comrades were decent-minded and beginning to see the real relation
of things, they were not disposed to be civil to Shefford. They were
certainly not Mormons. And his position, apparently as a Gentile, among
these Mormons was one open to criticism. They might have been jealous,
too; at any rate, remarks were passed in his hearing, meant for his
ears, that made it exceedingly trying for him not to resent. Moreover,
Joe Lake's increasing impatience rendered the situation more difficult.
Shefford welcomed the arrival of Nas Ta Bega. The Indian listened to the
loud talk of several loungers round the camp-fire; and thereafter he was
like Shefford's shadow, silent, somber, watchful.
Nevertheless, it did not happen to be one of the friendly and sarcastic
cowboys that precipitated the crisis. A horse-wrangler named Hurley, a
man of bad repute, as much outlaw as anything, took up the bantering.
“Say, Shefford, what in the hell's your job here, anyway?” he queried
as he kicked a cedar branch into the camp-fire. The brightening blaze
showed him swarthy, unshaven, a large-featured, ugly man.
“I've been doing odd jobs for Withers,” replied Shefford. “Expect to
drive pack-trains in here for a while.”
“You must stand strong with these Mormons. Must be a Mormon yerself?”
“No,” replied Shefford, briefly.
“Wal, I'm stuck on your job. Do you need a packer? I can throw a
diamond-hitch better 'n any feller in this country.”
“I don't need help.”
“Mebbe you'll take me over to see the ladies,” he went on, with a coarse
laugh.
Shefford did not show that he had heard. Hurley waited, leering as
looked from the keen listeners to Shefford.
“Want to have them all yerself, eh?” he jeered.
Shefford struck him--sent him tumbling heavily, like a log. Hurley,
cursing as he half rose, jerked his gun out. Nas Ta Bega, swift as
light, kicked the gun out of his hand. And Joe Lake picked it up.
Deliberately the Mormon cocked the weapon and stood over Hurley.
“Get up!” he ordered, and Shefford heard the ruthless Mormon in him
then.
Hurley rose slowly. Then Joe prodded him in the middle with the cocked
gun. Shefford startled, expected the gun to go off. So did the others,
especially Hurley, who shrank in panic from the dark Mormon.
“Rustle!” said Joe, and gave the man a harder prod. Assuredly the gun
did not have a hair-trigger.
“Joe, mebbe it's loaded!” protested one of the cowboys.
Hurley shrank back, and turned to hurry away, with Joe close after him.
They disappeared in the darkness. A constrained silence was maintained
around the camp-fire for a while. Presently some of the men walked off
and others began to converse. Everybody heard the sound of hoofs passing
down the trail. The patter ceased, and in a few moments Lake returned.
He still carried Hurley's gun.
The crowd dispersed then. There was no indication of further trouble.
However, Shefford and Joe and Nas Ta Bega divided the night in watches,
so that some one would be wide awake.
Early next morning there was an exodus from the village of the better
element among the visitors. “No fun hangin' round hyar,” one of them
expressed it, and as good-naturedly as they had come they rode away. Six
or seven of the desperado class remained behind, bent on mischief; and
they were reinforced by more arrivals from Stonebridge. They avoided the
camp by the spring, and when Shefford and Lake attempted to go to them
they gave them a wide berth. This caused Joe to assert that they were
up to some dirty work. All morning they lounged around under the cedars,
keeping out of sight, and evidently the reinforcement from Stonebridge
had brought liquor. When they gathered together at their camp, half
drunk, all noisy, some wanting to swagger off into the village and
others trying to hold them back, Joe Lake said, grimly, that somebody
was going to get shot. Indeed, Shefford saw that there was every
likelihood of bloodshed.
“Reckon we'd better take to one of the cabins,” said Joe.
Thereupon the three repaired to the nearest cabin, and, entering, kept
watch from the windows. During a couple of hours, however, they did not
see or hear anything of the ruffians. Then came a shot from over in
the village, a single yell, and, after that, a scattering volley. The
silence and suspense which followed were finally broken by hoof-beats.
Nas Ta Bega called Joe and Shefford to the window he had been stationed
at. From here they saw the unwelcome visitors ride down the trail, to
disappear in the cedars toward the outlet of the valley. Joe, who had
numbered them, said that all but one of them had gone.
“Reckon he got it,” added Joe.
So indeed it turned out; one of the men, a well-known rustler named
Harker, had been killed, by whom no one seemed to know. He had brazenly
tried to force his way into one of the houses, and the act had cost him
his life. Naturally Shefford, never free from his civilized habit of
thought, remarked apprehensively that he hoped this affair would not
cause the poor women to be arrested again and haled before some rude
court.
“Law!” grunted Joe. “There ain't any. The nearest sheriff is in Durango.
That's Colorado. And he'd give us a medal for killing Harker. It was a
good job, for it'll teach these rowdies a lesson.”
Next day the old order of life was resumed in the village. And the
arrival of a heavily laden pack-train, under the guidance of Withers,
attested to the fact that the Mormons meant not only to continue to live
in the valley, but also to build and plant and enlarge. This was good
news to Shefford. At least the village could be made less lonely.
And there was plenty of work to give him excuse for staying there.
Furthermore, Withers brought a message form Bishop Kane to the effect
that the young man was offered a place as teacher in the school, in
co-operation with the Mormon teachers. Shefford experienced no twinge of
conscience when he accepted.
It was the fourth evening after the never-to-be-forgotten moonlight ride
to the valley that Shefford passed under the dark pinyon-trees on his
way to Fay Larkin's cottage. He paused in the gloom and memory beset
him. The six months were annihilated, and it was the night he had fled.
But now all was silent. He seemed to be trying to drag himself back.
A beginning must be made. Only how to meet her--what to say--what to
conceal!
He tapped on the door and she came out. After all, it was a meeting
vastly different from what his feeling made him imagine it might have
been. She was nervous, frightened, as were all the other women, for
that matter. She was alone in the cottage. He made haste to reassure her
about the improbability of any further trouble such as had befallen
the last week. As he had always done on those former visits to her,
he talked rapidly, using all his wit, and here his emotion made him
eloquent; he avoided personalities, except to tell about his prospects
of work in the village, and he sought above all to lead her mind from
thought of herself and her condition. Before he left her he had the
gladness of knowing he had succeeded.
When he said good night he felt the strange falsity of his position. He
did not expect to be able to keep up the deception for long. That roused
him, and half the night he lay awake, thinking. Next day he was the life
of the work and study and play in that village. Kindness and good-will
did not need inspiration, but it was keen, deep passion that made him a
plotter for influence and friendship. Was there a woman in the village
whom he might trust, in case he needed one? And his instinct guided him
to her whom he had liked well--Ruth. Ruth Jones she had called herself
at the trial, and when Shefford used the name she laughed mockingly.
Ruth was not very religious, and sometimes she was bitter and hard.
She wanted life, and here she was a prisoner in a lonely valley. She
welcomed Shefford's visits. He imagined that she had slightly changed,
and whether it was the added six months with its trouble and pain or
a growing revolt he could not tell. After a time he divined that the
inevitable retrogression had set in: she had not enough faith to uphold
the burden she had accepted, nor the courage to cast it off. She was
ready to love him. That did not frighten Shefford, and if she did love
him he was not so sure it would not be an anchor for her. He saw her
danger, and then he became what he had never really been in all the days
of his ministry--the real helper. Unselfishly, for her sake, he found
power to influence her; and selfishly, for the sake of Fay Larkin, he
began slowly to win her to a possible need.
The days passed swiftly. Mormons came and went, though in the open day,
as laborers; new cabins went up, and a store, and other improvements.
Some part of every evening Shefford spent with Fay, and these visits
were no longer unknown to the village. Women gossiped, in a friendly way
about Shefford, but with jealous tongues about the girl. Joe Lake told
Shefford the run of the village talk. Anything concerning the Sago Lily
the droll Mormon took to heart. He had been hard hit, and admitted it.
Sometimes he went with Shefford to call upon her, but he talked little
and never remained long. Shefford had anticipated antagonism on the part
of Joe; however, he did not find it.
Shefford really lived through the busy day for that hour with Fay in the
twilight. And every evening seemed the same. He would find her in the
dark, alone, silent, brooding, hopeless. Her mood did not puzzle him,
but how to keep from plunging her deeper into despair baffled him. He
exhausted all his powers trying to do for her what he had been able to
do for Ruth. Yet he failed. Something had blunted her. The shadow of
that baneful trial hovered over her, and he came to sense a strange
terror in her. It was mostly always present. Was she thinking of Jane
Withersteen and Lassiter, left dead or imprisoned in the valley from
which she had been brought so mysteriously? Shefford wearied his brain
revolving these questions. The fate of her friends, and the cross she
bore--of these was tragedy born, but the terror--that Shefford divined
came of waiting for the visit of the Mormon whose face she had never
seen. Shefford prayed that he might never meet this man. Finally he grew
desperate. When he first arrived at the girl's home she would speak, she
showed gladness, relief, and then straightway she dropped back into the
shadow of her gloom. When he got up to go then there was a wistfulness,
an unspoken need, an unconscious reliance, in her reluctant good night.
Then the hour came when he reached his limit. He must begin his
revelation.
“You never ask me anything--let alone about myself,” he said.
“I'd like to hear,” she replied, timidly.
“Do I strike you as an unhappy man?”
“No, indeed.”
“Well, how DO I strike you?”
This was an entirely new tack he had veered to.
“Very good and kind to us women,” she said.
“I don't know about that. If I am so, it doesn't bring me happiness.
... Do you remember what I told you once, about my being a
preacher--disgrace, ruin, and all that--and my rainbow-chasing dream out
here after a--a lost girl?”
“I--remember all--you said,” she replied, very low.
“Listen.” His voice was a little husky, but behind it there seemed a
tide of resistless utterance. “Loss of faith and name did not send me to
this wilderness. But I had love--love for that lost girl, Fay Larkin. I
dreamed about her till I loved her. I dreamed that I would find her--my
treasure--at the foot of a rainbow. Dreams!... When you told me she was
dead I accepted that. There was truth in your voice. I respected your
reticence. But something died in me then. I lost myself, the best of me,
the good that might have uplifted me. I went away, down upon the barren
desert, and there I rode and slept and grew into another and a harder
man. Yet, strange to say, I never forgot her, though my dreams were
done. As I toiled and suffered and changed I loved her--if not her,
the thought of her--more and more. Now I have come back to these walled
valleys--to the smell of pinyon, to the flowers in the nooks, to the
wind on the heights, to the silence and loneliness and beauty. And here
the dreams come back and SHE is WITH me always. Her spirit is all that
keeps me kind and good, as you say I am. But I suffer, I long for her
alive. If I love her dead, how could I love her living! Always I torture
myself with the vain dream that--that she MIGHT not be dead. I have
never been anything but a dreamer. And here I go about my work by day
and lie awake at night with that lost girl in my mind.... I love her.
Does that seem strange to you? But it would not if you understood.
Think. I had lost faith, hope. I set myself a great work--to find Fay
Larkin. And by the fire and the iron and the blood that I felt it
would cost to save her some faith must come to me again.... My work
is undone--I've never saved her. But listen, how strange it is to
feel--now--as I let myself go--that just the loving her and the living
here in the wildness that holds her somewhere have brought me hope
again. Some faith must come, too. It was through her that I met this
Indian, Nas Ta Bega. He has saved my life--taught me much. What would I
ever have learned of the naked and vast earth, of the sublimity of the
wild uplands, of the storm and night and sun, if I had not followed a
gleam she inspired? In my hunt for a lost girl perhaps I wandered into
a place where I shall find a God and my salvation. Do you marvel that I
love Fay Larkin--that she is not dead to me? Do you marvel that I love
her, when I KNOW, were she alive, chained in a cañon, or bound, or lost
in any way, my destiny would lead me to her, and she should be saved?”
Shefford ended, overcome with emotion. In the dusk he could not see the
girl's face, but the white form that had drooped so listlessly
seemed now charged by some vitalizing current. He knew he had spoken
irrationally; still he held it no dishonor to have told her he loved
her as one dead. If she took that love to the secret heart of living Fay
Larkin, then perhaps a spirit might light in her darkened soul. He had
no thought yet that Fay Larkin might ever belong to him. He divined a
crime--he had seen her agony. And this avowal of his was only one step
toward her deliverance.
Softly she rose, retreating into the shadow.
“Forgive me if I--I disturb you, distress you,” he said. “I wanted to
tell you. She was--somehow known to you. I am not happy. And are YOU
happy?... Let her memory be a bond between us.... Good night.”
“Good night.”
Faintly as the faintest whisper breathed her reply, and, though it came
from a child forced into womanhood, it whispered of girlhood not dead,
of sweet incredulity, of amazed tumult, of a wondering, frantic desire
to run and hide, of the bewilderment incident to a first hint of love.
Shefford walked away into the darkness. The whisper filled his soul. Had
a word of love ever been spoken to that girl? Never--not the love which
had been on his lips. Fay Larkin's lonely life spoke clearly in her
whisper.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Next morning as the sun gilded the looming peaks and shafts of gold
slanted into the valley she came swiftly down the path to the spring.
Shefford paused in his task of chopping wood. Joe Lake, on his knees,
with his big hands in a pan of dough, lifted his head to stare. She
had left off the somber black hood, and, although that made a vast
difference in her, still it was not enough to account for what struck
both men.
“Good morning,” she called, brightly.
They both answered, but not spontaneously. She stopped at the spring and
with one sweep of her strong arm filled the bucket and lifted it. Then
she started back down the path and, pausing opposite the camp, set the
bucket down.
“Joe, do you still pride yourself on your sour dough?” she asked.
“Reckon I do,” replied Joe, with a grin.
“I've heard your boasts, but never tasted your bread,” she went on.
“I'll ask you to eat with us some day.”
“Don't forget,” she replied.
And then shyly she looked at Shefford. She was like the fresh dawn, and
the gold of the sun shone on her head.
“Have you chopped all that wood--so early?” she asked.
“Sure,” replied Shefford, laughing. “I have to get up early to keep Joe
from doing all the camp chores.”
She smiled, and then to Shefford she seemed to gleam, to be radiant.
“It'd be a lovely morning to climb--'way high.”
“Why--yes--it would,” replied Shefford, awkwardly. “I wish I didn't have
my work.”
“Joe, will YOU climb with me some day?”
“I should smile I will,” declared Joe.
“But I can run right up the walls.”
“I reckon. Mary, it wouldn't surprise me to see you fly.”
“Do you mean I'm like a cañon swallow or an angel?”
Then, as Joe stared speechlessly, she said good-by and, taking up the
bucket, went on with her swift, graceful step.
“She's perked up,” said the Mormon, staring after her. “Never heard her
say more 'n yes or no till now.”
“She did seem--bright,” replied Shefford.
He was stunned. What had happened to her? To-day this girl had not been
Mary, the sealed wife, or the Sago Lily, alien among Mormon women. Then
it flashed upon him--she was Fay Larkin. She who had regarded herself
as dead had come back to life. In one short night what had transformed
her--what had taken place in her heart? Shefford dared not accept, nor
allow lodgment in his mind, a thrilling idea that he had made her forget
her misery.
“Shefford, did you ever see her like that?” asked Joe.
“Never.”
“Haven't you--something to do with it?”
“Maybe I have. I--I hope so.”
“Reckon you've seen how she's faded--since the trial?”
“No,” replied Shefford, swiftly. “But I've not seen her face in daylight
since then.”
“Well, take my hunch,” said Joe, soberly. “She's begun to fade like the
cañon lily when it's broken. And she's going to die unless--”
“Why man!” ejaculated Shefford. “Didn't you see--”
“Sure I see,” interrupted the Mormon. “I see a lot you don't. She's so
white you can look through her. She's grown thin, all in a week. She
doesn't eat. Oh, I know, because I've made it my business to find out.
It's no news to the women. But they'd like to see her die. And she will
die unless--”
“My God!” exclaimed Shefford, huskily. “I never noticed--I never
thought.... Joe, hasn't she any friends?”
“Sure. You and Ruth--and me. Maybe Nas Ta Bega, too. He watches her a
good deal.”
“We can do so little, when she needs so much.”
“Nobody can help her, unless it's you,” went on the Mormon. “That's
plain talk. She seemed different this morning. Why, she was alive--she
talked--she smiled.... Shefford, if you cheer her up I'll go to hell for
you!”
The big Mormon, on his knees, with his hands in a pan of dough, and his
shirt all covered with flour, presented an incongruous figure of a man
actuated by pathos and passion. Yet the contrast made his emotion all
the simpler and stronger. Shefford grew closer to Joe in that moment.
“Why do you think _I_ can cheer her, help her?” queried Shefford.
“I don't know. But she's different with you. It's not that you're a
Gentile, though, for all the women are crazy about you. You talk to her.
You have power over her, Shefford. I feel that. She's only a kid.”
“Who is she, Joe? Where did she come from?” asked Shefford, very low,
with his eyes cast down.
“I don't know. I can't find out. Nobody knows. It's a mystery--to all
the younger Mormons, anyway.”
Shefford burned to ask questions about the Mormon whose sealed wife the
girl was, but he respected Joe too much to take advantage of him in a
poignant moment like this. Besides, it was only jealousy that made him
burn to know the Mormon's identity, and jealousy had become a creeping,
insidious, growing fire. He would be wise not to add fuel to it. He
rejected many things before he thought of one that he could voice to his
friend.
“Joe, it's only her body that belongs to--to.... Her soul is lost to--”
“John Shefford, let that go. My mind's tired. I've been taught so and
so, and I'm not bright.... But, after all, men are much alike. The thing
with you and me is this--we don't want to see HER grave!”
Love spoke there. The Mormon had seized upon the single elemental point
that concerned him and his friend in their relation to this unfortunate
girl. His simple, powerful statement united them; it gave the lie to his
hint of denseness; it stripped the truth naked. It was such a wonderful
thought-provoking statement that Shefford needed time to ponder how
deep the Mormon was. To what limit would he go? Did he mean that here,
between two men who loved the same girl, class, duty, honor, creed were
nothing if they stood in the way of her deliverance and her life?
“Joe Lake, you Mormons are impossible,” said Shefford, deliberately.
“You don't want to see her grave. So long as she lives--remains on the
earth--white and gold like the flower you call her, that's enough for
you. It's her body you think of. And that's the great and horrible error
in your religion.... But death of the soul is infinitely worse than
death of the body. I have been thinking of her soul.... So here we
stand, you and I. You to save her life--I to save her soul! What will
you do?”
“Why, John, I'd turn Gentile,” he said, with terrible softness. It was
a softness that scorned Shefford for asking, and likewise it flung
defiance at his creed and into the face of hell.
Shefford felt the sting and the exaltation.
“And I'd be a Mormon,” he said.
“All right. We understand each other. Reckon there won't be any call for
such extremes. I haven't an idea what you mean--what can be done. But I
say, go slow, so we won't all find graves. First cheer her up somehow.
Make her want to live. But go slow, John. AND DON'T BE WITH HER LATE!”
. . . . . . . . . . .
That night Shefford found her waiting for him in the moonlight--a girl
who was as transparent as crystal-clear water, who had left off the
somber gloom with the black hood, who tremulously embraced happiness
without knowing it, who was one moment timid and wild like a
half-frightened fawn, and the next, exquisitely half-conscious of
what it meant to be thought dead, but to be alive, to be awakening,
wondering, palpitating, and to be loved.
Shefford lived the hour as a dream and went back to the quiet darkness
under the cedars to lie wide-eyed, trying to recall all that she had
said. For she had talked as if utterance had long been dammed behind a
barrier of silence.
There followed other hours like that one, indescribable hours, so sweet
they stung, and in which, keeping pace with his love, was the nobler
stride of a spirit that more every day lightened her burden.
The thing he had to do, sooner or later, was to tell her he knew she was
Fay Larkin, not dead, but alive, and that, not love nor religion, but
sacrifice, nailed her down to her martyrdom. Many and many a time he
had tried to force himself to tell her, only to fail. He hated to risk
ending this sweet, strange, thoughtless, girlish mood of hers. It might
not be soon won back--perhaps never. How could he tell what chains bound
her? And so as he vacillated between Joe's cautious advice to go slow
and his own pity the days and weeks slipped by.
One haunting fear kept him sleepless half the nights and sick even in
his dreams, and it was that the Mormon whose sealed wife she was might
come, surely would come, some night. Shefford could bear it. But what
would that visit do to Fay Larkin? Shefford instinctively feared the
awakening in the girl of womanhood, of deeper insight, of a spiritual
realization of what she was, of a physical dawn.
He might have spared himself needless torture. One day Joe Lake eyed him
with penetrating glance.
“Reckon you don't have to sleep right on that Stonebridge trail,” said
the Mormon, significantly.
Shefford felt the blood burn his neck and face. He had pulled his
tarpaulin closer to the trail, and his motive was as an open page to the
keen Mormon.
“Why?” asked Shefford.
“There won't be any Mormons riding in here soon--by night--to visit
the women,” replied Joe, bluntly. “Haven't you figured there might be
government spies watching the trails?”
“No, I haven't.”
“Well, take a hunch, then,” added the Mormon, gruffly, and Shefford
divined, as well as if he had been told, that warning word had gone to
Stonebridge. Gone despite the fact that Nas Ta Bega had reported
every trail free of watchers! There was no sign of any spies, cowboys,
outlaws, or Indians in the vicinity of the valley. A passionate
gratitude to the Mormon overcame Shefford; and the unreasonableness of
it, the nature of it, perturbed him greatly. But, something hammered
into his brain, if he loved one of these sealed wives, how could he help
being jealous?