A HONEYMOON IN THE HILLS
SAM YERBY strolled up and down the station platform. His wife clung to
him on one side and on the other trotted Boy, hand in hand with his
new-found father. Outwardly Rogers and Cole took their good fortune
philosophically, but the Texan could not hide his delight at Missie,
Boy, and freedom. The habits of his former life began to reassert
themselves. His cheek bulged with a chew of tobacco. As the old cowman
grinned jauntily at Ruth, who had come down to see the party off, he
chirruped out a stanza of a range song:
“Goin’ back to town to draw my money,
Goin’ back home for to see my honey.
“Only I don’t have to go home to see her. She done come to see the old
man. I tell you it’s great, Miss Ruth. This air now; Lordee, I jus’ gulp
it down! But I’ll bet it ain’t a circumstance to that on the Fryingpan.
I’m sure honin’ to hit the old trails again.”
Ruth smiled through her tears. “Good days ahead, Mr. Yerby, for all of
us. We know just how you feel, don’t we, Missie?”
“When do you-all expect Mac to get in?”
“Some time this afternoon. Here comes your train. We’ll see you soon.”
After the train had gone Ruth walked back to the hotel where she was
staying. Governor McDowell had given a complete pardon to all four of
the cattlemen, but Rowan had not yet reached town from the distant road
camp where he was working. The clerk handed the young woman a letter. It
was from Jennings and was postmarked at a small town seventy miles
farther up the line.
Ruth reclaimed the baby from the nursemaid with whom she had left him
and went up to her room. A man came swinging with crisp step along the
dark corridor. She would have known that stride anywhere. A wave of
emotion crashed through her. In another moment she was in his arms.
“Oh, Rowan—at last!” she cried.
Presently they moved into the room and he held her from him while he
searched her face. Since last he had seen her she had endured the sting
of rain, the bluster of wind, and the beat of sun. They had played havoc
with her wild-rose complexion and the satin of her skin. She was no
longer the hothouse exotic he had married, a slip of a girl
experimenting with life, but a woman strong as tested steel. Here was a
mate worthy of any man, one with a vigorous, brave spirit clad in a body
of exquisite grace, young and lissom and vital.
An incomparable mate for some man! But was he the man that could hold
her? His old doubts asserted themselves in spite of the white dream of
her his heart had held through the years of their separation. She had
been loyal—never a woman more so. But he wanted more than loyalty.
Perhaps it was from him she got it. At any rate, an unexpected touch of
shyness lowered her lashes. She caught up the baby and handed him to the
father.
“Here is your son,” she said, the colour glowing in her cheeks.
Rowan looked at the little being that was flesh of his flesh and blood
of his blood, and his heart went out to the child in complete surrender.
Something primeval, old as the race, set him in an inner tumult. The
flame of life had passed through him to this dimpled babe. The child was
his—and Ruth’s. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never again know
quite the ecstasy of that moment.
To escape the tension of her feeling Ruth hurried into explanations.
“I’ve made all our arrangements for the next three days. You’re not to
ask me anything about them. You’re going to be personally conducted by
me and Baby, and you’ll have to do whatever we tell you to do. Do you
understand, sir?”
He smiled and nodded. This particular Ruth—the one that gave gay,
imperious orders—was an old friend of his. His heart welcomed her.
Apparently her plans included an automobile journey. Within an hour they
were driving through a desert of sand and sagebrush toward the
mountains. They glimpsed in the distance a couple of antelope shining in
the sunlight. Once a sage hen whirred from almost beneath the wheels of
the car. Great bare buttes rose in front of them and marched slowly to
the rear.
Rowan asked no questions. He wondered where she was taking him, but he
was content to await developments so long as he could sit beside Ruth
with the youngster on his lap.
As for Ruth her blood began to beat faster with excitement. She was
trying an experiment. If it proved a failure she knew she would be very
greatly disappointed. Just now it seemed to her that she had set the
whole happiness of her life at stake. For if Rowan did not look at it as
she did, if his joy in it did not equal her hopes, they would fail by
just so much of that unity of mind for which she prayed.
They had left Rawlins before noon. It was well into the middle of the
afternoon before the driver of the car stopped at a little two-store
village deep in the hills.
“We get out here,” Ruth told her husband.
She settled with the owner of the car, and the man started back to
Rawlins. Opposite the store where they had stopped was a corral. Ruth
led the way to it. Three horses were eating hay from a rack.
Rowan looked at them, then at Ruth. He had recognized two of the
animals, and the third one showed on the flank the Circle Diamond brand.
“Am I to ask questions yet?” McCoy wanted to know.
“If you like,” she smiled.
“Are we to ride home on the pinto and old Duke?”
“Yes.”
“And the sorrel?”
“For a pack horse.”
“You have supplies and a tent?”
“Jennings brought them.”
He took a deep breath of delight. For three days and nights they would
be alone, buried together in the eternal hills. Such a home-coming as
this had been beyond his dreams.
“Are you—glad?” she asked, and her voice was tremulous.
“Glad!” He spoke a little roughly to hide his deep feeling. “If I could
only let you know how I feel! If I could!”
Her heart jumped with a sudden gladness. Rowan did not want to meet his
friends yet. He wanted to be alone with her and the baby. This was to
be, then, their true honeymoon, the seal of their love for each other.
Rowan saddled the horses and packed the third animal, throwing the
diamond hitch expertly. His wife watched him work. It was a joy to see
how the vigour of his spirit found expression in the economy of his
movements, in the certainty of his fingers, in the easy power of the
shoulders muscled so beautifully where the bronzed neck sloped into
them.
Presently they were moving into the bigger hills. They saw no more sage
chickens or antelope, but as they wound deeper into the mountains his
keen eye detected signs of life that escaped her observation. He made
her get down once to look at the trail of an elk.
“We’ve been following his trail from that pine back there,” McCoy told
her. “He’s a big fellow, and he was on his way down to water. But he got
scared right here, I expect. Maybe he heard us coming, or maybe he
smelled a bear. Anyhow, he plunged right into the aspens without waiting
to say good-bye.”
“How do you know all that? I believe you’re spoofing, as one of our
riders, an Englishman, sometimes tells me when I joke him.”
“He’s left signposts all along the way. There’s one track. See? And
there’s another. They’re big tracks and they are far apart. The spread
of his forefeet shows that he’s a bull. Now notice where he broke the
brush here and how trampled down the young aspens are. His horn ripped
the bark clear off this tree. See how far from the ground it is. That
shows his height.”
“Yes, but how do you know he was frightened?”
“He dived into the brush mighty reckless. Why didn’t he wait and turn
off there by the big rock where the going would be easy? I reckon he
thought he hadn’t time.”
They camped far up beside a mountain lake. He pitched tent in a
beautiful grove of wide-spaced pines through which a brook sang its way
down to the lake. While he unpacked and made preparations for supper
Ruth took the rod to try her luck. When she returned half an hour later
the tent was pegged down, young pine boughs cut and spread for a bed,
and the fire going for their meal. Rowan had the water on to boil for
coffee, and slices of bacon in the frying pan ready to set upon the
rocks that hedged in his coals.
“I got the big fellow on a royal coachman. He took it with a rush,” she
explained.
McCoy cleaned the fish in the brook and cooked them in the pan when the
bacon grease was ready. They ate with the healthy appetite of outdoor
animals in the hills.
Ruth told him the gossip of the ranch and of the neighbourhood. She
retailed to him what she knew of the politics of the county. It pleased
her that his interest in these far-away topics was as yet perfunctory.
His world just now consisted of three persons, and of the three she was
the most important.
“You’re going to lose Jennings,” she told him.
“Isn’t he satisfied?”
Little imps of mischief danced in her eyes. “Not quite, but I think he’s
going to be. He has notions of marrying a handsome widow with a sheep
ranch.”
Rowan looked at her quickly. “You don’t mean Norma Tait?”
“Don’t I? Why not?” She added a corollary. “Norma is growing younger
every day. She has learned to laugh again.”
“I’m glad. Life plays some queer tricks, doesn’t it? But maybe in the
end things even up.”
From where she was cuddling the romping boy Ruth looked up and made
confession. “At first I thought I wouldn’t bring him with us. I wanted
these first days to be ours—just yours and mine. But that was selfish.
He has as much right to you as I have. Now I’m glad he is here. You
won’t think him in the way, will you?”
It did not seem to him necessary to answer that in words. He took little
Rowan into his arms and held him there till the child fell asleep.
When the baby was safely tucked up in the tent Ruth and Rowan walked to
the brow of the hill and watched the murk mist settle down into the
mountain cañons and drive the purple glow into the lake. They saw the
stars come out one by one until the heavens were full of them.
“The day is dead,” he said at last in a low voice which held the throb
of pain.
She knew that in his thoughts he was breasting again the troubled waters
that had swept them so far apart. Her warm, strong little hand slipped
into his. Cheerfully she took up his words:
“Yes, the day is dead—the long day so full of sorrow for us both. But
now the night has blotted out our grief. We are at peace—alone—beneath
the everlasting stars.”
He could not yet quite escape the net. “I’ve been a poor makeshift of a
husband, Ruth. I’ve brought you much worry and sorrow. And I’ve put a
stain on you and the boy that never can be wiped out.”
“You’ve brought me all that makes life brave and beautiful.” She turned
her buoyant head, and in the white moonlight her smile flashed radiant
upon him. “A new day is on the way to us, Rowan. The sun will reach down
into the valley there where you and I have been lost in the fog, and all
the mist will vanish as if it had never been.”
The man caught his breath sharply. She was so fine! With superb courage
and patience she had fought for him. All good things that life had to
offer should be hers. Instead, he brought her the poison of the
penitentiary record to taint her future.
Something of this he tried to tell her. “I’m a pardoned convict. Your
friends will never let you forget that—never.”
“Your friends are my friends. I have no others,” she told him, eyes
aglow. Then added, in a murmur: “Oh, my dear, as if what anybody says
matters now between you and me.”
Her faith was enough to save them both. He threw away his prudent doubts
and snatched her to him. In his kisses the lover spoke.
Presently they walked back to the camp through the gathering darkness. A
great peace lay over their world.
THE END
There’s More to Follow!
More stories of the sort you like; more, probably, by the author
of this one; more than 500 titles all told by writers of
world-wide reputation, in the Authors’ Alphabetical List which
you will find on the _reverse side_ of the wrapper of this book.
Look it over before you lay it aside. There are books here you
are sure to want—some, possibly, that you have _always_ wanted.
It is a _selected_ list; every book in it has achieved a certain
measure of _success_.
The Grosset & Dunlap list is not only the greatest Index of Good
Fiction available, it represents in addition a generally
accepted Standard of Value. It will pay you to
Look on the Other Side of the Wrapper!
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NOVELS OF FRONTIER LIFE
W I L L I A M M A C L E O D R A I N E
May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap’s list
=BIG-TOWN ROUND-UP, THE=
=BRAND BLOTTERS=
=BUCKY O’CONNOR=
=CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT=
=DAUGHTER OF THE DONS, A=
=DESERT’S PRICE, THE=
=FIGHTING EDGE, THE=
=GUNSIGHT PASS=
=HIGHGRADER, THE=
=IRONHEART=
=MAN FOUR-SQUARE, A=
=MAN-SIZE=
=MAVERICKS=
=OH, YOU TEX!=
=PIRATE OF PANAMA, THE=
=RIDGWAY OF MONTANA=
=ROADS OF DOUBT=
=SHERIFF’S SON, THE=
=STEVE YEAGER=
=TANGLED TRAILS=
=TEXAS RANGER, A=
=TROUBLED WATERS=
=VISION SPLENDID, THE=
=WYOMING=
=YUKON TRAIL, THE=
GROSSET & DUNLAP, _Publishers_, NEW YORK
R A F A E L S A B A T I N I ’ S N O V E L S
May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap’s list.
Jesi, a diminutive city of the Italian Marches, was the birthplace of
Rafael Sabatini, and here he spent his early youth. The city is
glamorous with those centuries the author makes live again in his novels
with all their violence and beauty.
Mr. Sabatini first went to school in Switzerland and from there to Lycee
of Oporto, Portugal, and like Joseph Conrad, he has never attended an
English school. But English is hardly an adopted language for him, as he
learned it from his mother, an English woman who married the
Maestro-Cavaliere Vincenzo Sabatini.
Today Rafael Sabatini is regarded as “The Alexandre Dumas of Modern
Fiction.”
=MISTRESS WILDING=
A romance of the days of Monmouth’s rebellion. The action is rapid, its
style is spirited, and its plot is convincing.
=FORTUNE’S FOOL=
All who enjoyed the lurid lights of the French Revolution with
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adventures of the Sea-Hawk, the corsair, will now welcome with delight a
turn in Restoration London with the always masterful Col. Randall
Holles.
=BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT=
An absorbing story of love and adventure in France of the early
seventeenth century.
=THE SNARE=
It is a story in which fact and fiction are delightfully blended and one
that is entertaining in high degree from first to last.
=CAPTAIN BLOOD=
The story has glamor and beauty, and it is told with an easy confidence.
As for Blood himself, he is a superman, compounded of a sardonic humor,
cold nerves, and hot temper. Both the story and the man are
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=THE SEA-HAWK=
“The Sea-Hawk” is a book of fierce bright color and amazing adventure
through which stalks one of the truly great and masterful figures of
romance.
=SCARAMOUCHE=
Never will the reader forget the sardonic Scaramouche, who fights
equally well with tongue and rapier, who was “born with the gift of
laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
GROSSET & DUNLAP, _Publishers_, NEW YORK
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.