Lynette, in a mood to expect anything of fate, wondered vaguely where
the steep trail of adventure now led. She would not have been surprised
had Standing set his plans for some spot a hundred miles distant. But
she was surprised to arrive so soon, after only two or three hours, at
their destination. He looked at her, exulting.
"Here is Eden!" he cried out joyously. "Remember the name, girl;
bestowed upon this spot no longer ago than this very minute! Eden! And
as far from the world as that other distant Eden. Here we stop and here
no man finds us!"
He had led the way, upward along a rocky slope. He had brought her into
a spot which she would have named "The Land of Waterfalls!" A tiny
valley with a sparkling mountain creek cleaving like flowing crystal
through a grassy meadow; tall trees, noble patriarchs bounding it.
Steep cañon walls shutting in the timber growth; a narrow ravine above
with the water leaping, plunging, tumbling translucent green over
jagged rocks, splashing into a series of pools, turned into rainbow
spray here and there in its wild cascadings. The world all about was
murmurous with living waters, with bees, with the eternal whisperings
of the pines.
And here began an idyl; a strange idyl. A man asserting his power as
captor; a maid made captive; two souls wide awake, questing, swung from
certainty to uncertainty, gathered up in doubt. Life grown a thing of
tremendous import.
All morning had Standing been wracked with pain. Yet none the less did
he hold unswervingly to his purpose. Now he sat down, his back to a
tree. Thor came and lay at his feet. Lynette stood looking down upon
the two.
"Rest," he said. "Here is your home for a time. A day? Ten days? Who
knows? Not I, girl! All that I know I have told you; here we rest and
here we take life into our hands and mould it ... as we have always
moulded it! We are at the gates; we enter or we turn to one side! We go
on or we go back. Which? When we know that, we know everything."
He had brought with him, slung across his back, a great roll from the
hidden cabin. His rifle lay across his knees. He looked up into her
face with eyes which, though haggard, shone wonderfully. She sat down,
ten steps from him; her clasped hands were in her lap; her eyes were
veiled mysteries.
"Taggart won't look for us here," he said. "He hasn't the brains of a
little gray seed-tick! He'll be sure we've made a big jump, forward or
back, ten times this distance. Besides, he has to go somewhere to get
himself a new set of guns! Imagine him tackling anything with an ounce
of risk in it unless he was heeled like an army corps! I begin to lose
respect for that man."
Lynette was thinking but one thing: "She was not afraid of this man;
not afraid to be alone with him in pathless solitudes. She might choose
to be elsewhere ... yet she was safe with him. For, above all, he was a
man; and never need a true girl fear a true man." And, when she stole
a swift glance at his face, it lay in her heart to be a bit sorry for
him. Sympathy? It lies close to another eternal human emotion! He
looked like one whom fate had crushed and yet whose spirit refused to
be crushed. He looked a sick man who, scorning all the commands laid
upon the flesh, carried on.
After a while he turned to look upon her, and for the first time she
saw a new and strange look in his eyes, a look of pleading.
"Don't misjudge me, girl," he said heavily. "Rather than see your
little finger bruised I'd have a man drive a knife in me! I'm just
blundering along now ... blundering ... trying to see daylight. I won't
hurt you. There's nothing on earth or in Heaven so sure as that. But
don't ask me to let you go!"
She made him no answer. She began thinking of his wounds; he gave them
such scant attention! He should be caring for them; what he should
do was to hasten to a surgeon. She wondered if still he clung to his
conviction, the natural one after all, that she had shot him? And she
wondered, as she had done so many a time before: "Who had shot him?"
Whose hand that which she had seen reach through her window and snatch
up her revolver and fire the cowardly shot? Taggart, only a few hours
ago, had said: "I saw! I was right there!" ...
"Was it Jim Taggart who shot you in the back last night?" she demanded
suddenly.
"Yes," he said. "At least, I think so."
"Is he that kind of man?"
Now his eyes were keen and hard upon hers.
"I begin to think that he is, girl," he said shortly. "Why?"
She shrugged and again turned away.
He lumbered to his feet. Thor, knowing where he was going, barked and
leaped ahead.
"Come, I'll show you where we pitch camp."
She looked about her. Mere madness to attempt flight now; he would bear
down upon her before she had run twenty steps. And did she want to run
just now? She had her own measure of curiosity.... Was it only that?...
and she had, locked away securely in her breast, her absolute positive
knowledge that she had nothing to fear at his hands. She rose and
followed him.
Suddenly he swerved about, confronting her, his eyes stern, his voice
hard with the emotion riding him.
"Madman I may be," he said. "Fool, I am not, praise God! Last night I
heard; you could have chucked that rifle into Taggart's hands and could
have gone free yourself ... and by now I'd be a dead man! But, glory
be, there isn't a streak of yellow in your whole glorious being!"
The blood ran up into her face; it made her hot throughout her whole
body. Praise, from him, to stir her like that! Her eyes flashed back
angrily, for she was angry with herself.
"Come," he muttered. "Talk's cheap at any time. And I'm to show you
where we make our first home."
With her teeth sharply catching up her underlip, she held her silence.
He went on some two-score paces and stopped; with a sudden gesture he
said:
"Here I've spent, God knows how many nights, when I had to be off by
myself! No roof for us, girl, but who wants a roof with that sky above
us?"
Here was a natural grotto which at another time would have made her
exclaim in delight: a nook, set apart, thresholded in tender grass shot
through with those tiny delicate blooms of mountain flowers. On one
side a cliff, outjutting, thrusting forward a great overhanging shelf
of rock which looked as though it must fall and yet which, obviously,
had held securely through the centuries. Three big pine-trees, two
of them leaning strangely toward the cliff, as though yearning to
lean against the sturdy rock and rest there upon its iron breast. The
whole ringed about by a dense copse of brush, thick as a wall and
rearing high above her head. Almost a cave made of cliff and growing
things, cosy and warm, with its opening fronting the stream which was
never silent. Thor ran ahead into the dusky seclusion and barked his
invitation to them to follow. A thick, dry mat, under Thor's feet, of
fallen pine-needles.
Standing tossed his roll inside; he began, with one hand, to work with
the knotted rope. Lynette came forward swiftly, saying:
"At least I have two hands...."
Their hands brushed over the labor. Again the hot blood raced through
her, and again sudden anger, anger at herself, flashed through her
being.
And a tingling, like that which shot through her, was in Bruce
Standing's veins. He caught her hand.
"Girl!" he said huskily.
"Don't!" she cried in alarm.
He dropped her hand and rose swiftly to his feet.
"You are right," he muttered. "Not yet...."
How could this man at a touch make her heart beat like mad? She was
afraid ... she knew that she was not afraid of _him_ ... yet she was
afraid.
"I'm sorry," he said roughly. Actually, marvelling, she saw that the
big man looked embarrassed. "Look here, girl: I've come to know you a
bit and, thinking what I think, I hold that I know you well! I'll take
my chance that you are no petty crook, that you are no coward, that you
are no liar! So...."
"Then," she cried, jumping to her feet, all eagerness, "do you believe
me when I say that I did not shoot you?"
His eyes met hers steadily; he answered promptly:
"You have told me ... and I believe. _I know!_"
A rush of gladness, an intoxication of gladness, swept over her. Her
eyes were shining, soft and bright and happy like stars.
"But," she said, "if not I, then who?"
"Jim Taggart," he said as unhesitatingly as he had spoken before. "Jim
told you that he saw, didn't he? That he was Johnny on the spot? Of
course he was! And we'd had our plain talk. And he figured it out, that
unless that very day I had changed my papers, I still named him in them
my old bunk-mate and friend, and that I'd not forget him with a legacy!
If I had died under that bullet, Jim Taggart would have had it doped
out that he'd stand to win about a hundred thousand dollars! And for a
tenth of that he'd crucify Christ!"
"But...."
"There are no buts about it! You did not do it; then Jim Taggart did.
He shot me last night, a second time and the second time in the back!
He was once a man; now he's a Gallup dog, a man gone to seed, a cur
and one for such as you and me to forget about. I hope to high heaven
I never see the man again; for the sake of what has been between Jim
Taggart and me, when both of us were younger, I'd rather let the past
bury its dead. For if he ever comes trailing his filth across my trail
again, I'll smash him into the earth." He made a wide angry gesture,
as though he would wipe an episode and a man out of his life. "But you
interrupt me; I was going to say something. Just this: I'll leave you
alone. For an hour, for a dozen hours! You want rest, you want solitude
and a chance to think. So do I. I can chain you to a tree and be sure
of you! Or I can ask you to give me your word that you'll wait here
until I come back to you ... and I already know you well enough to know
_that_ will hold you tighter than any chain that was ever forged!"
Lynette, without hesitating, answered:
"I do want rest and I do want to be alone. Is that to be wondered at?
Until noon I'll wait for you to come back."
"Until high noon," he said. "And, girl, you pledge me your word on
that?"
"Yes!"
"Come, Thor!" He turned and left her, his great dog at his heels, going
up the narrowing cañon.
"I'll not spy on you!" he called back, when he had gone a hundred
yards. "You'll hear me shouting to you well before I come within
eye-shot."
And then she lost him, gone among the lesser, denser trees thick about
the creek's margins.
She turned her back on the grotto of his choosing, and went out into
the full sunlight. She found a spot in the open, ringed about by the
majestic pines, a grassy sward with the cleaving silver line of the
creek cutting across it. For the first time in hours ... how many
endless hours? how many days?... she was alone! No man at her side,
either protecting or dominating. Her lungs filled with a deep sigh.
Alone and secure in her aloneness for a matter of several hours.
There was a certain singing happiness, electric within her, and it
sprang, bright-winged, from her own characteristic pride. Bruce
Standing had left her to an absolute physical freedom, knowing her
bound by that intangible and unbreakable bond of her promise. He, a man
who did not break his own word knew her for a girl who did not break
hers! And he knew, at last, that it had not been her hand that had
fired that cowardly shot.
"It was cruel ... to have laughed at him. I did not mean to laugh.
Would to God...."
But if she had not laughed? Then what? Then how much of her adventure
would have followed? How much of it did she, after all, regret?... She
fell to wondering dreamily on Babe Deveril. Where was he? And would she
see him again? And, if she should see him....
A thousand riddles and, as always, no answer to the riddles which
spring from eternity. Only the merry voice of the purling creek to talk
back to her, that and the rustling whisper ebbing and flowing through
the pine tops. The stream, like a companionable human voice, called to
her insistently. She rose and went down to it and stooped to drink; she
bathed her hands and arms and face. How lonely it was here! She cast
a quick glance up-stream; long ago Standing, with his big dog at his
heels, had passed out of sight. And he had given her gage of promise
for promise given ... he would send his shouting voice ahead of him
before he came back....
So she bathed fearlessly, watched only by the solitudes, guarded by
their sombre depths; she plunged, with a little shivery gasp, into the
deep, cool pool below the slithering waterfall; the water slipped,
gleaming like a bejewelled film over her pure-white body, making it
rosy when she emerged, like rose petals.... She dressed in furious
haste, all ablush and yet steeped in a confident knowledge that no
eye, save the bright eye of a curious brown bird, had seen. She felt
new-born; refreshed beyond belief. She ran back up the bank and sat
down in the very spot where she had dropped first when Standing had
left her. She began, always hurrying, to comb out her hair with her
fingers. Sitting there in the open she let it sun....
She rested. She drank deep, thankfully, of the hour. To be alone, to be
secure in the moment, to have no danger pressing down upon her, above
all to have no mind save her own dictating to her. It was glorious
and life was good and glad and golden, infinitely worth the living.
So passed an hour. It was so quiet here; so unutterably lonely. Only
the voice of the creek and the million-tongued murmuring pines. Her
swift thoughts raced ten thousand ways. They touched upon Big Pine; on
Taggart; Mexicali Joe; a gold-mine still for men to find; Maria, the
Indian girl whom Deveril had kissed; Deveril himself; that one-legged
man who rode horseback and carried forth the word and the law of his
master; Thor, a dog; Bruce Standing. Most of all, Bruce Standing. She
wondered where he was, what doing? Caring for his own wounds? Lying on
his back, his white face turned up, his eyes shut, tight shut? And he
loved her?
_Bruce Standing loved her, Lynette?_ Was that true? What was love?
Whence came love? For what purpose? What did it do to the hearts and
souls and bodies of men ... and girls? Was love for her? She had never
experienced it, not true, abiding love. Did Babe Deveril....
Another hour. Shadows slowly shifting, moving like gigantic hands of
eternal clocks. Time passing, time that answers all questions, man's
and maid's, saint's and sinner's. She stirred uneasily and sat up. She
looked at the pine tops and, beyond them, at the sun. It was almost
noon!
Come noon.... What then? Come high noon before Bruce Standing, and she
was free! Released from her promise, all bonds snapped! Free!
She jumped to her feet. Her eyes went questing, questing, everywhere.
To be free again; to be her own self, Lynette, untrammelled.... And she
felt awondering illogically: "Can it be that, after all, he was driving
himself beyond any man's endurance? that he is more badly hurt than
either he or I knew?"
But he returned a full half-hour before even the most eager could name
it noon. True to his word, he sent his voice, like a glorious herald,
ahead of him. She heard him call, not the wolf cry, but a rollicking
shout. And ten minutes later he himself came, plainly in the highest
of good humors. He was still pale and looked haggard, but his eyes were
flashing and triumphant and untroubled.
He came to her, splashing across the creek, water flying about his
boot-tops.
"I've had a bath," he announced from afar. "And I've plastered myself
with the worst that Billy Winch can concoct, and Richard is himself
again!" He came closer, towered above her and said: "You, too, have
bathed! You look it, as fresh from the plunge as any Diana! It's good
to be _clean_, isn't it?"
She flushed and was ashamed for it. She bit her lip and made no answer.
"Come," he said. "We'll lunch. And now, and from now on for some
sixty years, my girl, it will be I who waits on you! The slave rôle
reversed!" and he laughed.
"I promised to wait for you; I make no more promises!"
"That's fair enough! I watch you then!"
"Do you want to make me hate you?"
"Rather, I want you to come to love me."
"Could any girl come to love a man who treats her as you have done me?"
"Could any girl come to love a man," he demanded earnestly, "who
thought so little of her as to let her escape him when once destiny had
brought her and him together?"