QUEENIE
The shadows of evening met Van, as he stepped from the outside door and
started up the street. Then a figure emerged from the shadows and met
him by the corner.
It was Queenie. Her eyes were red from weeping. A smile that someway
affected Van most poignantly, he knew not why, came for a moment to her
lips.
"You didn't expect to see me here," she said. "I had to come to see if
it was so."
"What is it, Queenie? What do you mean? What do you want?" he
answered. "What's the trouble?"
"Nothing," she said. "I don't want nothing I can git--I
guess--unless--Oh, _is_ it her, Van? Is it sure all over with me?"
"Look here," he said, not unkindly, "you've always been mistaken,
Queenie. I told you at the time--that time in Arizona--I'd have done
what I did for an Indian squaw--for any woman in the world. Why
couldn't you let it go at that?"
"You know why I couldn't," she answered with a certain intensity of
utterance that gave him a species of chill. "After what you done--like
the only real friend I ever had--I belonged to you--and couldn't even
take myself away."
"But I didn't want anyone to belong to me, Queenie. You know that. I
could barely support my clothes."
Her eyes burned with a strange luminosity. Her utterance was eager.
"But you want somebody to belong to you now? Ain't that what's the
matter with you now?"
He did not answer directly.
"I didn't think it was in you, Queenie, to follow me around and play
the spy. I've liked you pretty well--but--I couldn't like this."
She stared at him helplessly, as an animal might have looked.
"I couldn't help it," she murmured, repressing some terrible emotion of
despair. "I won't never trouble you no more."
She turned around and went away, walking uncertainly, as if from
physical weakness and the blindness of pain.
Van felt himself inordinately wrung--felt it a cruelty not to run and
overtake her--give her some measure of comfort. There was nothing he
could do that would not be misunderstood. Moreover, he had no adequate
idea of what was in her mind--or in her homeless heart. He had known
her always as a butterfly; he could not take her tragically now.
"Poor girl," he said as he watched her vanishing from sight, "if only
she had ever had a show!"
He looked back at Mrs. Dick's. Bostwick had ousted him after all,
before he could extenuate his madness, before he could ascertain
whether Beth were angry or not--before he could bid her good-by.
Now that the cool of evening was upon him, along with the chill of
sober reflection, he feared for what he had done. He was as mad, as
crude as Queenie. Yet his fear of Beth's opinion was a sign that he
loved her as a woman should be loved, sacredly, and with a certain awe,
although he made no such analysis, and took no credit to himself for
the half regrets that persistently haunted his reflections.
It would be a moonlight night, he pondered. He had counted on riding
by the lunar glow to the "Laughing Water" claim. Would Beth, by any
possibility, attempt to see him--come out, perhaps, in the
moonlight--for a word before he should go?
He could not entertain a thought of departing without again beholding
her. He wanted to know what she would say, and when he might see her
again. After all, what was the hurry to depart? He might as well wait
a little longer.
He went to the hay-yard. Dave had disappeared. Half an hour of search
failed to bring him to light. On the point of entering a restaurant to
allay his sense of emptiness, Van was suddenly accosted by a wild-eyed
man, bare-headed and sweating, who ran at him, calling as he came.
"Hey!" he cried. "Van Buren! Come on! Come on! She's dyin' and all
she wants is you!"
"What's wrong with you, man?" inquired the horseman, halted by the
fellow's words. "What are you talking about?"
"Queenie!" gasped the fellow, panting for his breath. "Took poison--O,
Lord! Come on! Come on! She don't want nothing but you!"
Van turned exceedingly pale.
"Poison? What you want is the doctor!"
"He's there--long ago!" answered the informant excitedly, and swabbing
perspiration from his face. "She won't touch his dope. It's all over,
I guess--only she wants to see you."
"Show me the way, then--show me the way. Where is she?" Van shook the
man's shoulder roughly. "Don't stand here trembling. Take me to the
place."
The man was in a wretched plight, from fear and the physical suffering
induced by what he had seen. He reeled drunkenly as he started down
the street, then off between some rows of canvas structures, heading
for a district hung with red.
At the edge of this place, at an isolated cabin, comprising two small,
rough rooms, the man seemed threatened with collapse.
"May be too late," he whispered hoarsely, as he listened and heard no
sounds from the house. "I'm goin' to stay outside--and wait."
The door was ajar. Without waiting for anything further, Van pushed it
open and entered.
"There he is--I knew it!" cried Queenie from the room at the rear. It
was a cry that smote Van like a stab.
Then he came to the room where she was lying.
"I knew you'd come--I knew it, Van!" said the girl in a sudden outburst
of sobbing, and she tried to rise upon her pillow. Agony, which she
had fought down wildly, seized her in a spasm. She doubled on the bed.
Van glanced about quickly. The doctor--a young, inexperienced man--was
there, sweating, a look of abject helplessness upon his face. The room
was a poor tawdry place, with gaudy decorations and a litter of
Queenie's finery. In her effort to conquer the pains that possessed
her body, the girl had distorted her face almost past recognition.
Van came to the bedside directly, placed his hand on her shoulder, and
gave her one of his characteristic little shakings.
"Queenie, what have you done?" he said. "What's going on?"
She tried to smile. It was a terrible effort.
"It's nobody's fault--but what was the use, Van?--what was there in it
for me?"
"She won't take anything--the antidote--anything! There isn't a
stomach pump in town!" the doctor broke in desperately. "She's got to!
It's getting too late! We'll have to force it down! Maybe she'd take
it for you." He thrust a goblet into Van's nervous hand. It contained
a misty drink.
"For God's sake take this, Queenie," Van implored. "Take it quick!"
She shrank away, attempting with amazing force of will to mask her pain.
"I'd take the stuff--for your sake--when I--wouldn't for God," she
faltered, sitting up, despite her bodily anguish. "You don't ask me
to--do it for you."
"I do, Queenie--take it for me!" he answered, wrung again as he had
been at her smiles, an hour before, but now with heart-piercing
poignancy. "Take it for me, if you won't for anyone else."
She received the glass--and deliberately threw it on the floor. The
doctor cried out sharply. Queenie shook her head, all the time
fighting down her agony, which was fast making inroads to her life.
She fell back on her pillow.
"You didn't--ask me--Van 'cause you love me. Nobody--wants me to live.
That's all right. Do you s'pose you could kiss me good-by?"
The look on her face was peculiarly childish, as she drove out the
lines of anguish in a superhuman effort made for him. And the yearning
there brought back again that thought he had voiced before, that
night--why couldn't the child have had a chance?
The doctor was feverishly mixing another potent drink.
Van bent down and kissed her, indulgently.
"Force her to take it!" cried the doctor desperately. "Force her to
take it!"
"Queenie," Van said, "you've got to take this stuff."
Her hand had found his and clutched it with galvanic strength.
"Don't--make me," she begged, closing her eyes in a species of ecstacy
that no man may understand. "I'd rather--not--Van--please. Only about
a minute now. Ain't it funny--that love--can burn you--up?" Her grip
had tightened on his hand.
The doctor ran to the window, which he found already opened. He ran
back in a species of frenzy.
"Make her take it, make her take it! God!" he said. "Not to do
anything--not to do a thing!"
Queenie smiled at Van again--terribly. Her fingers felt like iron
rods, pressing into his flesh. As if to complete her renunciation she
dropped his hand abruptly. She mastered some violent convulsion that
left the merest flicker of her life.
"Good-by, Van--good luck," she whispered faintly.
"Queenie!" he said. "Queenie!"
Perhaps she heard. After an ordeal that seemed interminable her face
was calm and still, a faint smile frozen on her marble features.
Van waited there a long time. Someway it seemed as if this thing could
be undone. The place was terribly still. The doctor sat there as if
in response to a duty. He was dumb.
When Van went out, the man on the doorstep staggered in.
The moon was up. It shone obliquely down into all that rock-lined
basin, surrounded by the stern, forbidding hills--the ancient,
burned-out furnace of gold that man was reheating with his passions.
Afar in all directions the lighted tents presented a ghostly unreality,
their canvas walls illumined by the candles glowing within. A jargon
of dance-hall music floated on the air. Outside it all was the desert
silence--the silence of a world long dead.
Van would gladly have mounted his horse and ridden away--far off, no
matter where. Goldite, bizarre and tragic--a microcosm of the world
that man has fashioned--was a blot of discordant life, he felt, upon an
otherwise peaceful world. As a matter of fact it had only begun its
evening's story.
He stood in the road, alone, for several minutes, before he felt he
could begin to resume the round of his own existence. When he came at
length to the main street's blaze of light, a deeply packed throng
could be seen in all the thoroughfare, compactly blocked in front of a
large saloon.
Culver, the Government representative in the land-office needs, had
been found in his office murdered. He had been stabbed. Van's knife,
bought for Gettysburg, had been employed--and found there, red with its
guilt.
All this Van was presently to discover. He was walking towards the
surging mob when a miner he had frequently seen came running up and
halted in the light of a window. Then the man began to yell.
"Here he is!" he cried. "Van Buren!"
The mob appeared to break at the cry. Fifty men charged down the
street in a species of madness and Van was instantly surrounded.