The night dragged by, bringing little sleep to Dick Farley, and Virginia
Dalton’s father did not return. It was the longest night Dick had ever
known. Hour after hour he sat propped up against the wall, the pillows
behind him, and smoked, staring out through the open door at the shadows
the moon made. They were deep black shadows, and his spirit was caught
in them, strangely troubled. But at last, when the tardy day was
breaking, the spark in his pipe-bowl died and he slipped down in his
pillows and slept.
When he awoke, the sun was flinging its light through the tree-tops into
the cabin. Nature’s was a soft mood this morning—smiling, fragrant,
audible with many low, harmonious woodland notes. And through the weave
of still music, rising suddenly, clearly, sweetly, a girl’s voice
floated in to him in an old song. He watched the open door expectantly.
In a little while she came in, her voice hushed, walking tiptoe not to
wake him, a rod in one hand, a string of lake-trout swinging from the
other. Her smile was as gloriously a radiant thing as the morning itself
when her eyes met his expectant ones.
“Good morning!” she greeted him, coming to his bedside. “Awake at last,
are you? I was afraid I should have to breakfast alone.”
“Good morning,” he answered, his eyes filled with the rosy beauty of her
glorious youth. “You have been fishing already!”
“I have been down to the lake—for my morning plunge primarily, to tell
the truth. And in the second place for something for my sick man to eat.
Hungry?”
As she went to set the rod in its place in the corner he looked after
her approvingly. Her hair hung as yesterday in two long braids, one
flung over her shoulder. Her brown arms were bare from the shoulder.
“Yes,” he answered her, “I think I am hungry. While you are starting
breakfast I think I’ll get up——”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” she retorted positively. “I’ll put a
table close to your bunk, and we’ll eat here. After breakfast, when the
sun is a little higher and it’s good and warm, maybe I’ll let you try to
get up.”
As she moved toward the kitchen with her string of fish, he called after
her:
“Your father? He hasn’t come in yet?”
“No. But we’ll look for him before long. Dear old Daddy has dreadfully
irregular habits!”
Then he heard her clattering with pots and pans, heard her singing
broken snatches of songs; and soon the aroma of coffee and the sizzling
of the trout told him that breakfast was ready. She came in then,
removed the objects from the table across the room—he saw with a little
surprise that they were several books carelessly scattered—pushed the
table to his side, dragged her own chair up to it, and brought in the
fish and coffee and biscuits with tin cups, tin plates, heavy iron
knives, forks and spoons.
“There is no sugar, no butter, no cream,” she laughed at him. “But you
won’t mind, will you?”
While they ate she told him more of herself; how she fished, or used the
rifle to bring down a squirrel from a pine, or to get a deer, sometimes;
how from her lookout, a peak a mile behind the cabin, she mused over the
pale, shifting shades of daybreak or the vivid splashes of color in the
west before the dusk came; how she let her eyes go far out to the
furthermost rim of the vague, distant mountains and dreamed of the other
side—the land of men and women, of cities where the cañons were streets,
and the peaks many-storied buildings. She was not lonely because no one
had taught her the word, because she had known no existence but this.
She did not know unrest, because she had not lived in cities.
“But sometimes,” with a sudden wistfulness, “there is something here
which talks; and I can’t quite understand it!” She pressed her two hands
tightly upon her breast. “When I have everything here, how can there be
anything lacking? When the world is so big, how can it seem so little?
When the day is so filled with good things, how can it seem so empty?
When I am so happy, how can I be, all of a sudden, so sad? When I am
laughing, why do I want to cry——?”
He told her, too, of his own life; of the schools he had gone to; of his
work in cities of the East; of the command to go West for his health as
her father had done; of the fever of gold. But he said no word of his
partner—he could not speak of that, yet. Nor did he mention the Cup of
Gold, saying merely that he had pushed into these mountains, into her
valley, prospecting.
“But you said,” she reminded him frankly, “that you were looking for
some one?”
“Yes,” he admitted, turning from her clear eyes to the door. “I will
tell you about that some other time.”
* * * * *
He questioned her about her father; and she, glad to find other ears
than the inattentive ones of her woodland friends, spoke unreservedly.
He was a wonderful man, this James Dalton, this “dear old Daddy.” A
wonderful man to look at: big, mighty of his hands, handsome, a
full-bearded giant. With a great tender heart, too, forgetful at all
times of self, striving only for his daughter’s good and happiness,
doing all of the thousand and one little things to please her, to make
life run smoothly and brightly for her.
He had filled the long hours with instruction, had taught her to read
and write, had read to her from the few books which had come with them
into their exile. He had drawn pictures of busy cities with their
factories and hotels, their churches and stores, and he had promised her
that one day he would take her with him to see these marvelous things
with her own eyes.
“And now,” she ended, her eyes luminous with the dreamings of a golden
fairyland whose gates were to be thrown open to her, “now we are going
to see it all, very soon.”
She fell suddenly silent, looking beyond the far horizon where her
fancies led her.
“It is worth being raised like this,” Farley was thinking, “just to be
able to walk out into the other life—the life filled with the things man
has done. To wander through it a little—and then to come back, to stay.”
When all of the chill of the mountain morning had gone, drunk up by the
warm, thirsty sun, she allowed her sick man to get up. Farley found that
his wrist was more swollen, more painful than it had been last night,
but began to hope that there were no bones broken in it, that he had
sprained it badly and that in a few days it would mend itself. His right
side was very nearly useless to him, the shoulder, lower ribs and leg
being sore and stiff; but with a cane which she cut for him from a
sapling in the grove he was able to hobble around slowly.
He realized, as he worked his way unsteadily to the door, that it would
be many days before he could take up the trail which he had vowed over
his dead partner’s body to follow until he found its end.
The morning passed, and they had lunch together out under the trees at
the edge of the grove. Still Dalton had not come in. But the girl seemed
in no way surprised, saying lightly that her father often was gone a day
or so without warning, that perhaps he had found and was following the
tracks of a bear.
“I am going for my mail,” she told him, laughing at his wonder. “Do you
feel strong enough to come with me?”
“Mail?” he demanded incredulously.
“Yes! There may be a letter from Daddy. The post-office is over yonder,
across the lake. If you think that you can walk down to the canoe, we
can paddle over.”
With the help of his cane, with the aid of her hand when they came to
the rude steps in the cliff side, he finally reached the edge of the
lake where they had left the canoe yesterday. Leaving him here for a
little, she disappeared into the trees and came back presently, carrying
the light boat upon her shoulders.
Helping him to get into it, she pushed out from the shore, jumped in and
paddled out into the water, heading straight for the western side a
half-mile away. Upon a little beach there, sandy and strewn with white
pebbles she grounded the canoe; and with a word to him to wait while she
asked for her letter, hurried to a big rock, flat-topped, set back a
little from the water’s edge.
Turning so that he could see what she did, she tossed toward him five
pebbles which she had picked up from the rock. And then she came back to
him.
“No letter?” he asked.
“Didn’t you see it?” she laughed into his puzzled face. “Of course there
was! Daddy has gone over yonder,” pointing to the ridge of hills
sweeping upward into the westward mountains. “How do I know? Those
pebbles were in a row, pointing east and west, with the biggest one at
this end, the littlest, our ‘pointer,’ at the west end. And since there
were five pebbles, he means to be gone about five days. No, he didn’t
add a postscript saying what he was going for. We need sugar, and we
need ammunition. Also—” with a little glance, purely feminine, at her
skirt—“I shall want a new dress!”
“But,” suggested Farley, “there is no town, no camp near enough for him
to get those things and be back in five days?”
“He is generally gone longer,” she admitted as she got back into the
canoe and pushed off. “But it doesn’t matter what he went for, does it?
You’ll have to put up with my sole company for the five days.”