stupidly.
She shrugged lightly. “It don’t make any difference what I think of
you,” she said. “Ain’t it whether I’m goin’ to get away from Inch or
not? Ain’t that the idea?”
When he came to think of it, that was the immediate concern. With his
first utterance he had blundered, as he had blundered since the moment
when she had put herself in his keeping. None the less his misery was
too sharp to dismiss. But he had no clear idea how to ask a woman’s
forgiveness—a thing that he had never done in his life.
“I feel as bad as hell,” he blurted out.
“What for?” she asked.
“For all I’ve done,” he put it.
She considered this.
“Look here,” she said slowly. “You’ve been drunk before often enough,
ain’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered, miserably.
“Well, don’t feel bad about this just because I mixed up in it,” she
said. “I’m used to it. I see Dad and all of ’em drunk more times ’n I
see ’em sober.”
He looked away from her.
“I wasn’t thinking just about being drunk,” he said. “I meant—what I
said to you.”
“Oh—that!” she said. “Well. All men say that, I guess.” She looked at
him. “I did guess you was differ’nt, but I ought to knowed better.”
Then in a flash of intense joy, he remembered what she had said to him
in the hut. Her words came back as if she were speaking them again: “I
didn’t know no woman I could tell. Nor no other decent man.” Once more
the warmth of this was upon him, within him. Then the recollection of
how he had failed her invaded him in an anguish new, impossible to
combat. For she had thought that he was different from Jem Moor and
Bunchy....
The Inger got to his feet.
“I _am_ differ’nt,” he heard himself surprisingly saying.
She regarded him curiously, and with nothing in her eyes. It came to
him as he stood looking down at her, that he would give all that might
be asked if he could have seen her eyes as she looked up at him in the
hut the night before and told him why she had come to him to help her.
In the face of what had happened, the foolishness of protesting that he
was different overcame him, and he fell silent.
A new anxiety beset him.
“Did you sleep?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I was afraid,” she answered, simply.
The Inger stood for a moment as if the strength had run from his body.
She had sat there, afraid, while he had slept—and he himself had been
a part of her fear....
He turned away, and across the tops of the trees, he looked over the
valley, still lying in the shadow. There was mist, and down there the
pointed tops of the trees showed like green buds fastened to soft
wool. Where they two were, the sun was already smiting the branches,
and silencing the birds. Overhead, the clear blue, touched by sunny
clouds, lay very near. It was as if he were trying to find, among them,
something that could help him to tell her what he was feeling. But he
found nothing and he said nothing. He caught up the blanket and flung
it savagely aside, seized a great dead limb lying beside him and broke
it over his knee.
“Get out the stuff,” he bade her. “We’ll have a fire.”
He built and lighted the fire, brought the water, and found his way
down to the brook. He threw off his clothes, and lay flat in the bed
of the stream, his head on a rock. The sharp stones cut his flesh, and
the water somehow helped to heal him. He shook himself, dried by a run
down the trail, dressed, and returned, glowing.
The coffee was on the fire, and she was making toast on a stick. She
had spread what food she had brought, chiefly fruit and cooked meat and
cheese.
“Didn’t I bring any grub?” he demanded.
“The bird,” she answered. “The big bird.”
“That’s for dinner,” he observed, gruffly, and said no more.
He took the stick from her and made the toast. When she poured the
coffee, it was clear and golden and fragrant. She had two plates and
two cups, the Inger noticed. She made him roll the blankets for seats.
In spite of his suffering—which was the more real that it was new to
him—the cheer and the invitation of the time warmed him. But as for
her loveliness, he found himself now hardly looking at that, save
when he must, as if what she was had become to him something utterly
forbidden.
As for her, while she ate, she continually listened, and if a twig
broke, she started. For this she laughed at herself once.
“But if he should come,” she said, “if he should come....”
The Inger looked at her, that once, steadfastly.
“If he should come,” he said, “I could save you—now.”
The elusive trail which had baffled him, led with perfect distinctness
along a little shelf three steps up and around that sharp height of
rocks which he had scaled, and then the trail dipped down into a narrow
cañon, and up. Before the sun was an hour high, they were on their way
again.
With their brisk progress, her spirits rose, and once, to the Inger’s
exquisite delight, she broke into a lilt of song.
“You sing the way you laugh,” he said awkwardly. And she flashed him a
smile, over shoulder, as she had done that morning on the desert.
A tanager drew a line of scarlet through the trees, and burned from
a bough before them. In an instant the Inger’s hand was raised, and
he had aimed. But in that second, his arm was struck aside, the shot
glanced harmlessly among the trees, and the bird flashed safe to the
thicket.
He looked round at her in open amazement.
“What did y’ do that for?” he demanded.
“What did you want to go and kill him for?” she cried.
He considered this: what _had_ he wanted to kill that red bird for?
“He was such a pretty little fellow,” she said, but instead of a
rebuke, this seemed to him a reason.
“Yes,” he seized it eagerly. “That’s why. You want to get up close to
’em.”
“But if they’re dead....” she protested.
“You want to get up nearer to ’em,” he repeated. “Don’t you see? It’s
the only way you can.”
She said nothing. She was walking before him now, and he watched her.
She had braided her hair, and he liked the way the bright braids moved
on her shoulders when she walked, and hung against the hollow of her
waist. She must have braided her hair, he reflected, before he woke.
Then he remembered the blanket which he had found folded across his
shoulders. She must have found it, unstrapped it, covered him as he
lay. He longed to let her know that he knew, but he could not bring
himself to recall the time. “She seems to do everything so careful,” he
thought, and remembered the red bird and tried to fathom her care for
that. When she stooped to pick up a shining stone, he laughed out.
“See!” he said. “You want to pick up that stone to see it. Well, I
wanted to kill the bird—to see it.”
“But the bird was alive!” she exclaimed.
He stared at her.
“What of it?” said he. “Look at the lots of ’em there are!”
She said nothing.
“Who’d miss it?” he argued. “Who wants it? You always kill things.”
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know why. But it don’t seem
right.”
Women were like that, he reflected. They hated blood. But—a bird! It
was unfathomable.
High noon found them on the summit of Whiteface, looking down upon the
crouching shoulders of the east foothills. Where they stood, the sun
beat hotly, and the bare rocks and the coarse growth lay in intense
brooding quiet. Everything there was flat, as if the long pressure of
the sun had told, like weight.
Electrically, the Inger’s spirits returned to him. Here on the height,
kindling fire, boiling water, spreading food, were no such business as
these had been to him down on his little shelf. Here everything had
a way of being that was hitherto unknown to him. When their table was
spread in the shade of a pine, and the wood duck roasted slowly over
the fire on a spit which he had fashioned, he stood up and surveyed
their work, and his look fell on the girl, sitting relaxed, with
loosely fallen hands, the sun striking her hair to brightness.
For a moment he let himself watch her, and catching his look, she
smiled, as she had smiled when his eyes had met hers as he woke.
“Yi—eh! Yi—eh! Yi—e—h!” he suddenly shouted with the strength of
his lungs.
The echo rolled back to them like a taunt.
She sprang up.
“If they’re huntin’ us—” she said, trembling, “oh, they’ll hear that!”
He looked at her in horror. Fool! Would he never have done with his
blundering....
“Oh, my God, I forgot,” he exclaimed, contritely, and dropped to the
ground. “I don’t get _rested_ between kicking myself for being a damn
fool,” he said.
While they ate, he was quiet. There was no way to let her know how much
he hated himself, and his thought was occupied with nothing else. And
it was as if she divined, for she became very gentle.
“I guess maybe you wanted to do somethin’ else to-day,” she said.
He shook his head.
“It’s awful, me makin’ you do this,” she added. “Don’t you think I
don’t know that.”
“I ain’t doin’ anything—what am I doin’?” he burst out.
She looked at him gravely.
“You’re takin’ me out of a good sight worse’n death,” she answered.
“And don’t you think I’ll ever forget it.”
There was about her manner of saying this something infinitely
alluring. She fell in a sudden breathlessness, and her voice had a
tremor which seemed to lie in the very words themselves. And with this,
and with what she said, the Inger found himself suddenly utterly unable
to deal.
“Oh, g’on,” he said, feebly.
She said no more, and for a moment he was wretched again lest he had
offended her. But the gentleness and softness of her manner reassured
him. Moreover, he became conscious that of the cheese and bread she was
leaving the greater part for him, and pretending to have finished.
After their lunch, a consuming content fell upon the man, and he lay
stretched on his back, under the pine, staring upward, thinking of
nothing. For a little she moved about, and then she came and sat beside
him, saying nothing. More than he knew, this power of hers for silence
conquered him. When a man knows how to live alone, he may or may not
understand words, but he always understands silence.
Presently he looked over at her, and seeing that her eyes were heavy,
he sat erect, with the memory of her night’s vigil.
“Could you go to sleep?” he demanded.
She nodded. “I _could_,” she said. “I guess there ain’t the time,” she
added.
“Yes, there is,” he said eagerly. “We can get down from here in no
time. You rest yourself.”
She regarded him for a moment. Then, without a word, she drew her
blanket toward her, rested her head upon it, and relaxed like a child.
In a moment she lay sleeping.
Then he looked at her. All that day he had averted his eyes, in
his shame. But now that there could be in her look no rebuke, no
reminiscence of the night, he looked at her as freely as he had looked
that day on the desert, when she had sat his horse before him. Only
then his look had been a flame, and now it was as if the sight of her
was to him a healing power. For she still trusted him. She was lying
here asleep, and she had set him to watch. Immeasurably, she was giving
him back his self-respect, restoring to him his own place in her eyes
and in his own. He had no knowledge that this bore so strong a part in
the creeping sweetness which possessed him. He only knew that he was
happy, that he dreaded the time when she should awaken almost as much
as he longed for it; and he hoped with childish intensity that the
afternoon would never end.
That was an hour such as the man had never known. Women had followed
him, tempted him, run from him, but never in his life had a woman
either begged his help, as one being of another, or walked with him,
comradely. And with women he had always moved as lord and dispenser,
avoiding them, taking them for granted, occasionally pursuing them, but
always as chief actor. Now, suddenly, he had become in his own sight,
infinitely the lesser of the two; and even that grateful return of
belief in himself was a thing which she was, so gently, bestowing. He
sat, sunk in the newness of what had come upon him, making no effort to
understand, and looking neither forward nor back. He was beset alike
by the knowledge that she trusted him, and by the soft movement of her
breathing and by the flushed ripeness of her, and by the fact that, at
any second, she might waken and then smile upon him.
When, toward four o’clock, she did waken, her smile, that was as
instant as at a child’s awakening, was straightway darkened by a cloud
of fear.
“It’s late,” she said. “The train—can we get it now?”
“Can we get it now....” The Inger paused to taste this before he
answered.
“Easy,” he said. “You mean the eight: fifteen for Barstow?”
“Yes,” she said. “The eight: fifteen.” She had not meant for Barstow,
but that, as the farthest eastern destination of those who usually took
train from Inch, was the limit of the Inger’s imagining.
“Easy,” he repeated.
The way of descent, in the slanting light, was incredibly lovely. The
time had assumed another air. With that low sun, everything was thrown
sharply against the sky, like a pattern on a background. Something of
the magic of the Northern days lay upon that Southern land.
Once, feeling suddenly articulate, the Inger looked over his shoulder
at her, as she followed.
“It’s hell, ain’t it?” he said admiringly.
She understood this as the extreme of expression, anywhere applied.
“Ain’t it?” she agreed fervently.
It was not yet seven o’clock when they emerged from the last cañon, and
tramped across the sage brush toward the town. There the lights were
slowly shining out, and all the tawdry, squalid play of the night was
beginning, as night after night it begins in the ugly settlements where
men herd on the Great Desert under solemn skies. As the first sound of
rattling music came to the man and the woman, she turned to him.
“Is big towns like little ones, do you know?” she asked.
He reflected, remembered San Francisco, and replied:
“Yes,” he said, “I s’pose so, mostly. But the parts where the folks try
to be nice,” he added, vindictively, “are worse’n this and Inch.”
“Why?” she demanded, in surprise.
“Because,” he said, “they get too nice. They’re slush nice,” he
explained it.
She mulled this.
“I saw a lady, once,” she said. “She got off at Inch to mail a letter.
Her hair was combed pretty and she had her gloves on and her shoes fit
her feet—I donno. She must of come from somewheres,” she added vaguely.
He was silent and she tried to be clear.
“She wasn’t good-dressed like Beautiful Kate and them,” she added
anxiously. “She spoke nice, too. I heard her get a stamp from Leadpipe
Pete. Her words come so—easy.”
He nodded.
“There are them,” he said from his experience. “But not many.”
As they approached the station some stragglers were gathering to wait
for the train, and the two remained near the far end of the platform.
A monotonously repeated command forced itself to their attention. On
a stretch of bare, hard-trodden sand, a company of the town guard was
drilling in the twilight. About forty slim, loose-jointed youths were
advancing and wheeling under the direction of a stocky, middle-aged man
who walked like a rooster and shouted indistinguishably, in the evident
belief that the tone was the thing. The Inger walked to the edge of the
platform, and stared at them.
“That’s the United States Army,” he said, not without reverence.
She made no comment, and they watched the whole line in columns of
four, advancing in double time. The rhythmic motion of the khaki legs
vaguely touched the Inger with sensuous pleasure.
“Ain’t it grand?” he said.
“Grand!” repeated the girl. “It’s the limit.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, looking round at her.
“When they march,” she said, “I always think: ‘Dead legs, dead legs,
dead legs.’ I hate ’em.”
He smiled tolerantly.
“Women are lame ducks on the war game,” he admitted. “Look-a-here,” he
added. “I might as well tell you: I’m goin’ to Europe to get into the
fight.”
“On purpose?” she asked, incredulously.
He nodded. “It’s the only man’s job on the place just now,” he told
her. “Everybody else is just hangin’ round, lookin’ on. I want to be in
on it.”
She stood very still, and in the half light her face seemed white and
suddenly tired.
“Why don’t you ask which side?” he prompted her.
“I don’t care which side,” she answered, and walked back toward the end
of the platform.
He kept beside her, curiously beset by the need to follow his
spectacular announcement with some explanation. And abruptly he
thought that he understood her attitude.
“I s’pose,” he said, shamefacedly, “you’re thinkin’ I won’t be much of
a soldier if I behave as I did last night.”
“Oh no,” she said, “I don’t see as it matters much whether they’re shot
drunk or shot sober.”
While he was groping at this, she added:
“I donno but they’re better off drunk—they can’t kill so many o’ the
others.”
“You don’t understand—” he began, but she cut him short curtly.
“I better get my ticket,” she said.
“I’ll get it,” he told her. “Barstow—ain’t it?”
“No, I’m not going to Barstow,” she answered. “Get it to Lamy.”
He faced her in astonishment.
“Lamy!” he cried. “Murderation. _Clear_ east?”
“I’ve counted up,” she explained. “That’s as far as I’ve got the money
to get. I can stay there till I earn some to go on with. I’ve got an
aunt in Chicago.”
“East!” he said weakly. “Why, I never thought o’ you goin’ East.”
The station platform led with that amazing informality of the western
American railway station, to the raw elemental sand of the desert.
Within sight of the electric lamps of the station, were the tall
flowers of the Yucca and the leaves of the Spanish bayonet and the
flare of the spineless cactus under uninterrupted areas of dusky sky,
stretched as sand and sky had stretched for countless ages. Of the
faint tread of the soldiers, the commands of the captain, the trundle
of a truck, the click of the telegraph instrument, those sands and
those stars were as unconscious as they had been in the beginning. And
abruptly, as he looked at these lifelong friends of his, the Inger felt
intolerably alone.
“What do you want to go East for?” he demanded.
“Chicago’s the only place I’ve got anybody I could go to,” she said.
“But that ain’t the reason,” she added. “I want to get as far as I can,
’count of Bunchy.”
She looked back at the group gathering at the station to see the train
come in.
“You better get the ticket just to Albuquerque,” she said. “Somebody
might try to follow me up.”
“Albuquerque nothing,” he said roughly. “I’ll buy you your ticket right
through—to Chicago.” He went toward her. “Don’t go—don’t go!” he said.
She looked at him, intently, as if she were trying to fathom what he
would have said. But in that intentness of her look, he saw only her
memory of the night before. He drew sharply back, and turned away. “I
hate for you to go ’way off there alone,” he mumbled.
Across the desert, clear against the dusk of the mountains, a red eye
came toward them. She saw it.
“Oh quick,” she said. “There’s the train. Get it just to Albuquerque.
I’ll be all right.”
She gave him a knotted handkerchief, and he took it and ran down the
platform. This handkerchief he could give back to her as she was
leaving, and he would of course buy the ticket through—
He stopped short on the platform.
“What with, you fool?” he thought.
He remembered his drunken impression of the night before that there
was, before he should leave, something more to do, or to fetch. His
hand went to his pocket. Half a dozen silver dollars were there, no
more. In his wallet, which he searched under the light, were two five
dollar bills. By now he could hear the rumble of the Overland.
Outside the station two or three Mexicans were lounging. Half a dozen
renegade Indians were faithfully arriving with their bead chains and
baskets. The waiting-room was empty.
The Inger went in the waiting-room and closed the door. The ticket
agent stood behind his window, counting that which ticket-agents
perpetually count. The Inger thrust his own head and shoulders through
the window, and with them went his revolver.
“I’m Inger of Inch,” he said. “I guess you know me, don’t you? Just
you give me a through ticket and all the trimmings to Chicago, till I
can get to a bank, or I’ll blow all your brains out of you. Can you
understand?”
The ticket agent glanced up, looked into the muzzle, and went on
quietly counting.
“All right, Mr. Inger,” he said. “I guess the Flag-pole can stand that
much. But you hadn’t ought to be so devilish lordly in your ways,” he
complained.
The Inger pocketed his revolver, and smiled—the slow, indolent,
adorable smile which had made all Inch and the men at the mines his
friends.
“If you feel that way about it, my friend—” he said, and leaned
forward and added something, his hand outstretched.
The man nodded, shook the hand, and went to his ticket rack. The Inger
wrote out a message to his father, instructing him to pay to the agent
a sum which he named; and to his bank he scribbled and posted a brief
note. Then as the train pulled in, he turned back to where Lory waited.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “Everything’s all right,” he added
jubilantly. “Come on!”
Beside the train she would have taken his hand, but he followed her.
“I’m coming in,” he said brusquely, and in the coach sat down beside
her in her seat.
Then she turned to him, and in her voice were the tremor and the
breathlessness which had been there for an instant when, in the
morning, she had tried to say her thanks:
“I wish’t I could thank you,” she said. “I wish’t I could!”
He met her eyes, and he longed inexpressibly for a way of speech which
should say the thing that he meant to try to say.
“You know, don’t you,” he asked awkwardly, “that I’d do anything to
make up—”
“Don’t,” she begged. “I know. Don’t you think I don’t know.”
With this his courage mounted.
“Tell me,” he burst out. “Will you tell me? Am I different—ain’t I
different—from the way you thought?”
It was blind enough, but she seemed to understand.
“You’ve treated me whiter to-day than I’ve ever been treated,” she
said, very low. “Now good-bye!”
The Inger sat silent, but in his face came light, as if back upon him
were that which she had kindled there in the hut, by her trust in him,
and as if it were not again to darken. The train began to move, and he
sat there and did not heed it.
“Good-bye—oh, good-bye!” she said. “We’re going!”
“Yes,” he said, “we’re going! I donno what you’ll say—I got me a
ticket too.”
V
IT was black dawn when Lory and the Inger reached Chicago. Not the gray
dawn that he had sometimes known slipping down the sides of the cañons;
not the red dawn that had drawn him to his hut door to face upward to
the flaming sky, and had sent him naked and joyous, into the pool of
the mountain stream; and not the occasional white dawn, which had left
him silent on his shelf of Whiteface, staring at the flare of silver
in the east, and afterward letting fall into his skillet bacon and
dripping—but without thinking of bacon and dripping at all.
There in the railway sheds this Chicago dawn had no red, no white, no
gray. It was merely a thinning of the dark, so that the station lamps
began to be unnecessary. In this strange chill air of day, the men and
women dropped from the Overland, and streamed steadfastly away, each
in an incredible faith of destination. And from invisible sources there
came those creeping gases which are slaves to man, but fasten upon his
throat like hands, and press and twist, and take their toll of him.
Lory looked up at the Inger questioningly:
“Had it ought to be like this,” she asked, “or is something happening?”
“Seems as if something must be happening,” he answered.
They went into the street, and the Inger took from her the slip of
paper on which was written her aunt’s address. He held it out to the
first man he saw, to the second, to the third, and each one answered
him with much pointing, in a broken tongue which was indistinguishable,
and hurried on. Lory looked at the stream of absorbed, leaden faces of
those tramping to their work, heard their speech as they passed, and
turned a startled face to the Inger:
“I never thought of it,” she said. “Mebbe they don’t talk American,
East?”
“They won’t stop for us,” said the Inger. “That’s all.”
From one or two others they caught “South,” “Kedzie,” “Indiana Avenue.”
Some frankly shook their heads with “From th’ old country.” No officer
was in sight, and it occurred to neither of them to look for one. They
merely instinctively threw themselves on the stream of those others
whom they took to be like themselves.