BACON
The savour of roasting chicken, that first delicious burst of aroma when
the oven door is opened, would tempt an angel from heaven down to the
lowly earth. A Southerner declares that his nostrils can detect at a
prodigious distance the cooking of "possum and taters." A Kanaka has a
cosmopolitan appetite, but the fragrance which moves him most nearly is
the scent of fish baking in Ti leaves. A Frenchman waits unmoved until
the perfume of some rich lamb ragout, an air laden with spices, is
wafted toward him.
Every man and every nation has a special dish, in general; there is only
one whose appeal is universal. It is not for any class or nation; it is
primarily for "the hungry man," no matter what has given him an
appetite. It may be that he has pushed a pen all day, or reckoned up
vast columns, or wielded a sledge-hammer, or ridden a wild horse from
morning to night; but the savour of peculiar excellence to the nostrils
of this universal hungry man is the smell of frying bacon.
A keen appetite is even stronger than sorrow, and when Sally Fortune
awoke with that strong perfume in her nostrils, she sat straight up
among the blankets, startled as the cavalry horse by the sound of the
trumpet. What she saw was Anthony Bard kneeling by the coals of the fire
over which steamed a coffee-pot on one side and a pan of crisping bacon
on the other.
The vision shook her so that she rubbed her eyes and stared again to
make sure. It did not seem possible that she had actually wakened during
the night and found him gone, and with this reality before her she was
strongly tempted to believe that the coming of Nash was only a vivid
dream.
"Morning, Anthony."
He turned his head quickly and smiled to her.
"Hello, Sally."
He was back at once, turning the bacon, which was done on the first
side. Seeing that his back was turned, she dressed quickly.
"How'd you sleep?"
"Well."
"Where?"
He turned more slowly this time.
"You woke up in the middle of the night?"
"Yes."
"What wakened you?"
"Nash and Kilrain."
He sighed: "I wish I'd been here."
She answered: "I'll wash up; we'll eat; and then off on the trail. I've
an idea that the two will be back, and they'll have more men behind
them."
After a little her voice called from the outside: "Anthony, have you had
a look at the morning?"
He came obediently to the doorway. The sun had not yet risen, but the
fresh, rose-coloured light already swept around the horizon throwing
the hills in sharp relief and flushing, faraway, the pure snows of the
Little Brothers. And so blinding was the sheen of the lake that it
seemed at first as though the sun were about to break from the waters,
for there all the radiance of the sunrise was reflected, concentrated.
Looking in this manner from the doorway, with the water on either side
and straight ahead, and the dark, narrow point of land cutting that
colour like a prow, it seemed to Anthony almost as if he stood on the
bridge of a ship which in another moment would gather head and sail out
toward the sea of fresh beauty beyond the peaks, for the old house of
William Drew stood on a small peninsula, thrusting out into the lake, a
low, shelving shore, scattered with trees.
Where the little tongue of land joined the main shore the ground rose
abruptly into a shoulder of rocks inaccessible to a horse; the entrance
and exit to the house must be on either side of this shoulder hugging
closely the edge of the water.
Feeling that halo of the morning about them, for a moment Anthony forgot
all things in the lift and exhilaration of the keen air; and he accepted
the girl as a full and equal partner in his happiness, looking to her
for sympathy.
She knelt by the edge of the water, face and throat shining and wet, her
head bending back, her lips parted and smiling. It thrilled him as if
she were singing a silent song which made the brightness of the morning
and the colour beyond the peaks. He almost waited to see her throat
quiver--hear the high, sweet tone.
But a scent of telltale sharpness drew him a thousand leagues down and
made him whirl with a cry of dismay: "The bacon, Sally!"
It was hopelessly burned; some of it was even charred on the bottom of
the pan. Sally, returning on the run, took charge of the cookery and
went about it with a speed and ability that kept him silent; which being
the ideal mood for a spectator, he watched and found himself learning
much.
Whatever that scene of the night before meant in the small and definite,
in the large and vague it meant that he had a claim of some sort on
Sally Fortune and it is only when a man feels that he has this claim,
this proprietorship, as it were, that he begins to see a woman clearly.
Before this his observance has been half blind through prejudice either
for or against; he either sees her magnified with adulation, or else the
large end of the glass is placed against his eye and she is merely a
speck in the distance. But let a woman step past that mysterious wall
which separates the formal from the intimate--only one step--at once she
is surrounded by the eyes of a man as if by a thousand spies. So it was
with Anthony.
It moved him, for instance, to see the supple strength of her fingers
when she was scraping the charred bacon from the bottom of the pan, and
he was particularly fascinated by the undulations of the small, round
wrist. He glanced down to his own hand, broad and bony in comparison.
It was his absorption in this criticism that served to keep him aloof
from her while they ate, and the girl felt it like an arm pushing her
away. She had been very close to him not many hours before; now she was
far away. She could understand nothing but the pain of it.
As he finished his coffee he said, staring into a corner: "I don't know
why I came back to you, Sally."
"You didn't mean to come back when you started?"
"Of course not."
She flushed, and her heart beat loudly to hear his weakness. He was
keeping nothing from her; he was thinking aloud; she felt that the bars
between them were down again.
"In the first place I went because I had to be seen and known by name in
some place far away from you. That was for your sake. In the second
place I had to be alone for the work that lay ahead."
"Drew?"
"Yes. It all worked like a charm. I went to the house of Jerry Wood,
told him my name, stayed there until Conklin and several others arrived,
hunting for me, and then gave them the slip."
She did not look up from her occupation, which was the skilful cleaning
of her gun.
"It was perfect; the way clear before me; I had dodged through their
lines, so to speak, when I gave Conklin the slip, and I could ride
straight for Drew and catch him unprepared. Isn't that clear?"
"But you didn't?"
She was so calm about it that he grew a little angry; she would not look
up from the cleaning of the gun.
"That's the devil of it; I couldn't stay away. I had to come back to
you."
She restored the gun to her holster and looked steadily at him; he felt
a certain shock in countering her glance.
"Because I thought you might be lonely, Sally."
"I was."
It was strange to see how little fencing there was between them. They
were like men, long tried in friendship and working together on a great
problem full of significance to both.
"Do you know what I kept sayin' to myself when I found you was gone?"
"Well?"
"Todo es perdo; todo es perdo!"
She had said it so often to herself that now some of the original
emotion crept into her voice. His arm went out; they shook hands across
their breakfast pans.
She went on: "The next thing is Drew?"
"Yes."
"There's no changing you." She did not wait for his answer. "I know
that. I won't ask questions. If it has to be done we'll do it quickly;
and afterward I can find a way out for us both."
Something like a foreknowledge came to him, telling him that the thing
would never be done--that he had surrendered his last chance of Drew
when he turned back to go to Sally. It was as if he took a choice
between the killing of the man and the love of the woman. But he said
nothing of his forebodings and helped her quietly to rearrange the small
pack. They saddled and took the trail which pointed up over the
mountains--the same trail which they had ridden in an opposite direction
the night before.
He rode with his head turned, taking his last look at the old house of
Drew, with its blackened, crumbling sides, when the girl cried softly:
"What's that? Look!"
He stared in the direction of her pointing arm. They were almost
directly under the shoulder of rocks which loomed above the trail along
the edge of the lake. Anthony saw nothing.
"What was it?"
He checked his horse beside hers.
"I thought I saw something move. I'm not sure. And there--back,
Anthony!"
And she whirled her horse. He caught it this time clearly, the
unmistakable glint of the morning light on steel, and he turned the grey
sharply. At the same time a rattling blast of revolver shots crackled
above them; the grey reared and pitched back.
By inches he escaped the fall of the horse, slipping from the saddle in
the nick of time. A bullet whipped his hat from his head. Then the hand
of the girl clutched his shoulder.
"Stirrup and saddle, Anthony!"
He seized the pommel of the saddle, hooked his foot into the stirrup
which she abandoned to him, and she spurred back toward the old house.
A shout followed them, a roar that ended in a harsh rattle of curses;
they heard the spat of bullets several times on the trees past which
they whirled. But it was only a second before they were once more in the
shelter of the house. He stood in the centre of the room, stunned,
staring stupidly around him. It was not fear of death that benumbed him,
but a rising horror that he should be so trapped--like a wild beast
cornered and about to be worried to death by dogs.
As for escape, there was simply no chance--it was impossible. On three
sides the lake, still beautiful, though the colour was fading from it,
effectively blocked their way. On the fourth and narrowest side there
was the shoulder of rocks, not only blocking them, but affording a
perfect shelter for Nash and his men, for they did not doubt that it was
he.
"They think they've got us," said a fiercely exultant voice beside him,
"but we ain't started to make all the trouble we're goin' to make."
Life came back to him as he looked at her. She was trembling with
excitement, but it was the tremor of eagerness, not the unmistakable
sick palsy of fear. He drew out a large handkerchief of fine, white
linen and tied it to a long splinter of wood which he tore away from one
of the rotten boards.
"Go out with this," he said. "They aren't after you, Sally. This is west
of the Rockies, thank God, and a woman is safe with the worst man that
ever committed murder."
She said: "D'you mean this, Anthony?"
"I'm trying to mean it."
She snatched the stick and snapped it into small pieces.
"Does that look final, Anthony?"
He could not answer for a moment. At last he said: "What a woman you
would have made for a wife, Sally Fortune; what a fine pal!"
But she laughed, a mirth not forced and harsh, but clear and ringing.
"Anthony, ain't this better'n marriage?"
"By God," he answered, "I almost think you're right."
For answer a bullet ripped through the right-hand wall and buried itself
in a beam on the opposite side of the room.
"Listen!" she said.
There was a fresh crackle of guns, the reports louder and longer drawn.
"Rifles," said Sally Fortune. "I knew no bullet from a six-gun could
carry like that one."
The little, sharp sounds of splintering and crunching began everywhere.
A cloud of soot spilled down the chimney and across the hearth. A furrow
ploughed across the floor, lifting a splinter as long and even as if it
had been grooved out by a machine.
"Look!" said Sally, "they're firin' breast high to catch us standing,
and on the level of the floor to get us if we lie down. That's Nash. I
know his trademark."
"From the back of the house we can answer them," said Bard. "Let's try
it."
"Pepper for their salt, eh?" answered Sally, and they ran back through
the old shack to the last room.