IN THE ELBOW ROCK RAPIDS.
The day following that night of Brian Kent's uneasy wakefulness was a
hard day for the man and the woman in the little log house by the river.
For Brian, the morning dawned with a sense of impending disaster. He
left his room while the sky was still gray behind the eastern mountains,
and the mist that veiled the brightness of the hills seemed to hide in
its ghostly depths legions of shadowy spirits that from his past had
assembled to haunt him. The sombre aisles and caverns of the dimly
lighted forest were peopled with shadowy memories of that life which he
had hoped would never again for him awake. And the river swept through
its gray world to the crashing turmoil at Elbow Rock like a thing doomed
to seek forever in its own irresistible might the destruction of its
ever-living self.
As one moving in a world of dreams, he went about his morning's work.
“Old Prince” whinnied his usual greeting, but received no answer. “Bess”
met him at the barnyard gate, but he did not speak. The sun leaped
above the mountain-tops, and the world was filled with the beauty of
its golden glory. From tree and bush and swaying weed, from forest and
pasture, and garden and willow-fringed river-bank, the birds voiced
their happy greetings to the new day. But the man neither saw nor heard.
When he went to the house with his full milk-pail, and Betty Jo met him
at the kitchen-door with her cheery “Good-morning!” he tried resolutely
to free himself from the mood which possessed him, but only partially
succeeded. Several times, as the two faced each other across the
breakfast table, Brian saw the gray eyes filled with questioning
anxiety, as though Betty Jo, also, felt the presence of some forbidding
spectre at the meal.
After several vain attempts to find something they could talk about,
Betty Jo boldly acknowledged the situation by saying: “What in the world
is the matter with us, this morning, Mr. Burns? I am possessed with the
feeling that there is some one or something behind me. I want to look
over my shoulder every minute.”
At her words, Brian involuntarily turned his head for a quick backward
glance.
“There!” cried Betty Jo, with a nervous laugh, not at all like her
normal, well-poised self. “You feel it, too!”
Brian forced a laugh in return: “It is the weather, I guess.” He tried
to speak with casual ease. “The atmosphere is full of electricity this
morning. We'll have a thunder-storm before night, probably.”
“And was it the electricity in the air that kept you tramping up and
down your room last night until almost morning?” she demanded abruptly,
with her characteristic opposition to any evasion of the question at
issue.
Brian retorted with a smile: “And how do you know that I tramped up and
down my room last night?”
The color in Betty Jo's cheeks deepened as she answered, “I did not
sleep very well either.”
“But, I surely did not make noise enough for you to hear in your room?”
persisted Brian.
The color deepened still more in Betty Jo's checks, as she answered
honestly: “I was not in my room when I heard you.” She paused, and when
he only looked at her expectantly, but did not speak, continued, in a
hesitating manner quite unlike her matter-of-fact self: “When I could
not sleep, and felt so as though there were somebody or something in the
house that had no business here, I became afraid, and opened my door so
I would not feel so much alone; and then I saw the light under the door
of your room, and,--” she hesitated, but finished with a little air of
defiance,--“and I went and listened outside your door to see if you were
up.”
“Yes?” said Brian Kent, gently.
“And when I heard you walking up and down, I wanted to call to you; but
I thought I better not. It made me feel better, though, just to know
that you were there; and so, pretty soon, I went back to my room again.”
“And then?” said Brian.
“And then,” confessed Betty Jo, “whatever it was that was keeping me
awake came back, and went on keeping me awake until I was simply forced
to go to you for help again.”
Poor Betty Jo! She knew very well that she ought not to be saying those
things to the man who, while he listened, could not hide the love that
shone in his eyes.
And Brian Kent, as he thought of this woman, whom he loved with all the
strength of his best self, creeping to the door of his room for comfort
in the lonely night, scarcely dared trust himself to speak. At last,
when their silence was becoming unbearable, he said, gently: “You poor
child! Why didn't you call to me?”
And Betty Jo, hearing in his voice that which told her how near he was
to the surrender that would bring disaster to them both, was aroused to
the defense. The gray eyes never wavered as she answered, bravely: “I
was afraid of that, too.”
And so Betty Jo confessed her love that answered so to his need; but,
in her very confession, saved their love from themselves. If she had
lowered her eyes--Brian Kent, in reverent acknowledgment, bowed his
head before her. Then, rising, he walked to the window, where he stood
for some time looking out, but seeing nothing.
“It was that horrid man coming yesterday that has so upset us,” said
Betty Jo, at last. “We were getting on so beautifully, too. I wish he
had gone somewhere else for his vegetables and eggs and things!”
Brian was able to smile at this as he turned to face her again, and they
both knew that,--for that time, at least,--the danger-point was safely
past.
“I wish so, too,” he agreed; “but never mind; Auntie Sue will be home in
a day or two, and then everything will be all right again.”
But when he had taken his hat and was starting out for the day's work,
Betty Jo asked, “What are you doing to-day?”
“I was going to work on the fence around the clearing,” he answered.
“Why?”
“I--I--wish you could find something to do nearer the house,” came the
slow answer. “Couldn't you work in the garden, perhaps?”
“I should say I could!” he returned heartily.
All that forenoon, as Betty Jo went about her household duties she felt
the presence of the thing that filled her so with fear and dread. With
vigorous determination she scolded herself for being so foolish, and
argued with herself that it was all a nervous fancy born of her restless
night. But, the next moment, she would start with a sudden fear and turn
quickly as if to face some one whose presence she felt behind her. And
Brian, too, as he worked in the garden, caught himself often in the act
of pausing to look about with nervous apprehension.
During the noonday meal they made a determined effort to laugh at
themselves, and by the time dinner was over had almost succeeded. But
when Brian, as he pushed back his chair, said, jestingly, “Well, am I
to work in the garden again this afternoon?” Betty Jo answered,
emphatically, “Indeed you are! I will not stay another minute in this
house alone. Goodness knows what I will do to-night!”
There was no jest in the man's voice as he answered: “I'll tell you what
you will do to-night,--you will go to bed and you will go to sleep. You
will leave the door to your room wide-open, and I shall lie right there
on that couch, so near that a whisper from you will reach me. We will
have no more of this midnight prowling, I promise you. If any ghost
dares appear, we--”
The reassuring words died on Brian Kent's lips. His eyes, looking over
Betty Jo's shoulders, were fixed and staring, and the look on his face
sent a chill of horror to the girl's heart. She dared not move nor look
around as he sat like a man turned to stone.
A woman's laugh broke the dead silence.
With a scream, Betty Jo sprung to her feet and whirled about.
As one in a trance, Brian Kent arose and stood beside her.
The woman, who stood in the open doorway, laughed again.
Martha Kent's heavy drinking the night before, when her clubhouse
friends in a wild debauch had tried to help her to forget, was the
climax of many months of like excesses. The mood in which she had sent
the man Green from her room was the last despairing flicker of her
better instincts. Moved by her memories of better things,--of a better
love and dreams and ideals,--she had spent a little hour or two in
sentimental regret for that which she had so recklessly cast aside. And
then, because there was within her no foundation of abiding principle
for her sentiment, she had again put on the character which had so
separated her from the life of the man to whom she was married, indeed,
but with whom she was never one. With the burning consciousness of what
she might have been and of what she was ever tormenting her, she sank,
as the hours passed, deeper and deeper into the quicksands of physical
indulgence until, in her mad determination to destroy utterly her
ability to feel remorse, she lost all mental control of herself, and
responded to every insane whim of her drink-disordered brain.
As she stood there, now, in the doorway of that little log house by the
river,--face to face with the man and the woman who, though they
were united in their love, were yet separated by the very fact of her
existence,--she was, in all her hideous, but pitiful, repulsiveness, the
legitimate creation of those life-forces which she so fitly personified.
Betty Jo instinctively drew closer to Brian's side.
“Hello, Brian, dear!” said the woman, with a drunken leer. “Thought I'd
call to see you in your charming love-nest that Harry Green raved so
about. Can't you introduce me to your little sweetheart?”
“No?” she continued, and laughed again. Then coming an unsteady step
toward them, she added, thickly: “Very well, Brian, old sport; you
won't introduce me,--I'll have to introduce myself.” She grinned with
malicious triumph at Betty Jo: “Don't be frightened, my dear. It's all
right. I'm nobody of importance,--just his wife,--that's all,--just his
wife.”
Betty Jo, with a little cry, turned to the man who stood as if stricken
dumb with horror. “Brian?” she said. “Oh, Brian?”
It was the first time she had ever addressed him by his given name, and
Brian Kent, as he looked, saw in those gray eyes no hint of doubt or
censure, but only the truest love and sympathy. Betty Jo had not failed
in the moment of her supreme testing.
“It's true, all right, isn't it, Brian?” said Martha Kent. “I'm his wife
fast enough, my dear. But you don't need to worry,--you two. I'm a good
sport,--I am. I've had my fun. No kick coming from me. Just called to
pay my respects,--that's all. So-long, Brian, old sport! Good-bye, my
dear!”
With an uncertain wave of her hand, she staggered through the doorway
and passed from their sight.
In the little log house by the river the two who had kept the fineness
of their love stood face to face.
For Betty Jo, the barrier which Brian Kent had maintained between them
to protect her from his love was no longer a thing unknown. But the
revelation, coming as it did, had brought no shadow of distrust or doubt
of the man to whom she had so fully entrusted herself. It had, indeed,
only strengthened her faith in him and deepened her love.
For one glorious triumphal moment the very soul of the man exulted in
the truth which Betty Jo made known to him. Then he turned slowly away,
for he dared not trust himself to look at her a moment longer.
With bowed head he paced up and down the room. He went to the table
which held Auntie Sue's sewing-basket, and fingered the trifles there.
Then, slowly, he passed through the open door to the porch, where Betty
Jo, through the window, near which she stood, saw him look away over the
river and the mountains.
Suddenly, she saw him start, and stare intently at some nearer object
that had caught his attention. As Betty Jo watched, he moved to the edge
of the porch, and, stooping, grasped the railing with his hands;--his
head and shoulders were thrust forward; his lips were parted; his
whole attitude was that of the most intense and excited interest. Then,
straightening up, he threw back his head, and laughed aloud. But his
laughter alarmed the girl, who ran to the door, crying, “What is it,
Brian?”
“Look!” he shouted, madly, and pointed toward the river. “Look, Betty
Jo!”
Martha Kent, alone in one of the clubhouse boats, was rowing with
drunken clumsiness toward the head of the Elbow Rock rapids.
The woman's friends had missed her, and, guessing, from some remark she
had made, where she had gone, had sent four men of the party after her;
for they realized that she was in no condition to be alone in a boat
on the river, particularly on that part of the stream near Auntie Sue's
place. After leaving Brian and Betty Jo, she had gone back to her boat
in the eddy at the foot of the garden, and was pulling out into the
stream when she saw her friends approaching. With a drunken laugh, she
waved her hand, and began rowing from them directly toward the swift
water. The men shouted for her to stop, and pulled with all their
strength. But the woman, taking their calls as a challenge, rowed the
harder, while every awkward pull of the oars carried her nearer the
deadly grip of the current.
Betty Jo, as she reached Brian's side, and saw what was happening on the
river, grasped the man's arm appealingly, with a cry: “Brian! Brian! She
is going into the rapids! She will be carried down to Elbow Rock!”
But Brian Kent, for the moment, was beside himself. All that he had
suffered,--all that the woman out there on the river had cost him in
anguish of soul,--all that she had taken from him of happiness,--came
before him with blinding vividness; and now,--now,--in her drunkenness,
she was making her own way to her own destruction.
“Of course she is!” he shouted, in answer to Betty Jo. “Her friends
yonder are driving her to it! Could anything be more fitting?”
As though grasped by powerful unseen hands beneath the surface, the boat
shot forward. The woman, feeling the sudden pull of the current, stopped
rowing, and looked about as if wondering what had happened. Her friends,
not daring to follow closer to the dangerous water, were pulling madly
for the landing at the foot of the garden. The boat in the middle of the
river moved faster.
“Look, Betty Jo, look!” shouted the man on the porch, madly. “It's got
her now--the river has got her--look!”
With a scream of fear, the woman in the boat dropped her oars, and
grasped the gunwale of the little craft.
Brian Kent laughed.
Betty Jo shrank back from him, her eyes, big with horror, fixed upon
his face. Then, with a quick movement, she sprang toward him again, and,
catching his arm, shook him with all her strength and struck him again
and again with her fist.
“Brian! Brian!” she cried. “You are insane!”
The man looked down at her for an instant with an expression of
bewildered astonishment on his face, as one awakened from a dream. He
raised his hand and drew it across his forehead and eyes.
The boat with the helpless woman was already past the front of the
house.
Betty Jo cried again as if calling the man she loved from a distance:
“Brian! Brian!”
With a sudden movement, the man jerked away from her. The next instant,
he had leaped over the railing of the porch to the ground below and was
running with all his might toward the river, at an angle which would put
him opposite or a little below the boat when he reached the bank.
With a sob, Betty Jo followed as fast as she could.
As Brian Kent raced toward the river's edge, the powerful current drew
the boat with the woman into the first rough water of the rapids, and,
as the skiff was shaken and tossed by the force that was sweeping it
with ever-increasing speed toward the wild turmoil at Elbow Rock, the
woman screamed again and again for help.
The warring forces of the stream whirled the little craft about, and
she saw the man who was nearing the bank. She rose to her feet in the
rocking boat, and stretched out her arms,--calling his name, “Brian!
Brian! Brian!” Then the impact of the boat against a larger wave of
the rapids brought her to her knees, and she clung to the thwarts with
piteous cries.
Betty Jo and the clubhouse men, who had overtaken her, saw Brian as
he reached the river opposite the boat. For a little way he raced the
tumbling waters until he had gained a short distance ahead of the skiff;
then they saw him, without an instant's pause, leap from the high bank
far out into the boiling stream.
Running along the bank, the helpless watchers saw the man fighting his
way toward the boat. One moment, he disappeared from sight, dragged
beneath the surface by the powerful currents with which he wrestled. The
next instant, the boiling waters would toss him high on the crest of a
rolling wave, only to drag him down again a second later. But, always,
he drew nearer and nearer the object of his struggle, while the rapids
swept both the helpless woman and the tossing boat and the swimming man
onward toward the towering cliff, and the thunder-roar of the mad waters
below grew louder and louder.
The splendid strength of arms and shoulders which Brian Kent had
acquired by his months of work with his ax on the timbered mountain-side
sustained him now in his need. With tremendous energy, he breasted the
might of the furious river. To the watchers it seemed at times that it
was beyond the power of human muscles to endure the terrific strain.
Then he gained the boat, and they saw him striving with desperate energy
to drag it toward the opposite shore and so into the currents that would
carry it past the menacing point of the cliff and perhaps to the safety
of the quiet water below.
All that human strength could do in that terrible situation, Brian Kent
did. But the task was beyond the power of mortal man.
For an instant the breathless watchers on the bank thought there was a
chance; but the waters with mad fury dragged their victims back, and,
with terrific power, hurled them forward toward the frowning rocks.
It was quickly over.
In that wild turmoil of the boiling, leaping, seething, lashing,
hammering waves, the boat, with the woman who crouched on her knees on
the bottom, and the man who clung to the side of the craft, appeared for
a second lifted high in the air. The next instant, the crash of breaking
wood sounded above the thundering roaring of the waters. The man and
the woman disappeared. The wreck of the boat was flung again and again
against the cliff, until, battered and broken, it was swept away around
the point.
Against the dark wall of rock Brian Kent's head and shoulders appeared
for an instant, and they saw that he held the woman in his arms. The
furious waters closed over them. For the fraction of a second, the man's
hand and arm appeared again above the surface, and was gone.
Betty Jo sank to the ground with a low cry of anguish, and hid her face.
Another moment, and she was aroused by a loud shout from one of the men
who had caught a glimpse of the river's victims farther out at the point
of the rocky cliff.
Springing to her feet, Betty Jo started madly up the trail that leads
over the bluff. The men followed.
Immediately below Elbow Rock there is a deep hole formed by the waters
that pour around the point of the cliff, and below this hole a wide
gravelly bar pushing out from the Elbow Rock side of the stream forces
the main volume of the river to the opposite bank. In the shallow water
against the upper side of the bar they found them.
With the last flicker of his consciousness, Brian Kent had felt his feet
touch the bottom where the water shoals against the bar, and, with his
last remaining strength, had dragged himself and the body of the woman
into the shallows.
Betty Jo was no hysterical weakling to spend the priceless seconds of
such a time in senseless ravings. The first-aid training which she had
received at school gave her the necessary knowledge which her native
strength of character and practical common sense enabled her to apply.
Under her direction, the men from the clubhouse worked as they probably
never had worked before in all their useless lives.
But the man and the woman whose life-currents had touched and
mingled,--drawn apart to flow apparently far from each other, but drawn
together again to once more touch, and, as one, to endure the testing
of the rapids,--the man and the woman had not brought to the terrible
ordeal the same strength.
One was drawn into the Elbow Rock rapids by the careless indifference
and the reckless spirit that was born of the life she had chosen; by
her immediate associates and environment; and by the circumstances that
were, at the last analysis, of her own making.
The other braved the same dangers, strong in the splendid spirit that
had set him against such terrible odds to attempt the woman's rescue.
From his work on the timbered mountain-side, from his life in the clean
atmosphere of the hills, and from the spiritual and mental companionship
of that little log house by the river, he had brought to his testing the
splendid strength which enabled him to endure.
Somewhere in that terrible conflict with the wild waters at Elbow Rock,
while the man whose life she had so nearly ruined by her wantonness was
fighting to save her, the soul of Martha Kent went from the bruised and
battered body which Brian drew at last from the vicious grasp of the
currents.
But the man lived.