THE SEVENTH SENSE
They were as good as their word, and when Nance rode up the narrow
defile on the day and hour appointed, they were waiting, fresh and
neat as abundant water and their worn garments would permit.
Sonny wore denim overalls a shade less ragged and a little shirt
with sleeves. His face shone like the rising sun from behind Fair’s
shoulder as they sat decorously mounted on Diamond.
“The out-riders wait the Princess,” said Fair, “good morning, Miss
Allison.”
“Did you bring cookies?” queried the boy eagerly, “we’ve got the
fish!”
“Good morning,” answered Nance, “sure I did, Sonny. And other
things, too. We’ll be good and hungry by noon time.”
The sun was two hours high outside, but here between the towering
walls the shadows were still blue and cold. The murmur of the stream
seemed louder than usual, heard thus in the stillness of the early
day. The mystery of the great cut was accentuated, its charm
intensified a thousandfold to Nance. There was a strange excitement
in everything, a sense of holiday and impending joy. Her face broke
into smiles as helplessly as running water dimples, and when the two
riding ahead turned from time to time to look back she was fair as
“a garden of the Lord,” her bronze head shining bare in the blue
light, her eyes as wide and clear as Sonny’s own.
This was adventure to Nance—the first she had ever known, and its
heady wine was stirring in her veins.
She did not know why the tumbling stream sang a different song, or
why the glow of light creeping down from the rimrock along the
western wall seemed more golden than before.
She only knew that where her heart had lain in her breast calm and
content with her labor and her majestic environment of hills and
river, there was now a strange surge and thrill which made her think
of the stars that sang together at the morning of creation. Surely
her treasured Book had something for each phase of human
life—comfort for its sorrows, divine approval for its happiness.
So she rode, smiling, her hands folded on her pommel, listening to
Brand Fair’s easy speech, watching his shoulders moving lithely
under the blue flannel shirt, comparing him to the men she knew and
wondering again why he was not like them.
They followed the stream sometimes, and again trotted across flat,
hard, sandy spaces where the floor of the cañon widened, and passed
now and again the mouths of smaller cuts diverging from the main
one.
“About two miles from here,” she told Fair, “we leave Blue Stone and
take up Little Blue to the left. At its head lie Grey Spring and the
Circle. We’ll make it about noon.”
The sun was well down in the great gorge when they reached the
opening of Little Blue, and in this smaller cañon which diverged
sharply at right angles, its golden light flooded to the dry bottom.
“Little Blue has no water to speak of,” said Nance, “only holes here
and there—but they are funny places, deep and full, and they seem to
come up from the bottom and go down somewhere under the sand. They
have current, for if you throw anything in them it will drift about,
slow, and finally go down and never come up.”
“Subterranean flow,” said Fair, “I’ve seen other evidence of it in
this country. Must have been volcanic sometime.”
The gorge lifted and widened and presently they passed several of
these strange pools, set mysteriously in the shelving floor.
The towering walls fell away and they had the feeling of coming up
into another world. Soil began to appear in place of the abundant
blue sand, and trees and grass clothed the floor in ever increasing
beauty.
Fair drew Diamond up and waited until Nance rode alongside and they
went forward into a tiny country set in the ridging rock of the
shallowed cañon to where Grey Spring whispered at the edge of the
Circle.
“See!” cried Nance waving a hand about at the smiling scene, “it is
a magic place—no less!”
The spring itself was a narrow trickle above sands as grey as cloth,
a never-ceasing flow of water, clear and icy cold, and beyond it was
a round little flat, thick with green grass beneath spreading
mush-oaks, a spot for fairy conclaves.
“Yes,” nodded the man, “it is magic—the true magic of Nature in
gracious perfection, unmarred by the hand of man.”
“Are we going to have the cookies now?” came the anxious pipe of the
boy, and Fair laughed.
“Can’t get away from the deadly commonplace, Miss Allison, with
Sonny on the job. Poor little kid—he’s about fed up on untrammeled
nature. I’m afraid I owe him a big debt for what I’ve done to
him—and yet—I am trying to pay a bigger one which someone else owes
him. Let’s camp.”
They dropped the reins and turned the horses loose to graze, and
Fair built a little fire of dry wood which sent up a straight column
of smoke like a signal.
Nance untied her bundle from the saddle thongs and Fair unrolled a
dozen trout, firm and cool in their sheath of leaves. He hung them
deftly to the flames on a bent green twig and Romance danced
attendance on the hour. He was expert from long experience of
cooking in the open, and when he finally announced them done they
would have delighted an epicure. Nance laid out a clean white cloth
and spread upon it such plain and wholesome things as cold corned
beef, white bread and golden butter, home-made cucumber pickles and
sugared cookies.
They were poor folk all, the nomad man and boy, the girl who knew so
little beyond the grind of work, but they were richer than Solomon
in all his glory, for they had health and youth and that most
priceless thing of all—a clear conscience and the eager expectation
of the good the next day holds.
They sat cross-legged about their sylvan board and forgot such
things as work and hardship and the bitterness of threatened feud,
and—mayhap—vengeance.
They talked of many things and all the time Nance’s wonder grew at
Fair’s wide knowledge of the outside world, at his gentle manners,
his quiet reticence in some ways, his genial freedom in others.
He told her of the cities and the sea, spoke of Mexico and this and
that far place, but mostly he brought her pictures of her own
land—the rivers of the Rockies, the Arizona mesas—and the girl,
starved for the unknown, listened open-lipped.
They cleared away the cloth and Nance took Sonny in her lap, while
Fair stretched out at length smoking in contentment.
The child slept, the sun dropped down the cloud-flecked vault, and
it was Fair himself who finally put an end to the enchanted hour,
rising and catching up the horses.
“You have far to go, Miss Allison,” he said as he stood beside her
smiling down into her face, “and Sonny and I must be careful not to
work a hardship on you, or you might not come again.”
The ride back down Little Blue was quiet. A thousand impressions
were moiling happily in Nance’s mind. Her eyes felt drowsy, a little
smile kept pulling at her lips’ corners, and yet, so wholly
inexperienced was she, she did not know what magic had been at work
in the green silence of the Circle and Grey Spring.
It was only when Fair pulled his horse so sharply up that Buckskin
nearly stumbled on his heels that she came out of her abstraction.
He sat rigid in his saddle, one hand extended in warning, gazing
straight ahead to where Little Blue opened into Blue Stone. She
looked ahead and understood.
A horseman was just coming into sight at the right edge of the
opening, a big red steer was just vanishing at the left—and the man
was Kate Cathrew’s rider, Sud Provine.
He rode straight across and did not glance up the cut, and the
watchers in the shadow knew they were unobserved.
For a long time they sat in tense silence after he had passed,
waiting, listening, but nothing followed and presently Fair turned
and looked at her.
His lips were tightly set and his face was grave.
“Miss Allison,” he said regretfully, “that’s the first human I’ve
seen in Blue Stone Cañon beside yourself, and it means something to
me. It means that Sonny and I must move—at once.”
He sat thinking a moment, then raised his eyes to hers again.
“I believe—if you will trust us a little longer—and if you can keep
him hidden—that I will take you up. I’ll give you Sonny for a while.
I feel guilty in doing so, for I know how heavily burdened you are
already, but some day I shall make it right with you—as handsomely
right as possible. Will he be too much trouble?”
“Trouble?” cried Nance, her face radiant, “give him to me this
minute!” and she held out her arms.
Brand turned and looked down at the boy, smiling again.
“How about that, kid?” he asked. “Cookies and Miss Allison’s lap
instead of the cold cañon and lonesomeness—why—why, old-timer—what’s
the matter?”
He pulled the child around a bit to scan him more closely.
The little face was milk-white, the brown eyes wide.
“You—going to—to give me away, Brand?” said Sonny with that curious
seeming of maturity which sometimes fell upon him.
The man’s face grew very tender.
“I should say not!” he said reassuringly, “I’m only going to let you
stay awhile with Miss Allison—so our enemies won’t find you when I’m
gone.”
Nance leaned forward.
“Enemies?” she said sharply. “Enemies, you say?”
“A figure of speech,” smiled Fair, “but just the same we don’t want
any one beside yourself to know about us. And by the way, my name is
Smith at Cordova—and Sonny doesn’t exist.”
“I see,” said the girl slowly, “or rather I don’t see—but as I said
before, it doesn’t matter.”
“You’re a wonderful woman. Not one in a million would accept us as
you have done—lost waifs, ragged, hiding, mysterious. I didn’t think
your kind lived. You’re old-fashioned—blessedly old-fashioned. Why
did you accept us?”
“My Mammy says there’s something in a woman’s heart that sets the
stamp on a man for good or bad, a seventh sense. I know there is. A
woman _feels_ to trust—or not to trust.”
Fair nodded.
“That’s it,” he said, “instinct—but maybe, some day, you may come to
feel it has betrayed you—in our case—my case—I mean. What then?”
Nance shook her head.
“It won’t, Mr. Fair,” she replied.
The man sighed and frowned.
“God knows,” he said, “I hope not. But let’s get on—it’s getting
pretty late.”
Fair rode to the cave by the pool in silence. There he dismounted
and brought from the blankets such poor bits of garments as belonged
to the child, rolled them in a bundle and fastened them on Nance’s
saddle.
“I’m sorry they are so ragged,” he apologized.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Nance, “Mammy has stuff that can be made
over. We’ll fix him up.”
Fair mounted again and rode with her to the mouth of Blue Stone.
There he halted and lifted Sonny to Buckskin’s rump.
The little fellow whimpered a bit and clung to his neck, while the
man patted his bony little shoulder.
“There—there, kid,” he said, “don’t you love Miss Allison?”
“Yes,” wailed Sonny at last; “but—but—I just _love_ you, Brand!”
“I’ve put in two pretty strenuous years for Sonny’s sake,” he said
softly, “but they’ve been worth while, Miss Allison.”
“The service of love is always worth while,” said Nance, “it’s the
biggest thing in this world.”
“And now,” said Fair, “if you’ll buck up and be a man, Sonny, I’ll
promise to come right down to the homestead some night soon and see
you—if Miss Allison will let me?”
Something surged in the girl’s breast like a sunlit tide.
“If you don’t, we’ll come hunting you,” she said.
Then Fair kissed the boy, mounted Diamond and sat with hands crossed
on his pommel while Buckskin carried his double burden across the
little flat and through the belly-deep flood of Nameless whispering
on its riffle.
On the other side Nance and Sonny turned to wave a hand and went
forward into a new life.
* * * * *
At the cabin door Bud stared with open mouth when they rode up, but
Mrs. Allison, who had been watching them come along the flat far
down, and who had vaguely understood, came forward with uplifted
arms.
“I figgered it wouldn’t be so long before you brought him home,” she
said, “a child is what we do need in this here cabin. What a fine
little man! An’ supper’s all hot an’ waitin’.”
“I knew you’d understand, Mammy,” said the girl gratefully, “you’ve
got the seventh sense, all right, and one or two more. No wonder our
Pappy loved you all his life.”
And so it was that Sonny Fair came into the warmth and comfort of
fire and lamplight, of chairs and tables, and beds with deep
shuck-ticks, and to the loving arms of woman-kind, after two years
of riding on the big black’s rump, of sleeping on the earth beside a
campfire, and the long lonely days of waiting.
And, faithful as his shadow, Dirk the Collie sat on the stone that
formed the doorstep and refused to budge until both Nance and Sonny
convinced him that all was well, and that this was home.
When Nance sat to her gracious hour with the Scriptures that night
it seemed a very fitting coincidence that the Book should fall open
at the Master’s tender words, “Suffer little children to come unto
Me, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”