As before said, it was not the accidental juncture of distance and
fatigue that had caused Bull to stop for the last rest on the plateau.
From its edge the trail fell steeply down a watercourse between high
walls of shale into a rocky pocket, then climbed the opposite bank to a
lesser eminence. Huge boulders occurred all over the level. Launched
down the watercourse as through the bore of a giant stone cannon, they
could be depended upon to do terrible execution upon a file of mounting
men.
After Lee and Gordon disappeared, using his rifle barrel for a lever,
Bull pried loose and rolled to the plateau edge over a dozen of the
largest. Before them he built an ambush of sage that would look, from
below, like ordinary chaparral. Whereafter, he sat down on a boulder and
looked out over the Pass, the rugged outlines of which were beginning to
form in the pale dawn.
Than this hour, when day stirs in the womb of night, there is none so
fraught with a sense of imminence; presage of things to come, calamity
or joy, accomplishments and failure, disaster, triumph, defeat. For who
shall say what the day may bring forth? In far-off times the first
pallid lights had often revealed these very mountains shaken upon their
great bases; valleys suddenly buried under the green inundations of
rushing seas; cyclonic disturbances that have registered so strongly in
the racial consciousness of man that he may never watch without awe the
emergence of the new day from the baptism of dawn. As Bull sat, like a
man of the stone age in wait for a great cave bear, the feeling was
strong upon him.
In such moments a man's whole life is apt to be thrown, like a cinema
drama, on the curtains of his mind. But Bull's reflections began with
his new birth at Los Arboles. Vividly there rose before him the golden
pastures rolling off and away to the mountains; in the foreground,
coming at full gallop down the opposite slope, fair hair floating on the
wind, he saw Lee following her father in chase of the Colorados.
Next flashed up the sick-room, where she sat for long hours in mute
white fear on the opposite side of Carleton's death-bed. He saw her,
after the funeral, coming toward him through the _patio_ gateway,
swaying like a lily in a breeze, the whiter by contrast with Phyllis
Lovell's rich, dark beauty.
Followed happier pictures. A slight smile marked a memory of her
diligence in his own reconstruction; her delight when her pains yielded
some small return in the way of an amended fault, correction remembered.
All of it, from the coming of Gordon, the pains and perplexities of
match-making, to the triumphal conclusion, moved slowly through his
thought; then, from the end, his mind returned and lingered with one
scene.
Once again she was giving him her usual critical survey the morning he
started for Torreon. While he stood smiling with embarrassed pleasure
her eyes rose from the tie she was straightening to his. As she read
their sympathy and intelligence, the hands flew up around his neck, her
face buried itself in his breast.
Now he was looking down on Arboles from the ridge, her last words still
in his ears, the thrill of her soft, cool arms still at his neck. Then,
as he turned and rode northward toward the Mills _rancho_, memory leaped
the gap in time and distance--he was sitting in the widow's kitchen,
Betty curled up on his knee, watching the compounding of Lee's birthday
cake.
From that through the stages of their acquaintance down to the last
tender scene the night before he left for Torreon, Memory spread her
pictures. Again he was looking down on the house, almost hidden in the
bougainvillea whose crimson blossoms splashed the golden walls. Now he
was inside, living again that one perfect evening, Betty snuggled warm
in his arms, her mother sewing while the flooding sunset faded into
dusk. She was speaking, holding out hope for his regeneration. As always
in that vision, her hand came fluttering like a small white bird through
the dusk. Dark flashed into day. He was listening to the last words that
his ears would ever take from her lips; the words that confirmed her
ownership.
"I shall expect you soon?"