to him that there was a blue veil across his eyes, but he winked it away
quickly enough, shook the ache out of his shoulders, put down the
shoe-string that he was making out of a squirrel's skin, and stood in
front of the shack waiting, with his hat in his hand. He had on a
mud-stained corduroy hunting suit and big buckskin leggings, and there
was a week's growth of beard on his face. He looked not unlike a highly
civilised bear, and he felt his looks. She did not seem to see him until
she was close upon him.
"Oh," she cried, "I was not expecting to find you here," and when that
sounded a little bald, added quickly, "I heard that you were sick and I
thought it likely that you were up in Canaan."
"Oh, no, I am not sick," he told her, hastening down to the trap, the
delicious excitement that possessed him well restrained, "and since you
have found me here, won't you get out and have some,--well, let me
see,--some coffee and bacon? And I can make a lovely corn-dodger. Also I
have some kind of good stuff in a can, though I can't get the can open.
Do please stop and dine." Steering, sick, gaunt, gay, mocking at
hardship, hope deferred and far-reaching disappointment, was at his
best. Her eyes slipped away from his as he pressed his invitation. Then
she laughed softly, with the little shake of her laughter when a notion
appealed to her happily.
"I'm going to accept," she said, "I'll cook things and you can eat
them."
"I'll make a sacred duty of my part," he promised gravely; he was
lifting her from the buggy; her hands were on his shoulders; for a
little delirious minute she was in his arms; he could not keep his hands
from closing about her sweet body lingeringly as he lifted her; her eyes
were looking into his, her face was coming down close to his; he had a
wild fleeting hallucination that she----
"Don't imagine," she began, and his senses came back to him and he set
her down, "don't imagine that I can't cook. Where's your range?"
He showed her a scooped-out place in the side of the bluff. "There are
two bricks in the back, two on each side and two on the top," he
explained with some pride.
"I am afraid you have brought foolish habits of luxury out of the East
with you," was her reply. She made him build her a fire and bring some
water and meal and then she took things entirely out of his hands.
"It's a picnic," she said. Her gown she had folded back and pinned up
until a little tangle of silk and lace frou-froued beneath it
bewilderingly; her sleeves she had rolled back until the creamy tan of
her round slim arms showed to the elbow; her hat she had taken off, and
the sun danced in the gold lustres of her hair. She was all aglow; she
belonged out in the fresh air and the sunlight like this; she could
stand it; that dusky-gold radiance played from her like a burnish.
Steering sat down on the log bench and watched her, hypnotised by her
into haunting fancies of something, somebody, somewhere. She was one of
those beings whose rich magnetism of face and personality brings them
close to you, not only for the present, but also for the past, one of
those people who are apt to make you feel that you have known them
before, forever, a feeling that flowers into elusive fragrances,
suggestions, reminiscences, flown on the first stir of a thought to
catch them.
"What a long time since I even so much as saw you," he sighed happily,
happy because here before him in the body again she was exactly the girl
he remembered, exactly the girl he had dreamed of all winter. "What have
you done all winter?" he asked.
"Nursed Father. He has stayed at home with me a good deal. It was a
lovely winter, wasn't it?"
Steering thought of the long, quiet, lonely days, the weeks, the months
during which he had seen her only to bow to her. Then he thought of the
calendar inside his office. Every day that he had seen her on his rare
trips up river to Canaan was marked with an imitation of the rising sun.
There were only eight rising suns for the whole winter. Then he thought
how the memory of those sun days had stayed with him and made him feel
blessed. Then he answered, "Yes, it has been lovely,--nice, open
weather. I have been out on the Di in a skiff almost every day." He did
not add that every day his journey had been to the upper water near
Madeira Place; but he might have.
"Once or twice I have seen you." She did not add that she had stood at
her window, behind a partly drawn blind, gazing after him through slow
tears; but she might have. "What a very long time indeed since we saw
each other,--and talked to each other!"
"Oh, about two thousand years," he answered with careful calculation.
"I wonder if you remember the ride across country into the sunset?"
Should he ever forget it? Then the spring wind blew up to them from off
the Di with a coolish, dampening touch. "What do you hear from Elsie?"
he asked, heeding the wind's touch.
"She is in love. What do you hear from Mr. Carington?"
"That same. It seems very right and fit. Carington and Elsie are well
mated. The wedding will happen in July. Carry wants me to come back to
him for it."
She was stirring the meal and water together briskly, with her back half
turned to him. At his words she stopped in her work and put her hand up
to her heart with her strange little pushing gesture, as though she must
push her heart down. "And you will go, I suppose?"
"No, I shan't go."
She took her hand down and laughed lightly. He could not hear the joyful
relief in the laugh, but she could. "My, but you have become attached to
Redbud, haven't you? Hasn't it been lonely for you here?"
"Well, the cherry hat little girl up above Sowfoot has been a comfort.
And then I've studied a heap."
"Studied what?"
"Mizzourah!"
"Redbud and Sowfoot are good teachers," she laughed; then her face
sobered quickly, "but I don't think you should stay down here by the
river when you are ill," she said. Her sweet, wistful interest was
balsamic to him. For a moment he tried to look sicker than he was.
"Oh, it's nothing, nothing," he protested in a gone voice.
"Yes, it is something," she had the corn-dodgers going over a slow fire
and was dubiously regarding a second skillet that he had brought her.
"Don't you ever try water for it?" she interrupted herself to ask. He
admitted that he was not as careful of the skillet as he should be, and
she went back to her first anxiety, "Why do you stay here when you are
ill?"
"Oh, I'm not ill a bit, not really." He had forgotten to be ill.
Regarding her dreamily from his bench he was wishing that the moment
could be eternity, that he could be hungry forever and that forever she
could make corn-dodgers for him.
"I think you are sick. _Something_ is the matter with you?"
"Yes," he changed his position a little on the bench, "something is the
matter with me."
"Well, why don't you go on and say what?" She put the skillet on some of
the coals and the coffee-pot on the skillet, being too busy to look
around at him.
"Oh!"--he wanted to tell her, but his pride saved him in time. She was
in rich in gold and land and cattle, in ore, too now; and he? He didn't
know how he was going to fill his meal sack the next time it was empty.
That was where matters had got with him. "I think I won't go on and say
what, after all; let's not bother. Let's just be happy for the minute.
That's something I have learned out here in Missouri, just to be happy
when you get the chance, minute by minute, no matter what sort of hours
are to come after. This, now, is so much more than I had hoped for. I
hadn't really hoped to see you again before----"
"Before what?"
"Well, a fellow can't go on like this forever, can he? I expect I am
going to cut all this."
"_What!_ And leave Uncle Bernique?"
"Uncle Bernique can hold the claim alone, you know. And I'm wasting hope
and energy here. What's the use in staying longer?"
She was very busy with the bacon now and he did not see her face. There
was a wild quiver on it, of grief, fright, dismay.
"You ought not to leave Uncle Bernique and Piney, I am sure of that,"
she said at last earnestly, almost commandingly.
"Heigh-ho! I think Bernique is getting restless, too. He will be
drifting off soon on that tidal wave of ore fever that comes over him;
Piney has been gone for a great while. It's pretty lonely. It's getting
on my nerves. Of course I shouldn't pet my nerves if I had any hope
about the run here, but I haven't. I think that the work we have carried
on is fairly conclusive."
"But wait a minute, didn't you buy this land? Didn't you put some money
in it?"
Steering laughed blithely. "Not much," he said. The thing that made him
laugh was the fact that though it was not much it was all that he had,
and it was, in a way, amusing to consider how he was to get away from
Canaan. Looking at Sally Madeira, who suggested luxury nonchalantly,
trouble about ways and means was bound to be untimely and laughable.
Indeed, looking at Sally Madeira all troubles were more or less
laughable.
"You haven't gone to Europe?" he reminded her, after he had drunk her
health in the coffee.
"No! I haven't gone."
"Are you going?"
"Not unless Father's health improves."
"Isn't he well?"
"No," her face clouded sadly, "he is over-working. Oh, you don't know
how sorry I am," she began, and faltered.
"Sorry? for him?"
"Yes. And for you. And for m-- and because things have come around like
this."
"Let's not be sorry just now," said Steering. "Won't you, please, talk
about glad things now. It's so pleasant to have you here." Since she was
unhappy, he took charge of her unhappiness, and would not be serious any
longer about anything. When she brought him his corn-dodger on a
shingle and more coffee in a tin dipper, he was foolish with happiness,
kept his own spirits high and overcame every little disposition to
seriousness on her part until their picnic had to come to an end, and
she must be starting back down the river road.
"Do you feel like doing something for me?" she asked, her hand in his,
as she made ready to go.
"Something? Everything."
"Then wait just as long as you can, will you?"
"Yes, I will, gladly, since you ask it, just as long as I can."
Steering's voice sang as he answered.
She would not let him accompany her on her homeward journey, but went on
down the river road alone, and Steering returned to the shack, and
carefully measured the amount left in his meal sack, and carefully
counted the money in his wallet. There was just about enough in the sack
to last ten days, flanked by the potatoes and the bacon, and there was
so little in the wallet that any kind of emotion about it seemed a
waste. Still, he did not appear to appreciate the extremity of the
situation as yet. His face was all lit up and the sound of his own voice
pleased him.
"I will wait, just as long as I can," he repeated at the end of his
calculations, "and I can till the meal gives out."
_Chapter Fourteen_
WHEN THE MEAL GAVE OUT
Steering sat on his bunk in his shack with his elbows on his knees, his
head in his hands, and his eyes upon an empty bag that hung from the
bough of a weeping-willow tree. He had just written Carington to explain
that it could not be said that he had conquered Missouri, and that he
was leaving next day for Colorado to try his luck at gold on the Cripple
Creek circuit. He had not explained to Carington that he would walk the
greater part of the way. By some strange perversity of pride a man never
does explain a thing of that kind to anybody, least of all to Carington,
best friend and close sympathiser.
Arrangements for his journey were about complete. Before he had left New
York he had turned everything into ready cash that could be so turned,
so that even when he first reached Missouri his personal effects had not
made travel a burden to him. During the past weeks all the balance of
his belongings that possessed any negotiability whatsoever had been
turned into meal. And his meal sack was empty! By no sort of
foreknowledge can a man accustomed to enough money for current
expenses,--a goodly budget as recognised by the class of which Steering
was an exemplar,--imagine, during his easy circumstances, how he would
feel if ever things should so go against him that he would be left
staring into an empty meal sack. Steering felt an awkward incompetence
to realise the case now. He had looked at the sack at close range,
patted it, as though to mollify its consequences to him, pooh-poohed it,
taken it philosophically, taken it smilingly, but he had been all the
time unable to get his eyes off it, even though he had finally carried
it down to the river's edge and hung it upon the bough of the weeping
willow tree. His eyes were still upon it, he was still regarding it at
long range, through the shack door, getting the foreshorten of it,
getting the middle distance, getting the perspective, utterly unable to
stop his ceaseless staring into the emptiness of it, stop wondering what
next and how next.
He got up and went to the door of the shack and looked out. By and by
it occurred to him that the case would be much worse if there were
anyone besides himself concerned. All the vague fleeting sympathies that
had ever been aroused within him by newspaper stories of starving
families, the nearest he had ever come to the actuality of starving
families, quivered and stirred within him. The first thing he knew, he
was feeling infinitely relieved that he had no starving family. He had a
sensitive and active imagination, and, as he pictured the hungry little
children that he did not have, tears of gratitude came into his eyes,
and he blew gay kisses to those airy little folks.
It was glorious weather. Wild spring flowers were abundant, and there
were cheerful whiskings among the trees where the birds and squirrels
were busy again. The young shoots strained with the urge of the sap,
making little popping noises. Steering started now and again and held
his head waitingly. He had been watching and hoping for Piney for days,
and was on the alert. Every noise, however, resolved itself into the
noise of bird, squirrel, or sapling. There was never the voice nor the
footfall of the human. Once that very afternoon, he had been so sure
that he had heard Piney's pony up on the bluff that he had gone up there
searchingly, joyfully. But except for a little scatter, that he took to
be the lift of a covey of quail somewhere off in the Gulch bushes, not a
sound or sign came up to the bluff. Steering mourned for Piney. If the
tramp-boy had not gone away, things might have been more bearable. But
the lad's jealousy and his love for Steering were in battle royal now,
and Piney kept far from his hero, on the misty hills. Uncle Bernique was
off on the hills, too, almost all the time; at the moment of this
present crisis Bernique had been away for days. It was the merciless
loneliness of the effort there at Redbud that had been most effective in
dulling Steering's endurance. If he had been less lonely he might have
devised ways of standing Missouri yet longer. Up at Dade farm they kept
telling him, when he went up there for one of his visits to the little
girl with the cherries on her hat, that he had "malary." It did not seem
to him a very able diagnosis, but, as he had admitted to Miss Madeira,
something was the matter with him, and it had now become his notion that
the quicker he got out of Missouri the quicker he would be cured of the
something. He was all ready to commence his treatment; he had
corn-dodgers for supper that night, and for breakfast next morning, and
with the morning sun he meant to travel on. The only reason that he did
not start now, this minute, was because--well, she had come up the river
road about this hour once, and he was waiting. Circumstanced as he was
now, with the only three people whom he could count as friends in
Missouri almost always away from him, life had come to mean little but
this feverish, alert waiting. He went out and sat down by the shivering
Di for his very last wait for any of the three.
It was there that old Bernique came upon him. Steering was shivering a
little, too.
"Dieu! You have the malaria!" was the Frenchman's greeting.
"Go 'long, I have no such thing; I'm only as lonely as the devil."
Steering got up and shook hands with the old man with so much energy
that Bernique made a grimace of pain. "Come up here and talk," cried
Steering, his eagerness to hear the sound of a human and friendly voice
making him overlook the excitement under which Bernique laboured. He
tied Bernique's horse to a bush and drew the old man up the bluff.
"Where have you been this time? Where is Piney? Hello! what's the matter
with you anyhow? struck another lode?"
Old Bernique spread out his palms avertingly. "You go fas'," he
protested. "Wait, I beg. I have again had those exper-r-ience that so
much disturb me. But no, I have not found anothaire lode, though I have
been on the hills vair' long time. Thees day I come a-r-round by the way
of Canaan. At the pos'-office I am stop'." The old man was talking now
with his eyes burning into Steering's eyes, an expression of horror
flattening his face; he held the four fingers of one lean hand pressed
to his mouth, so that his words came out inarticulate and broken, though
they seemed to scorch his throat like balls of fire. "At the pos'-office
one say to me, 'Here is lettaire for you!' I take the lettaire and
read.... Now, I ask you, Mistaire Steering, to take it and read."
Bernique drew forth a letter from his pocket and thrust it into
Steering's hand with a finely dramatic gesture. He had the appreciation
of his race for climax.
The letter, Steering saw at once, was in the same gnarled handwriting as
that letter which Crittenton Madeira had given him to read on the first
day of his arrival in Canaan, and its contents made evident the same
gnarled personality that had been made evident by that first letter.
"Read it aloud," said Bernique, and Steering read:
"'Deep Canyon, Colorado, September 23rd, 1899,' hey! what's the matter
with the date, where's the slow-boy been?"
"Read on, Mistaire Steering," said Bernique grimly. But Steering looked
at the post-mark on the envelope in his hand before he read on.
"Post-mark's dated April 23rd, 1900--why----"
"Read on!" cried old Bernique. "It is explain'," and Steering read on.
"'My dear Placide:--You and I were good friends in the days that we
spent in prospecting over the Canaan hills, and, even though I incurred
your displeasure when I abandoned the hills, I am depending upon the
old friendship to influence you to do a last friendly act for me. It is
not necessary for me to acquaint you with the detail of humiliations and
persecutions to which I have been subjected by the man of whom I was
once so foolish as to borrow money, any more than it is necessary for me
to condone to you the desire that has developed within me to make him
bite the dust, even as he has made me bite it. I am not remorseless in
this. I gave him his chance to escape me, but, quite as I anticipated,
he has fallen into the trap that I set for him; else would you not be
reading this letter to-day, nearly a year after it was written.
"'Look close now, friend Placide. Nearly a year prior to the date that
you will get this, that is to say on the 23rd of last September, the
same day that I write this letter to you, I wrote Crittenton Madeira
that I should be dead when my letter reached him, dead under an assumed
name, in a strange land. It was the God's truth. I was dead when the
letter reached him. You are reading a letter from the dead now, friend
Placide.'" Steering stopped for a moment with a little shiver, but
Bernique urged him on, and he read again--"'Placide, in that letter to
Madeira were my instructions to turn over the Canaan Tigmores to Bruce
Steering, because, I being dead, the hills were due to pass on to my
heir. Well, Placide, has Madeira done that? Has he carried out my
instructions? Has he fulfilled his trust? Has Steering possession of the
Canaan Tigmores?
"'Like the thief that he is, Madeira has not done his part. Had he done
it, you would not be reading this letter to-day. I wrote it and placed
it with the clerk of Snow Mountain County, the county in which I died,
to be mailed to you on the 23rd of April, 1900, only in case no inquiry
had ever come from Madeira to verify my death. No inquiry has ever come!
So the clerk of the county, who is my executor, mails this letter to
you. This letter, Placide, is to attest that for seven months Crittenton
Madeira has been in unlawful possession of the Canaan Tigmores,
defrauding my heir and holding land under my name after being advised of
my death and of the means of verifying the advice. There are now, in the
keeping of the clerk of Snow Mountain County, two sealed envelopes, to
be delivered by him, the one to you, the one to Crittenton Madeira.
Madeira's has never been called for. See that yours is. In it you will
find the credentials of my identity, my sworn statements, and the
documents that prove my late encumbency of the entail. I am buried in
the pauper's field in the cemetery of Deep Canyon. The stone slab that I
have directed to be put over me bears the inscription, "James Gray, Died
September 23, 1899."
"'Get your proofs together, Placide, and carry them to the defrauded
heir. I have not forgotten the letters that I received from him, nor his
young eagerness to get at the land that is now his and that should have
been his nearly a year ago. Put the proofs before him. And I pray that
he may be quick and sure to deal out judgment and retribution. He is my
kinsman. Let him for me, as well as for himself, wield the lash that I
put in his hands.
"'Do these things for me, friend Placide, and believe that even in the
grave, I remain,
"'Very gratefully yours,
"'BRUCE GRIERSON.'"
The letter fell from Steering's hand and fluttered to the ground, while
he sat with his hands hanging limply from his knees for a moment.
"Grierson is dead! Grierson is dead!" he repeated. The funereal words
rang through his ears like a grand Praise-God. He knew that he ought to
be sorry and that he was inexpressibly glad, not because the grim old
man was dead--dead, with his malevolence reaching out toward Madeira,
spinning and twisting like a great cobweb snare from the grave--but
because of what must now happen, because vistas of wonderful beauty were
opening up through the long shadows of the Tigmores, because if the end
had come to the house of Grierson, beginning had come to the house of
Steering. Life, big, splendid, stretched out before him. Old Bernique
had risen and was pacing the banks of the Di nervously. Steering, too,
got to his feet. Going down to Bernique, he took the old man's hands in
his. Neither heard a little rustle up the bluff in the leafy bushes.
"Oh, Uncle Bernique!" said Steering, and stopped because of the wild
sound of his own voice. He saw that it would be dangerous for him to
try to talk with his mind in that high tremulous whirl. The old man
clung to him, silent, too, for a teeming moment.
"Now God above, why not Crit Madeira tell you that tr-r-ue way of
things?" shouted Bernique at last fiercely. "Why not?"
The two men looked into each other's eyes, Steering bearing up the old
man, who clutched him feverishly. When the Frenchman began to talk again
his teeth were chattering. "Why not? Hein? Because he t'ief. But God
above! We got those proof! Dead for mont's. And Madeira know it! The
Teegmores are yours for mont's, Mistaire Steering! And Madeira know it!
We put that fine man where he belong. We jail him! He t'ief! We r-r-uin
him, as he would r-r-uin you!"
"Ruin him!" Bruce said the words over measuredly. "We can do it easily.
Everything he has has gone into the company that is getting its chief
encouragement out of the Tigmores. It will be easy to ruin him."
"Yes, God above, it will be easy! We r-r-ruin him. We do that thing
quick and glad." Bernique slid his lean hands up Steering's arms and
held to him.
"Wait! Wait!" The Frenchman's convulsive anger received a sudden check
by the sound of Steering's voice. He clung more tightly to Steering's
arms as he looked into Steering's face, then shrank back helplessly.
"My God!" said the old man, "I forgot!"
"Yes," answered Steering, no hesitation in his voice. "Yes, you forgot
_her_. We must not do that, you know."