all thoughts save those of him. He wanted her
mind free of the dead man, wanted him eliminated from her imagination.
The spiritual image of David must fade from her thoughts as his
corporeal part would soon fade in the desiccating desert airs. Alone
by the spring, held against Courant's side by an arm that trembled with
a passion she still only half understood, she told him of her last
interview with David. In an agony of self-accusation she whispered:
"Oh, Low, could he have killed himself?"
"Where?" said the man. "Haven't we searched every hole and corner of
the place? He couldn't have hidden his own body."
The only evidence that some mishap had befallen David was Daddy John's,
who, on the afternoon of the day of the disappearance had heard a cry,
a single sound, long and wild. It had seemed to come from the crest of
the rock, and the old man had listened and hearing no more had thought
it the yell of some animal far on the mountains. This gave color to
Courant's theory that the lost man had been seized by the Diggers.
Borne away along the summit of the ridge he would have shouted to them
and in that dry air the sound would have carried far. He could have
been overpowered without difficulty, weakened by illness and carrying
no arms.
They spent the morning in a fruitless search and in the afternoon
Courant insisted on the train moving on. They cached provisions by the
spring and scratched an arrow on the rock pointing their way, and
underneath it the first letters of their names. It was useless, the
leader said, to leave anything in the form of a letter. As soon as
their dust was moving on the trail the Diggers would sweep down on the
camp and carry away every scrap of rag and bone that was there. This
was why he overrode Susan's plea to leave David's horse. Why present
to the Indians a horse when they had only sufficient for themselves?
She wrung her hands at the grewsome picture of David escaping and
stealing back to find a deserted camp. But Courant was inexorable and
the catching-up went forward with grim speed.
She and the old man were dumb with depression as the train rolled out.
To them the desertion seemed an act of appalling heartlessness. But
the mountain man had overcome Daddy John's scruples by a picture of
their own fate if they delayed and were caught in the early snows of
the Sierras. The girl could do nothing but trust in the word that was
already law to her. He rode beside her murmuring reassurances and
watching her pale profile. Her head hung low on her breast, her hat
casting a slant of shadow to her chin. Her eyes looked gloomily
forward, sometimes as his words touched a latent chord of hope, turning
quickly upon him and enveloping him in a look of pathetic trust.
At the evening halt she ate nothing, sitting in a muse against the
wagon wheel. Presently she put her plate down and, mounting on the
axle, scanned the way they had come. She could see the rock, rising
like the clumsy form of a dismantled galleon from the waters of a
darkling sea. For a space she stood, her hand arched above her eyes,
then snatched the kerchief from her neck and, straining an arm aloft,
waved it. The white and scarlet rag flapped with a languid motion, an
infinitesimal flutter between the blaze of the sky and the purpling
levels of the earth. Her arm dropped, her signal fallen futile on the
plain's ironic indifference.
During the next day's march she constantly looked back, and several
times halted, her hand demanding silence as if she were listening for
pursuing footsteps. Courant hid a growing irritation, which once
escaped him in a query as to whether she thought David, if he got away
from the Indians, could possibly catch them up. She answered that if
he had escaped with a horse he might, and fell again to her listening
and watching. At the night camp she ordered Daddy John to build the
beacon fire higher than ever, and taking a rifle moved along the
outskirts of the light firing into the darkness. Finally, standing
with the gun caught in the crook of her arm, she sent up a shrill call
of "David." The cry fell into the silence, cleaving it with a note of
wild and haunting appeal. Courant went after her and brought her back.
When they returned to the fire the old man, who was busy with the
cooking, looked up to speak but instead gazed in silence, caught by
something unusual in their aspect, revivifying, illuminating, like the
radiance of an inner glow. It glorified the squalor of their clothing,
the drawn fatigue of their faces. It gave them the fleeting glamour of
spiritual beauty that comes to those in whom being has reached its
highest expression, the perfect moment of completion caught amid life's
incompleteness.
In the following days she moved as if the dust cloud that inclosed her
was an impenetrable medium that interposed itself between her and the
weird setting of the way. She was drugged with the wine of a new life.
She did not think of sin, of herself in relation to her past, of the
breaking with every tie that held her to her old self. All her
background was gone. Her conscience that, in her dealings with David,
had been so persistently lively, now, when it came to herself, was
dead. Question of right or wrong, secret communings, self judgment,
had no place in the exaltation of her mood. To look at her conduct and
reason of it, to do anything but feel, was as impossible for her as it
would have been to disengage her senses from their tranced
concentration and restore them to the composed serenity of the past.
It was not the sudden crumbling of a character, the collapse of a
structure reared on a foundation of careful training. It was a logical
growth, forced by the developing process of an environment with which
that character was in harmony. Before she reached the level where she
could surrender herself, forgetful of the rites imposed by law,
unshocked by her lover's brutality, she had been losing every ingrafted
and inherited modification that had united her with the world in which
she had been an exotic. The trials of the trail that would have dried
the soul and broken the mettle of a girl whose womanhood was less rich,
drew from hers the full measure of its strength. Every day had made
her less a being of calculated, artificial reserves, of inculcated
modesties, and more a human animal, governed by instincts that belonged
to her age and sex. She was normal and chaste and her chastity had
made her shrink from the man whose touch left her cold, and yield to
the one to whom her first antagonism had been first response. When she
had given Courant her kiss she had given herself. There was no need
for intermediary courtship. After that vacillations of doubt and
conscience ended. The law of her being was all that remained.
She moved on with the men, dust-grimed, her rags held together with
pins and lacings of deer hide. She performed her share of the work
with automatic thoroughness, eating when the hour came, sleeping on the
ground under the stars, staggering up in the deep-blue dawn and
buckling her horse's harness with fingers that fatigue made clumsy.
She was more silent than ever before, often when the old man addressed
her making no reply. He set down her abstraction to grief over David.
When he tried to cheer her, her absorbed preoccupation gave place to
the old restlessness, and once again she watched and listened. These
were her only moods--periods of musing when she rode in front of the
wagon with vacant eyes fixed on the winding seam of the trail, and
periods of nervous agitation when she turned in her saddle to sweep the
road behind her and ordered him to build the night fire high and bright.
The old servant was puzzled. Something foreign in her, an inner
vividness of life, a deeper current of vitality, told him that this was
not a woman preyed upon by a gnawing grief. He noted, without
understanding, a change in her bearing to Courant and his to her.
Without words to give it expression he saw in her attitude to the
leader a pliant, docile softness, a surreptitious leap of light in the
glance that fell upon him in quick welcome before her lids shut it in.
With Courant the change showed in a possessive tenderness, a brooding
concern. When, at the morning start, he waited as she rode toward him,
his face was irradiated with a look that made the old man remember the
dead loves of his youth. It was going to be all right Daddy John
thought. David gone, whether forever or for an unknown period, the
mountain man might yet win her. And then again the old man fell a
wondering at something in them that did not suggest the unassured
beginnings of courtship, a settled security of relation as of complete
unity in a mutual enterprise.
One afternoon a faint spot of green rose and lingered on the horizon.
They thought it a mirage and watched it with eyes grown weary of the
desert's delusions. But as the road bore toward it, it steadied to
their anxious gaze, expanded into a patch that lay a living touch on
the earth's dead face. By the time that dusk gathered they saw that it
was trees and knew that Humboldt was in sight. At nightfall they
reached it, the first outpost sent into the wilderness by the new
country. The red light of fires came through the dusk like a welcoming
hail from that unknown land which was to be theirs. After supper Daddy
John and Courant left the girl and went to the mud house round which
the camps clustered. The darkness was diluted by the red glow of fires
and astir with dusky figures. There were trains for California and
Oregon and men from the waste lands to the eastward and the south,
flotsam and jetsam thrown up on the desert's shore. Inside, where the
air was thick with smoke and the reek of raw liquors, they heard again
the great news from California. The old man, determined to get all the
information he could, moved from group to group, an observant listener
in the hubbub. Presently his ear was caught by a man who declared he
had been on the gold river and was holding a circle in thrall by his
tales. Daddy John turned to beckon to Courant and, not seeing him,
elbowed his way through the throng spying to right and left. But the
mountain man had gone. Daddy John went back to the gold seeker and
drew him dry of information, then foregathered with a thin individual
who had a humorous eye and was looking on from a corner. This stranger
introduced himself as a clergyman, returning from the East to Oregon by
way of California. They talked together. Daddy John finding his new
acquaintance a tolerant cheery person versed in the lore of the trail.
The man gave him many useful suggestions for the last lap of the
journey and he decided to go after Courant, to whom the route over the
Sierra was unknown ground.
The camps had sunk to silence, the women and children asleep. He
skirted their tents, bending his course to where he saw the hood of his
own wagon and the shadowy forms of Julia and her mates. The fire still
burned bright and on its farther side he could make out the figures of
Susan and Courant seated on the ground. They were quiet, the girl
sitting with her feet tucked under her, idly throwing scraps of sage on
the blaze. He was about to hail Courant when he saw him suddenly drop
to a reclining posture beside her, draw himself along the earth and
curl about her, his elbow on the ground, his head propped on a
sustaining hand. With the other he reached forward, caught Susan's and
drawing it toward him pressed it against his cheek. Daddy John watched
the sacrilegious act with starting eyes. He would have burst in upon
them had he not seen the girl's shy smile, and her body gently droop
forward till her lips rested on the mountain man's. When she drew back
the old servant came forward into the light. Its reflection hid his
pallor, but his heart was thumping like a hammer and his throat was
dry, for suddenly he understood. At his step Susan drew away from her
companion and looked at the advancing shape with eyes darkly soft as
those of an antelope.
"Where have you been?" she said. "You were a long time away."
"In the mud house," said Daddy John.
"Did you find anyone interesting there?"
"Yes. When I was talkin' with him I didn't know he was so powerful
interestin', but sence I come out o' there I've decided he was."
They both looked at him without much show of curiosity, merely, he
guessed, that they might not look at each other and reveal their secret.
"What was he?" asked Courant.
"A clergyman."
This time they both started, the girl into sudden erectness, then held
her head down as if in shame. For a sickened moment, he thought she
was afraid to look at her lover for fear of seeing refusal in his face.
Courant leaned near her and laid his hand on hers.
"If there's a clergyman here we can be married," he said quietly.
She drew her hand away and with its fellow covered her face. Courant
looked across the fire and said:
"Go and get him, Daddy John. He can do the reading over us now."
END OF PART IV
PART V
The Promised Land
CHAPTER I
In the light of a clear September sun they stood and looked down on
it--the Promised Land.
For days they had been creeping up through defiles in the mountain
wall, crawling along ledges with murmurous seas of pine below and the
snow lying crisp in the hollows. On the western slope the great
bulwark dropped from granite heights to wooded ridges along the spines
of which the road wound. Through breaks in the pine's close ranks they
saw blue, vaporous distances, and on the far side of aerial chasms the
swell of other mountains, clothed to their summits, shape undulating
beyond shape.
Then on this bright September afternoon a sun-filled pallor of empty
space shone between the tree trunks, and they had hurried to the summit
of a knoll and seen it spread beneath them--California!
The long spurs, broken apart by ravines, wound downward to where a flat
stretch of valley ran out to a luminous horizon. It was a yellow
floor, dotted with the dark domes of trees and veined with a line of
water. The trail, a red thread, was plain along the naked ridges, and
then lost itself in the dusk of forests. Right and left summit and
slope swelled and dropped, sun-tipped, shadow filled. Slants of light,
rifts of shade, touched the crowded pine tops to gold, darkened them to
sweeps of unstirred olive. The air, softly clear, was impregnated with
a powerful aromatic scent, the strong, rich odor of the earth and its
teeming growths. It lay placid and indolent before the way-worn trio,
a new world waiting for their conquering feet.
The girl, with a deep sigh, dropped her head upon her husband's
shoulder and closed her eyes. She weakened with the sudden promise of
rest. It was in the air, soft as a caress, in the mild, beneficent
sun, in the stillness which had nothing of the desert's sinister quiet.
Courant put his arm about her, and looking into her face, saw it drawn
and pinched, all beauty gone. Her closed eyelids were dark and seamed
with fine folds, the cheek bones showed under her skin, tanned to a dry
brown, its rich bloom withered. Round her forehead and ears her hair
hung in ragged locks, its black gloss hidden under the trail's red
dust. Even her youth had left her, she seemed double her age. It was
as if he looked at the woman she would be twenty years from now.
Something in the sight of her, unbeautiful, enfeebled, her high spirit
dimmed, stirred in him a new, strange tenderness. His arm tightened
about her, his look lost its jealous ardor and wandering over her
blighted face, melted to a passionate concern. The appeal of her
beauty gave place to a stronger, more gripping appeal, never felt by
him before. She was no longer the creature he owned and ruled, no
longer the girl he had broken to an abject submission, but the woman he
loved. Uplifted in the sudden realization he felt the world widen
around him and saw himself another man. Then through the wonder of the
revelation came the thought of what he had done to win her. It
astonished him as a dart of pain would have done. Why had he
remembered it? Why at this rich moment should the past send out this
eerie reminder? He pushed it from him, and bending toward her murmured
a lover's phrase.
She opened her eyes and they met an expression in his that she had felt
the need of, hoped and waited for, an answer to what she had offered
and he had not seen or wanted. It was completion, arrival at the goal,
so longed for and despaired of, and she turned her face against his
shoulder, her happiness too sacred even for his eyes. He did not
understand the action, thought her spirit languished and, pointing
outward, cried in his mounting gladness:
"Look--that's where our home will be."
She lifted her head and followed the directing finger. The old man
stood beside them also gazing down.
"It's a grand sight," he said. "But it's as yellow as the desert.
Must be almighty dry."
"There's plenty of water," said Courant. "Rivers come out of these
mountains and go down there into the plain. And they carry the gold,
the gold that's going to make us rich."
He pressed her shoulder with his encircling arm and she answered
dreamily:
"We are rich enough."
He thought she alluded to the Doctor's money that was hidden in the
wagon.
"But we'll be richer. We've got here before the rest of 'em. We're
the first comers and it's ours. You'll be queen here, Susan. I'll
make you one." His glance ranged over the splendid prospect, eager
with the man's desire to fight and win for his own. She thought little
of what he said, lost in her perfect content.
"When we've got the gold we'll take up land and I'll build a house for
you, a good house, my wife won't live in a tent. It'll be of logs,
strong and water tight, and as soon as they bring things in--and the
ships will be coming soon--we'll furnish it well. And that'll be only
the beginning."
"Where will we build it?" she said, catching his enthusiasm and
straining her eyes as if then and there to pick out the spot.
"By the river under a pine."
"With a place for Daddy John," she cried, stretching a hand toward the
old man. "He must be there too."
He took it and stood linked to the embracing pair by the girl's warm
grasp.