His eyes still intently fixed on mine. “Do you think if we changed our
trail we could lose them from us?”
I was framing a jocose reply about Ounces being a good walker, when the
sound of hoofs rushing in the distance stopped me, and he ran out of the
tent with his rifle. When I followed with mine he was up the bank, and
all his powers alert. But nothing came out of the dimness save our three
stampeded horses. They crashed over fallen timber and across the open to
where their picketed comrade grazed at the end of his rope. By him they
came to a stand, and told him, I suppose, what they had seen; for all
four now faced in the same direction, looking away into the mysterious
dawn. We likewise stood peering, and my rifle barrel felt cold in my
hand. The dawn was all we saw, the inscrutable dawn, coming and coming
through the black pines and the gray open of the basin. There above
lifted the peaks, no sun yet on them, and behind us our stream made a
little tinkling.
“A bear, I suppose,” said I, at length.
His strange look fixed me again, and then his eyes went to the horses.
“They smell things we can’t smell,” said he, very slowly. “Will you
prove to me they don’t see things we can’t see?”
A chill shot through me, and I could not help a frightened glance where
we had been watching. But one of the horses began to graze and I had
a wholesome thought. “He’s tired of whatever he sees, then,” said I,
pointing.
A smile came for a moment in the Virginian’s face. “Must be a poor
show,” he observed. All the horses were grazing now, and he added, “It
ain’t hurt their appetites any.”
We made our own breakfast then. And what uncanny dread I may have been
touched with up to this time henceforth left me in the face of a real
alarm. The shock of Steve was working upon the Virginian. He was aware
of it himself; he was fighting it with all his might; and he was being
overcome. He was indeed like a gallant swimmer against whom both wind
and tide have conspired. And in this now foreboding solitude there was
only myself to throw him ropes. His strokes for safety were as bold as
was the undertow that ceaselessly annulled them.
“I reckon I made a fuss in the tent?” said he, feeling his way with me.
I threw him a rope. “Yes. Nightmare--indigestion--too much newspaper
before retiring.”
He caught the rope. “That’s correct! I had a hell of a foolish dream for
a growed-up man. You’d not think it of me.”
“Oh, yes, I should. I’ve had them after prolonged lobster and
champagne.”
“Ah,” he murmured, “prolonged! Prolonged is what does it.” He glanced
behind him. “Steve came back--”
“In your lobster dream,” I put in.
But he missed this rope. “Yes,” he answered, with his eyes searching me.
“And he handed me the paper--”
“By the way, where is that?” I asked.
“I built the fire with it. But when I took it from him it was a
six-shooter I had hold of, and pointing at my breast. And then Steve
spoke. ‘Do you think you’re fit to live?’ Steve said; and I got hot at
him, and I reckon I must have told him what I thought of him. You heard
me, I expect?”
“Glad I didn’t. Your language sometimes is--”
He laughed out. “Oh, I account for all this that’s happening just like
you do. If we gave our explanations, they’d be pretty near twins.”
“The horses saw a bear, then?”
“Maybe a bear. Maybe “--but here the tide caught him again--“What’s your
idea about dreams?”
My ropes were all out. “Liver--nerves,” was the best I could do.
But now he swam strongly by himself.
“You may think I’m discreditable,” he said, “but I know I am. It ought
to take more than--well, men have lost their friendships before. Feuds
and wars have cloven a right smart of bonds in twain. And if my haid
is going to get shook by a little old piece of newspaper--I’m ashamed I
burned that. I’m ashamed to have been that weak.”
“Any man gets unstrung,” I told him. My ropes had become straws; and I
strove to frame some policy for the next hours.
We now finished breakfast and set forth to catch the horses. As we drove
them in I found that the Virginian was telling me a ghost story. “At
half-past three in the morning she saw her runaway daughter standing
with a babe in her arms; but when she moved it was all gone. Later they
found it was the very same hour the young mother died in Nogales. And
she sent for the child and raised it herself. I knowed them both back
home. Do you believe that?”