The earliest manifestations of spring had ripened into a warmer
fullness. Everywhere the rhododendron was bloom-loaded, and the
large-petaled flower of the "cucumber tree" spread its waxen whiteness.
Hill-sides were pink with the wild-rose and underfoot violets and the
dandelions made a bright mosaic.
Again Alexander was approaching her door with her face set toward the
sunset and again she saw before her own house the figure of a man who
loomed tall, and who for a brief space remained a featureless
silhouette against the colored sky.
She hastened her step a little, resolved that this time she would teach
Jerry, in an unforgettable fashion, that her edicts of banishment were
final and that they could not be lightly disobeyed--but this time it
was not Jerry.
Indeed she had realized that almost immediately and her heart had
missed its beat. The man was Halloway himself and he was looking in
another direction just then, so he did not see the fleet, yet instantly
repressed eagerness that flashed into and out of her eyes. It was a
self-collected young woman, with a distinctly casual manner who crossed
the stile and confronted her visitor.
As he turned and saw her, he started impulsively forward, but recovered
himself and also adopted the matter-of-fact demeanor, which she had,
herself, assumed.
"Howdy, Jack," said the girl carelessly. "I didn't know ye war
hyarabouts. I'd jest erbout forgot ye altogether."
"I reckon thet would be a right easy thing ter do," he handsomely
admitted, then each having indulged in the thrust and parry of an
introductory lie, they stood there in the sunset, eying each other in
silence.
But Alexander recognized a transformation in the man's appearance, and
if she seemed tepid of interest, the semblance belied her throbbing
pulses. Halloway was too accomplished an actor to have abandoned his
pose or makeup. He must remain in character and dress the part, but he
had used a consummate skill in doing so. In every detail of clothing
he remained the mountaineer, yet there was no longer any trace of the
slovenly or unclean.
He was close shaven and trim of hair. His flannel shirt, still open on
his throat, was of good quality. The trousers that were thrust into
high laced boots were not so new as to attract undue attention, but
they fitted him. The note of carelessness was maintained--but with
artistry to accentuate the extraordinary effect of physique and
feature. He was eye-filling and rather splendid.
Alexander felt that some recognition of this metamorphosis was expected
of her, but she had no intent of admitting the true force of its
impression.
"Hit's a right smart wonder I knowed ye a-tall, ye've done spruced up
so," was the dubious compliment with which she favored him after a
deliberate scrutiny. "I hain't nuver seed ye with yore face washed
afore."
"I 'lowed I'd seek ter make a killin' with ye," he bantered easily, and
she sniffed her simulated disdain. They had moved together up the
steps of the porch, and he stood there looking at her, quelling the
up-rush of admiration and avid hunger in his eyes. Then she said
curtly, for in these days she was always on the defensive, and meant to
be doubly so with him whom she secretly feared, "Ye're in ther house
now. Ef ye wants ter mek a killin' with me, tek off yore hat. Don't
folks hev no manners whar ye comes from?"
Halloway shook his head, not forgetful that one playing a part must
remain in character.
"I don't tek off my hat ter no man," he replied, stressing the final
word ever so lightly.
"I'm a man when I wants ter be, an' when I wants manners I aims ter hev
'em," she declared, but her visitor stood, still covered, in her
presence, and after a moment she said curtly--yet rather breathlessly,
"Wait hyar," and turning, disappeared into the house.
Floods begin slowly with trickles, but they break suddenly with
torrents. A flood had seized Alexander at that moment. Perhaps she
did not herself pause to recognize or analyze her motive. She merely
acted on an impulse that had come with an onsweep of conscious and
subconscious tides. It was a motive that had to do with her activities
that day when she had gone to the nearby town.
Halloway remained there, frankly puzzled. Unless she was like himself
acting, her interest in his arrival was pallid and lukewarm. He had
counted much on appearing suddenly before her at his best--and the
impression seemed to have been negligible.
Where had she gone? He asked himself that question several times
during the considerable interval of his waiting. The sunset was coming
to its final splendor behind mountains that were ash of violet.
Through the blossom-laden air stole a seductive intoxication that
mounted to his head. The voices of the Red Gods had mastered him, and
he had come.
Then he saw a vision in the doorway, and his senses reeled.
Alexander stood there as he had never seen her before. She was in a
woman's dress, very simple of line and unadorned. But her beauty was
such as could support and glorify simplicity. Indeed it required
simplicity as a foil for its own delicate gorgeousness. The lithe
slenderness of her figure was enhanced by the transformation. Her long
hair hung in heavy braids that gave an almost childlike girlishness to
her appearance. Alexander, he thought, was wholly delectable.
But as he stared at Alexander she flung him look for look and commanded:
"Now, tek off your hat."
He tossed the thing away from him, and hesitated for a moment gazing at
her while his eyes kindled, then with an inarticulate sound in his
throat and no other word, he sprang forward and caught her to him, in
arms that would not be denied.
Alexander made no struggle. It would have been futile to match even
her fine strength against the herculean power of those arms--and
suddenly the girl felt faint.
For that unwarned and tumultuous conduct on the part of the man she had
been totally unprepared and it was as though the wave of amazement
which swept over her had left her gasping; bereft of both nerve-force
and breath. But other waves were sweeping her too, so that she of the
ready and invincible spirit for the moment rested inert in Halloway's
arms as her brain reeled. In one way she was dazed into
semiconsciousness. In another way, she was so staringly wide awake as
she had never before been in life. She had thought of this man with
feelings that she had neither named to herself nor analyzed, but the
unadmitted sex call of the strong man to the strong woman had sounded
like a bugle note through her nature. Now while the beginnings of an
indescribable fury stirred within her, she none the less thrilled to
his embrace with a flooding of her heart under which she almost
swooned. While she felt his kisses on her temples, her cheeks and her
lips, she had no power of speech or protest.
To Jack Halloway, it seemed that this non-resistance was unconditional
surrender and through him in a current of fluid fire, ran the fierce
ecstasy of victory.
But after a little Alexander straightened up and the pliant softness of
her body stiffened in his arms. She pushed against his shoulders with
steady hands. They were not struggling hands but firm and definite of
meaning, and Halloway released her. He released her readily as a man
may who can afford to be deferential in his moment of victory.
But when she was quite free, she stood unsteadily for a moment and then
stepped back and leaned against the wall of the house. Her hands
pressed against the weather-boarding with outspread fingers. Out of a
white face she looked straight before her with eyes preternaturally
wide and full of dazed wonderment.
At first there was no resentment, no denunciation. The girl only
leaned there with parted lips and heaving bosom and that fixed gaze
which, for all its rigid tensity, seemed groping.
It was not as the individual that she now thought of Jack Halloway but
of the terrifying and unexplained force that he had awakened in
herself; the force of things that she never until now realized.
Halloway did not speak. He bent a little toward her, looking at her as
his own breath came fast. At first he did not even marvel at the
stunned, groping blankness of the unmoving features.
He had known that when she awoke it would be with the shock of latent
fires set loose. Now it was a time to go very gently with her, until
she found her footing in fuller comprehension again.
Then the girl said so faintly that he could hardly hear her:
"Thet's ther fust time thet. . . ." She broke off there.
"I know it, Alexander. I couldn't stay away. I had to come!"
He took a step forward with outstretched arms but she lifted a pleading
hand.
"Don't," she said. "I've got ter think . . . go away now."
And triumphantly confident of what would come out of her meditation, he
turned and picked up his hat and left her standing there. He might
have talked to her of passionate love, he told himself, to the end of
time and it would have meant nothing. Instead he had brought her face
to face with it--and now there was no need of talk.
Jack Halloway had meant it when he admitted to Brent in New York that
it would not do to give rein to his thoughts of Alexander. They were
all lawless thoughts of a love not to be trammeled by the obligations
of marriage.
If he hated the civilized world at times, there were other times when
he could not live without it, and into its conventionalized pattern,
Alexander could never fit. She was not civilized enough or educated
enough to take her place there at his side, nor was she pagan enough to
come to him without terms or conditions. So he had resolved to stay
away, and put her out of his mind and in that determination he failed.
Now he had flung away all heed. He had held her in his arms and
consequences could care for themselves!
But when he had left the porch and Alexander had begun to grope her way
out of the vortex of confusion, that small figment of wrath that she
had known she should feel and yet had so far failed to feel, began to
grow until it engulfed and merged into itself every other element of
her reflections.
She had been scornful when Brent questioned her ability or her
permanent wish to repulse suitors, and yet after only two had come, she
no longer knew her own mind. But she told herself with a solemn
indignation, she at least wanted to make her own terms. She had no
intent of being swept off her feet by the masterful whim of a man who
had never pleaded. Yet that was the thing that had just occurred.
Slowly the stunned eyes in the waxen white face became less wonder-wide
and began to smoulder with outraged realization. She rose with the
fixed determination that before the sun set, she would kill Halloway or
compel him to kill her. One of them must die. But her own ideas of
fairness challenged that edict. If she had the right to assume such a
ground, she should have taken it without any instant of faltering. She
should never have acknowledged an impulse of thrill while she was
close-held in his arms. She had let him think that she had not
resented it, and she was as much to blame as he.
So when Halloway came back the next morning with the glow of eagerness
in his face, he found a very quiet girl waiting to receive him, and
when he would have taken her in his arms she once more put out that
warning hand, but this time with a different expression of lip and eye.
"Stop," she said. "Me an' you hev got ter talk together."
"Thet suits me," he assured her. "Thar hain't nothin' else I'd ruther
do--save ter hold ye in my arms."
"I reckon ye knows I've done took oath thet no man could ever come on
this place--sparkin'."
"I war right glad ter hev ye say that-- Hit kept other fellers away,
an' any man thet hit _could_ skeer off wasn't hardly wuth hevin' round
nohow. But thet war afore ye fell in love with me."
"Fell in love with ye?" She repeated the words after him still in that
even somewhat puzzled quiet which was, for her, almost toneless. "Jack
Halloway, when ye went away from hyar yestiddy evenin' an' I'd sat thar
fer a full measured hour an' thought, I 'lowed thar warn't a soul on
earth ner in hell thet I hated so much as you. I'd done med up my mind
ter kill ye afore I laid down ter sleep."
There was an implacability about this new manner, that disquieted the
man a little, but he said gravely:
"Them feelin's jest comes about because what ye felt yestiddy war all
new ter ye. Hit's nat'ral enough, but hit won't endure."
She went on ignoring his protestations. "Ther only reason I _didn't_
kill ye, war thet I'd done _let_ ye . . . an' I hated myself next es
bad es you. Folks tells me thet I hain't always goin' ter want ter
turn men back. Mebby thet's true."
"Ye knows full well a'ready, thet hit's true," he declared vehemently.
"Be thet es hit may, no man's ter wed me without he wooes me fust, an'
no man hain't never goin' ter lay a hand on me without I consents. Now
I aims ter try an' fergit erbout yestiddy--an' you'd better fergit hit
too."
The man's eyes broke into vehement challenge. "So long es thar's life
in me I won't fergit hit!"
"I reckon ye'd better heer me out," she reminded him with an ominous
note and he nodded his head, waiting, while she continued.
"Yestiddy I seemed crazed--but terday I hain't. Ye 'pears ter be right
sartain thet I loves ye. I don't know, but I either loves ye or I
hates ye like all hell. Ef I loves ye I kain't kill ye--an' ef I hates
ye thar's time enough."
"But Alexander, you do love me! I know----"
"Wa'al, I don't--an' thet's a right pithy point ter my manner of
thinking! Ye're a right masterful sort of feller, an' ye likes ter
plow yore way through life gloryin' in yore strength an' forcin' your
will on weaker folks." She paused an instant then added significantly:
"But I'm a right masterful sort of woman myself--an' I hain't ter be
nowise driv. Ef you an' me kain't consort peaceable I reckon we'll
jest erbout rake hell afore we finishes up our warfare."
As he looked at her his admiration was flaming. Possibly it was best,
just now, to advance slowly.
"I'm willin' ter wait," he conceded slowly. "Ye're wuth hit."
"Ye says I loves ye. If I finds thet out fer myself, in due course
I'll wed with ye. Ef I don't, I won't, but----" Her voice broke so
suddenly out of the quiet plane in which it had been pitched, that her
climax of words came like a sharp thunder clap on still air. "But ef
ye seeks ter fo'ce me, or ef ever ergin ye lays a hand on me or teches
me, 'twell I tells ye ye kin, afore God in Heaven, one of us has got
ter die! An' I won't never be with ye unarmed, nuther."
Halloway did not judge it a good time to mention that her allusion to
marriage left a rather wide territory of debate open. One thing at a
time seemed enough and more than enough.
Alexander had not asked him in, and he inquired calmly: "Now thet ye've
stated yore terms an' I've done agreed ter 'em, hain't ye goin' ter
invite me in?"
"No," she said shortly. "I makes ther laws in my own household. Ye
air goin' away an' ye hain't comin' back hyar fer one week. I aims ter
be left alone fer a spell now. Ef them terms don't suit ye, ye needn't
come back at all."
And in that week of reprieved decision Alexander took her life to
pieces and searchingly examined it, item by item. Some strange
reactions were taking place in the laboratory of her life. She was no
more seen in breeches and boots. She had self-contemptuously decided
that if she could not hold undeviatingly to her strongest tenet, but
became a palpitant woman when a man seized her in his arms, she would
throw overboard the whole sorry pretense.
She would henceforth be frankly and avowedly a woman, but a woman
different from those about her, giving up none of the leadership that
was in her blood or the self-pride that was her birthright.
One afternoon she met Jerry O'Keefe on the road, and with the old
unabashed twinkle in his eye he accosted her.
"I heer tell ther big feller's back," he began and the girl flushed.
"Hev ye done run him offen yore place, too?"
"Thet's my business."
"Yes _thet_ is, but yore runnin' me off's right severely _mine_."
"Mebby I've got a rather who comes thar."
"So hev I." There was a lurking, somewhat engaging impertinence even
in Jerry's quietest rejoinders, a humorous boldness and self-confidence.
"Howsomever, I reckon ye're kinderly skeered thet I'd mek ye think too
towerin' much of me. I reckon ye dar'sn't trust yoreself."
Alexander looked at him, and for all her attempted severity she could
not keep the twinkle out of her own pupils. If she had not succeeded
in driving Halloway away, why should she stand out for the subterfuge
of banishing Jerry? It reminded her of Joe's picking an easy man to
whip. There was even a faint challenge of coquetry in her manner as
she disdainfully announced: "Ef thet's ther way I'm feedin' yore
vanity, come over whenever ye feels like hit. I'll strive ter endure
ye, ef ye don't tarry too long."
"I kain't come afore ternight. Hit's sun-down now," was the instant
response.
Things had not gone well with Jase Mallows. The wound that Bud had
inflicted had healed slowly and he had lain long bedridden. He had
been the last of the gang to hear the sorry story of how the robbery
had failed and the sequel recording the deaths of Lute and his
lieutenant. Now Jase heard that Alexander's door was no longer barred
to men who came courting and he returned home. But he came nursing a
grudge against Bud who had wounded him and who had set awry all his
plans. For only one thing was he thankful. Alexander had no suspicion
of his complicity in the effort to rob her.
But when Jase presented himself at Alexander's house, wearing a fancy
waistcoat and a bright colored tie, he learned to his discomfiture that
the bars which had been lowered to others were still up and fixed
against himself.
Bud, too, was far from happy, as from a distance he watched Alexander's
apotheosis. Bud knew that he was like a gray and inconspicuous moth
enamored of a splendidly winged butterfly. She could never be thrilled
by the colorless fidelity of a man who was simple almost to stupidity,
even though he lived with no thought above his loyalty. One day almost
unconquerable thirst came upon Bud. It attacked him suddenly as he
passed the house and saw Halloway sitting on the porch talking with
Alexander, and heard the peal of her responsive laughter.
That appetite rode him like a witch, making capital of his nervous
dejection and he tramped the woods vainly struggling to submerge it in
physical fatigue. Unfortunately it took a great deal of exertion to
wear Bud down, and the mania of craving was as strong as his untiring
muscles. By the purest of evil chance too, he stumbled upon an illicit
still, where an acquaintance was brewing whiskey. He had not known
that it was being operated there and had he sought to find it he could
not have done so, for it was well hidden behind browse and thicket and
a man watched furtively with a ready rifle. But the "blockader"
recognized Bud and had no fears of his playing informer, so with an
amused smile on his bearded face he stepped into sight with a tin cup
invitingly out-held.
To Bud Sellers its sickening odor was the bouquet of ambrosia. It
stole into his nostrils and set up in his brain insidious sensations of
imagined delight. He pushed it back at first then seized it and gulped
it greedily down.
Hurriedly he went away. He told himself that if he stopped there all
would still be well, but it was as feasible to tell the tiger that has
tasted blood to lie down and be good. He must have more. For a time
Bud struggled, then he saddled a mule and went as fast as he could ride
toward town. It was a race of endurance against a collapsing resolve.
When he reached the village he sought out the town marshal and
excitedly begged, "Fer God's sake lock me up in ther jail-house. Ther
cravin's done come on me afresh. I'm goin' mad ergin."
The town marshal knew the history of Bud's alcoholic periodicity, yet
he had no authority to jail a man on request in advance of any offense.
"Ye don't look drunk yit, Bud, albeit I'm afeared ye soon will be," he
said. "I reckon I hain't hardly got ther power ter jail ye, without ye
commits some misdeed."
But Bud was at the end of his struggle. In a minute more instead of
pleading to be confined, he would be hunting for liquor. It was now or
never. He seized up a brick that lay at his feet and hurled it through
the glass window of a store, before which they stood talking.
"Kin ye do hit now?" he demanded hoarsely, and the town marshal said:
"Yes, I reckon I kin--now."
Men have varied fashions for expressing their love of women. That
night Jack Halloway sat on the moonlit porch of Alexander's house and
Bud sat in the vermin-infested cell of the village lockup. But as the
hours went on he found a certain recompense in the thought that he was
keeping a pledge.
As for Jerry O'Keefe that night, he was doing nothing at all except
thinking certain things about the great fellow who was with the girl,
but those thoughts were putting out roots of future conflict.