Dan Failing was really not badly hurt. The quick, lashing blows had not
done more than severely bruise the flesh of his face; and the mists of
unconsciousness that had been falling over him were more nearly the
result of his own tremendous physical exertion. Now these mists were
rising.
"Go--go away," the girl was commanding. "I think you've killed him."
Dan opened his eyes to find her kneeling close beside him, but still
covering Cranston with her pistol. Her hand was resting on his bruised
cheek. He couldn't have believed that a human face could be as white,
while life still remained, as hers was then. All the lovely tints that
had been such a delight to him, the play of soft reds and browns, had
faded as an after-glow fades on the snow.
Dan's glance moved with hers to Cranston. He was standing easily at a
distance of a dozen feet; and except for the faintest tremble all over
his body, a muscular reaction from the violence of his passion, he had
entirely regained his self-composure. This was quite characteristic of
the mountain men. They share with the beasts a passion of living that is
wholly unknown on the plains; but yet they have a certain quality of
imperturbability known nowhere else. Nor is it limited to the
native-born mountaineers. No man who intimately knows a member of that
curious, keen-eyed little army of naturalists and big-game hunters who
go to the north woods every fall, as regularly and seemingly as
inexorably as the waterfowl go in spring, can doubt this fact. They seem
to have acquired from the silence and the snows an impregnation of that
eternal calm and imperturbability that is the wilderness itself.
Cranston wasn't in the least afraid. Fear is usually a matter of
uncertainty, and he knew exactly where he stood.
It is extremely doubtful if a plainsman would have possessed this
knowledge. But a plainsman has not the knowledge of life itself that the
mountaineer has, simply because he does not see it in the raw. And he
has not half the intimate knowledge of death, an absolute requisite of
self-composure. The mountaineer knows life in its simple phases with
little tradition or convention to blur the vision. Death is a very
intimate acquaintance that may be met in any snowdrift, on any rocky
trail; and these conditions are very deadly to any delusions that he has
in regard to himself. He acquires an ability to see just where he
stands, and of course that means self-possession. This quality had
something to do with the remarkable record that the mountain men, such
as that magnificent warrior from Tennessee, made in the late war.
Cranston knew exactly what Snowbird would do. Although of a higher
order, she was a mountain creature, even as himself. She meant exactly
what she said. If he hadn't climbed from Dan's prone body, she would
have shot quickly and very straight. If he tried to attack either of
them now, her finger would press back before he could blink an eye, and
she wouldn't weep any hysterical tears over his dead body. If he kept
his distance, she wouldn't shoot at all. He meant to keep his distance.
But he did know that he could insult her without danger to himself. And
by now his lips had acquired their old curl of scorn.
"I'll go, Snowbird," he said. "I'll leave you with your sissy. But I
guess you saw what I did to him--in two minutes."
"I saw. But you must remember he's sick. Now go."
"If he's sick, let him stay in bed--and have a wet nurse. Maybe you can
be that."
The lids drooped halfway over her gray eyes, and the slim finger curled
more tightly about the trigger. "Oh, I wish I could shoot you, Bert!"
she said. She didn't whisper it, or hiss it, or hurl it, or do any of
the things most people are supposed to do in moments of violent emotion.
She simply said it, and her meaning was all the clearer.
"But you can't. And I'll pound that milksop of yours to a jelly every
time I see him. I'd think, Snowbird, that you'd want a _man_."
He started up the trail; and then she did a strange thing. "He's more of
a man than you are, right now, Bert," she told him. "He'll prove it some
day." Then her arm went about Dan's neck and lifted his head upon her
breast; and in Cranston's plain sight, she bent and kissed him, softly,
on the lips.
Cranston's answer was an oath. It dripped from his lips, more poisonous,
more malicious than the venom of a snake. His late calm, treasured so
much, dropped from him in an instant. His features seemed to tighten,
the dark lips drew away from his teeth. No words could have made him
such an effective answer as this little action of hers. And as he turned
up the trail, he called down to her a name,--that most dreadful epithet
that foul tongues have always used to women held in greatest scorn.
Dan struggled in her arms. The kiss on his lips, the instant before, had
not called him out of his half-consciousness. It had scarcely seemed
real, rather just an incident in a blissful dream. But the word called
down the trail shot out clear and vivid from the silence, just as a
physician's face will often leap from the darkness after the anesthesia.
The whole scene in an instant became incredibly vivid,--the dark figure
on the trail, the girl's white face above him, narrow-eyed and
drawn-lipped, and the dark pines, silent and sad, overhead. Something
infinitely warm and tender was holding him, pressing him back against a
holy place that throbbed and gave him life and strength; but he knew
that this word had to be answered. And only actions, not other words,
could be its payment. All the voices of his body called to him to lie
still, but the voices of the spirit, those higher, nobler promptings
from which no man, to the glory of the breed from which he sprung, can
ever quite escape, were stronger yet. He tugged upward, straining. But
he didn't even have the strength to break the hold that the soft arm had
about his neck.
"Oh, if I could only pull the trigger!" she was crying. "If I could only
kill him--"
"Let me," he pleaded. "Give me the pistol. I'll kill him--"
And he would. There was no flinching in the gray eyes that looked up to
her. She leaned forward, as if to put the weapon in his hands, but at
once drew it back. And then a single sob caught at her throat. An
instant later, they heard Cranston's laughter as he vanished around the
turn of the trail.
For long minutes the two of them were still. The girl still held the
man's head upon her breast. The pistol had fallen in the pine needles,
and her nervous hand plucked strangely at the leaves of a mountain
flower. To Dan's eyes, there was something trancelike, a hint of
paralysis and insensibility about her posture. He had never seen her
eyes like this. The light that he had always beheld in them had
vanished. Their utter darkness startled him.
He sat up straight, and her arm that had been about his neck fell at her
side. He took her hand firmly in his, and their eyes met.
"We must go home, Snowbird," he told her simply. "I'm not so badly hurt
but that I can make it."
She nodded; but otherwise scarcely seemed to hear. Her eyes still
flowed with darkness. And then, before his own eyes, their dark pupils
began to contract. The hand he held filled and throbbed with life, and
the fingers closed around his. She leaned toward him.
"Listen, Dan," she said quickly. "You heard--didn't you--the last thing
that he said?"
"I couldn't help but hear, Snowbird."
Her other hand sought for his. "Then if you heard--payment must be made.
You see what I mean, Dan. Maybe you can't see, knowing the girls that
live on the plains. You were the cause of his saying it, and you must
answer--"
It seemed to Dan that some stern code of the hills, unwritten except in
the hearts of their children, inexorable as night, was speaking through
her lips. This was no personal thing. In some dim, half-understood way,
it went back to the basic code of life.
"People must fight their own fights, up here," she told him. "The laws
of the courts that the plains' people can appeal to are all too far
away. There's no one that can do it, except you. Not my father. My
father can't fight your battles here, if your honor is going to stand.
It's up to you, Dan. You can't pretend that you didn't hear him. Such as
you are, weak and sick to be beaten to a pulp in two minutes, you alone
will have to make him answer for it. I came to your aid--and now you
must come to mine."
Her fingers no longer clasped his. Strength had come back to him, and
his fingers closed down until the blood went out of hers, but she was
wholly unconscious of the pain. In reality, she was conscious of nothing
except the growing flame in his face. It held her eyes, in passionate
fascination. His pupils were contracting to little bright dots in the
gray irises. The jaw was setting, as she had never seen it before.
"Do you _think_, Snowbird, that you'd even have to ask me?" he demanded.
"Don't you think I understand? And it won't be in your defense--only my
own duty."
"But he is so strong--and you are so weak--"
"I won't be so weak forever. I never really cared much about living
before. I'll try now, and you'll see--oh, Snowbird, wait and trust me: I
understand everything. It's my own fight--when you kissed me, and he
cried down that word in anger and jealousy, it put the whole thing on
me. No one else can make him answer; no one else has the right. It's my
honor, no one else's, that stands or falls."
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it again and again.
And for the first time he saw the tears gathering in her dark eyes. "But
you _fought_ here, didn't you, Dan?" she asked with painful slowness.
"You didn't put up your arms--or try to run away? I didn't come till he
had you done, so I didn't see." She looked at him as if her whole joy of
life hung on his answer.
"Fought! I would have fought till I died! But that isn't enough,
Snowbird. It isn't enough just to fight, in a case like this. A man's
got to win! I would have died if you hadn't come. And that's another
debt that I have to pay--only that debt I owe to _you_."
She nodded slowly. The lives of the mountain men are not saved by their
women without incurring obligation. She attempted no barren denials. She
made no effort to pretend he had not incurred a tremendous debt when she
had come with her pistol. It was an unavoidable fact. A life for a life
is the code of the mountains.
"Two things I must do, before I can ever dare to die," he told her
soberly. "One of them is to pay you; the other is to pay Cranston for
the thing he said. Maybe the chance will never come for the first of the
two; only I'll pray that it will. Maybe it would be kinder to you to
pray that it wouldn't; yet I pray that it will! Maybe I can pay that
debt only by being always ready, always watching for a chance to save
you from any danger, always trying to protect you. You didn't come in
time to see the fight I made. Besides--I lost, and little else matters.
And that debt to you can't be paid until sometime I fight again--for
you--and win." He gasped from his weakness, but went on bravely. "I'll
never be able to feel at peace, Snowbird, until I'm tested in the fire
before your eyes! I want to show you the things Cranston said of me are
not true--that my courage can stand the test.
"It wouldn't be the same, perhaps, with an Eastern girl. Other things
matter in the valleys. But I see how it is here; that there is only one
standard for men and by that standard they rise or fall. Things in the
mountains are down to the essentials."
He paused and struggled for strength to continue. "And I know what you
said to him," he went on. "Half-unconscious as I was, I remember every
word. Each word just seems to burn into me, Snowbird, and I'll make
every one of them good. You said I am a better man than he, and sometime
it would be proved--and it's the truth! Maybe in a month, maybe in a
year. I'm not going to die from this malady of mine now, Snowbird. I've
got too much to live for--too many debts to pay. In the end, I'll prove
your words to him."
His eyes grew earnest, and the hard fire went out of them. "It's almost
as if you were a queen, a real queen of some great kingdom," he told
her, tremulous with a great awe that was stealing over him, as a mist
steals over water. "And because I had kissed your fingers, for ever and
ever I was your subject, living only to fight your fights--maybe with a
dream in the end to kiss your fingers again. When you bent and kissed me
on that hillside--for him to see--it was the same: that I was sworn to
you, and nothing mattered in my life except the service and love I could
give to you. And it's more than you ever dream, Snowbird. It's all
yours, for your battles and your happiness."
The great pines were silent above them, shadowed and dark. Perhaps they
were listening to an age-old story, those vows of service and
self-gained worth by which the race has struggled upward from the
darkness.
"But I kissed you--once before," she reminded him. The voice was just a
whisper, hardly louder than the stir of the leaves in the wind.
"But that kiss didn't count," he told her. "It wasn't at all the same. I
loved you then, I think, but it didn't mean what it did to-day."
"And what--" she leaned toward him, her eyes full on his, "does it mean
now?"
"All that's worth while in life, all that matters when everything is
said that can be said, and all is done that can be done. And it means,
please God, when the debts are paid, that I may have such a kiss again."
"Not until then," she told him, whispering.
"Until then, I make oath that I won't even ask it, or receive it if you
should give it. It goes too deep, dearest--and it means too much."
This was their pact. Not until the debts were paid and her word made
good would those lips be his again. There was no need for further words.
Both of them knew. The soldier of the queen must be tried with fire,
before he may return to kiss her fingers. The light burns clear in this.
No instances of degeneracy, no exceptions brought to pass by thwarted
nature, can affect the truth of this.
In the skies, the gray clouds were gathering swiftly, as always in the
mountains. The rain-drops were falling one and one, over the forest. The
summer was done, and fall had come in earnest.