The most perfect of the summer months in this secluded mountain nook,
not inaptly named "Eden" by Standing, was a period of time measuring
itself in soft, fragrant loveliness. The days were balmy, perfect,
halcyon; gentle hours of blue cloudlessness and golden sunshine and
little breezes which scarcely ruffled the clear water in the bigger
pools; night as clear as crystal, with flaring stars like distant
torches above the yellow pine tops; nature in her gentlest mood here
among the ruggedness of the wilderness, expressing herself in the most
delightful of odors wafted through the woods, in the tenderest tiniest
blossoms of wild flowers; a time of infinite hush and infinite solitude
and peace.
To have chafed and been unhappy here, to a spirit like either Bruce
Standing's or Lynette Brooke's, would have seemed next door to an
impossibility. Even the girl, though restrained, a prisoner of a
man's will when the bright star of her life had ever been one of
splendid independence, found it easier to smile or laugh aloud at the
sober-faced antics of Thor ... when she and Thor were alone with none
to see!... than to sigh. She knew her periods of restiveness and bitter
rebellion; they were due not to her environment, but to the thought
that another than herself was dictating to her. But for one reason or
another these periods were rarer and briefer than her other hours of a
strange sort of peacefulness.
"It's because I've been worn out and only now am resting," she tried
to tell herself. "Recuperating from a condition of exhausted mind and
body."
Thus four days and nights passed. There had been, during all that time,
not the slightest opportunity to escape. The first day Standing had
hurled the chain from him, as far as he could send it. But he had not
lost sight of her for more than a few minutes at a time, saving such
times that she gave him her promise that she would wait for him to come
back. He accepted her word as he expected all the world to accept his.
On other occasions, when he allowed her briefer freedoms, he had said
merely: "No chance to run for it, girl! I'd overtake you, you know, in
no time. Even if you hid, here'd be old Thor, nosing you out!" Then he
laughed, adding: "For his own sake, the renegade, as well as for his
master's! He's fallen in love with you, too." He made her bed in the
rock-and-tree grotto; he labored, one-handed, over it for hours. With
his heavy clasp knife he cut the tender tips of resinous branches; he
heaped them high; he covered all with great handfuls of fragrant grass,
thick with the tall red flowers that grew down by the creek, odorous
with the tender white blossoms which shyly lifted their little heads to
dot the grassy slopes.... He made her a bathing-pool: stiff and sore
all up and down his left side, he worked with his right hand, dragging
big boulders up out of their ancient beds, piling them in a ring about
the pool, plastering them over the top with great handfuls of that
carpet-like moss which thrived in these cool places.
"If you'd let me go!"
"No; not yet.... What man can read the mind of a girl? How do I know
what you would do? Where you would go? My wounds are healing; until
they heal I am only half a man. You might whisk away from me, I tell
you; and I'd have to follow and seek you, if you led me through hell
on the way to heaven; and I must be whole again. And I've got to get
everything straight...."
Always when he left her he returned before the end of the time she
had promised to wait for him. And always he sent, as herald of his
approach, his golden voice forward to her. At times in an echoing
shout. More than once in an outburst of singing which thrilled her
strangely. What a voice the man had! And once, when he had elected to
bathe in the starlight, he sent down to her that cry which she had
heard the first time from the door of Babe Deveril's cabin in Big Pine
... the wild, fierce call of the timber-wolf which, despite her naming
herself "fool," sent a shiver into her blood.... Once this happened:
He had left her in the forenoon, accepting her word that she would not
stir until high noon. Usually he came well in advance; this time she
watched the climbing sun and the creeping shade and suddenly her heart
began its wild beating; it was almost noon and he was not here; no
sound of his coming. When he shouted to her and then came rushing into
camp, he found that she had been working frenziedly with a stick and a
stone; driving the sliver of wood like a stake into the ground.... She
started up, her face crimson.
"Well?" he said, his hands on his hips, staring down at her. "What's
that?"
She blurted out the explanation and then was angry with herself for
telling him. She had meant to stay until the tip end of the giant
pine's shadow fell where it marked midday; she had meant there to drive
in her stake; for him it would be a marker, an assurance from her that
she had kept her word with him, that she had waited as she had promised
to wait ... that then, scorning him, she had snatched at her rights and
had fled!
His first impulse was toward laughter. And then, strangely quiet, he
stood looking at her and she saw a gathering mist in his eyes!
"Girl!" he muttered. "Oh, girl!... God, I love you!"
"I hate you...."
... How many times had she cried out in those words! And how much of
that did she mean? In her heart, in her soul ... in the most hidden
recesses of her most hidden being?
Thus she had hours to herself. And, therefore, had Bruce Standing hours
to himself. For he wanted them. He wanted to be away from her, where he
could not see her, could not hear that low music of her voice, could
not catch that soft lure of her eyes, could not be tempted to have
it happen that his rude hand brushed her hand.... Her hand, though
she had been all these days and nights outdoors, roughing it, seemed
to him a maddening realm of crumpled rose-leaves ... pink-and-white
rose-leaves. He left her, secure in her pledge that she would wait for
him, and threw himself down on his back and stared up through slowly
shifting branches and mused on her. He thought how like a flower she
was, the queen of flowers ... and he could have wept that he was so
big and ungentle. He thought of Babe Deveril, and cursed him for being
so slender and debonair; graceful and light of mood; gentle-voiced,
with the knack of pretty words to pretty ladies. And Babe Deveril
had befriended her; stood champion to her against him! He ground his
teeth. He leaped up and paced back and forth, forgetful of all such
insignificant nothings as trifling wounds of the flesh. He recalled
how, man to man, he had broken Babe Deveril, and he laughed out
loud.... Yet it remained that Babe Deveril had stood her friend and
protector when he had pursued them both, linking them but the closer,
with his wrath. She and Deveril had travelled together, side by side
and hand in hand, miles and other miles of the open solitudes; they
had been drawn close together, driven closer together. He, Bruce
Standing, Timber-Wolf, and Fool, had done that! And what spark had
been struck out of the flint of the adversity which he had hurled at
them?... Had they loved ... had they kissed ... was _she_ now longing
with a sick heart for the return of Babe Deveril?
"Oh, Lord!" he cried out, his great iron fingers crooking as his arms
were thrown out. "Deliver him into these hands!"
Lynette had no mirror. Standing began to grow a lusty young beard, as
blond as his hair, shot through with red gleams. She knew the need of
fresh clothing. When he was away she did her washing as best she could,
pounding garments against the rocks in the creek; she dried them and
hid them and donned them without his knowing ... though of course he
knew as she knew that he did his own rude washings. There was a spring
at the side of the cañon, one of the many sources which fed the stream;
a shadowed, tranquil place. Of this she made her pier-glass! She
stooped and looked down into its glassily smooth surface. It gave back
her own image; it reflected the dark green of the pines, the lighter
green of the willows. Even the subdued colors of her worn suit. She
washed her hair and groomed it; no comb, no brush, but agile fingers.
Most of all, when secure through his promise in return for her own,
did she enjoy her plunge in the pool he had made for her. The slender
whiteness of her slipped hastily down under the translucent cover of
the cool, flowing water; she was as swift in her movements as any
slim-bodied trout that darted about her, scurrying into its retreat;
the water shot a thrill through her; she emerged, dripping, charged
with all the electric currents of well-being.
"If this were only a holiday ... instead of imprisonment!"
She, too, thought of Babe Deveril, as was inevitable. And in many ways:
One, always recurrent, was: "Could she have been as _sure_ of Babe
Deveril as she was of Bruce Standing? As secure in her utter conviction
of safety?" And here was a question to which she found no ready answer.
Babe Deveril, leaping full-breastedly into the stream which had swept
her off her feet, had been a friend to her from the beginning; from the
beginning Bruce Standing had been a menace.
... Best of all she loved the waterfall. It was her shower-bath. But,
more than that, it was her friend and confidante, and, beyond aught
else, a living, glimmering, varicolored thing of gossamer beauty. It
talked with her, it was at once handmaiden and musician and troubadour;
it plashed and sang and poured its cadences into quiet harmonies which
sank into her soul. It had leapt and sparkled and poured itself onward
unstintedly, unafraid, for a thousand years; for a thousand years would
it keep up its merry dancings, uncaring if only the tall pines watched
or if men and maids brought hither their loves and hates and hopes and
fears. Unstable it was always, always falling; secure was it in its
diaphanous veilings of its own merry immortality. She loved it for its
abandon, for its recklessness, for its translucent myriad beauties.
It lived; it sang and sparkled; it filled the moment with musical
murmurings and recked not of all those vague threats and shadows of a
vague future.... She sat here, quiet under the spell of its dashings
and splashings and eerie flutings ... musing, her soul drawn forth into
all those vague and troublous musings which beset the heart of youth.
Youth? Young, too, was Bruce Standing! He hearkened to the cascading
waters; he listened to the harp-tongued whisperings of the pines.... He
had done everything wrong; he told himself that a thousand, thousand
times. Yet he told himself savagely that throughout the insanities,
the veritable madnesses of constricted human life there flowed always,
onward and sweepingly upward, the great, triumphal, eternal forces of
destiny. And, in the end ... in the end ... it all made for good. For
eternal and triumphant good.
... After all, but the old, old story of man and maid, converging to
the one gleaming, focal point though across distances oceans-wide
removed.
He had his point of view; Lynette Brooke had her point of view. Yet it
remains that from two widely separated peaks two eager hearts may see
the same sun rise.
"Tell me," he said once. "What manner of man is this Babe Deveril? I
know him as a man may know a man; you know him otherwise. Tell me; what
have you found him to be?"
Never would she have been Lynette, had she not been ever quick of
instinct ... instinct leaping, never looking, yet so certain to strike
true! She read the thought under a thought; there came a living, joyous
gloating; she cried warmly, all the while watching him:
"A true friend and a gentleman! A man unafraid ... one like a loyal
knight of the olden time! Like one of the King Arthur's knights...."
"Like one," he growled, deep down in his throat, angrily, "who saw
another Lynette across the four fords? That's not true, girl; else he
would not have forsaken you so long! Nor would he have given up so
easily when, in your view, I beat him down and sent him up over the
ridge!"
"He'll come back!"
"You think so?"
"_I know!_"
Chance remarks of hers ... this one above all others ... rankled. She
seemed so confident that Babe Deveril would come again, that he would
carry in his breast the memory of sweet hours with her, that he would
never rest until he, with her pleading eyes tender upon his, could
rescue her from the bondage which Bruce Standing had set upon her! So
it came about that nightly, and all night long, Bruce Standing dreamed
of Babe Deveril and of battling with him and of beating him finally
into such definite defeat as had not resulted from that other fierce
struggle before her widening eyes.
Another day went by and another, with Bruce Standing obsessed, knowing
himself for a man who yearned with all his soul for one thing and one
thing only, a mere slip of a gray-eyed girl who made madness in his
pulses. He had his moods of fierceness; on their heels came those
other moods of tenderness. More than once he came toward her, striding
through the woods, his mind made up to set her free, asking only her
happiness. And then he saw her; and in his heated fancies he saw Babe
Deveril; and he named Deveril a man of slight manhood and swore by his
own manhood that never would he show so lax and flabby a hand as to let
this priceless girl, drop into the graceful, careless hand of any Babe
Deveril who ever lived.
"He'd never know how to love her as I do!" That ancient cry of all true
lovers!
But all the while there bit into him doubtings, fears, those manifold
darts flung from love's alter ego, jealousy. He stood ready to give
this girl full-handedly everything; from her he craved with that direst
of all cravings, everything.... And when he could no longer hold back
the tumult within him and demanded: "What of this Baby Devil?" putting
a sneer into his voice, always she cried out warmly: "A true friend and
a gentleman!"
All unexpected by both of them, the less by him than her, Billy Winch,
Timber-Wolf's one-legged retainer, rode full tilt into camp. They
were lunching; they sat under a tree in the noonday shadow like two at
picnic. He had been saying: "We're running short of rations." Then it
was that Billy Winch, anxiously spurring a big roan saddle-horse, rode
down upon them and, seeing them, began waving his hat high over his
head in sweeping, joyous circles and shouting:
"So you're still alive! That's something!"
"You fool! Who told you to come here!"
Standing leaped to his feet; he was hot with anger.
"I knew where to find you, Timber!" cried Billy Winch gleefully.
"Unless, a fair bet, the devil had claimed you and taken you down
under, I knew I'd find you here!... How's the sick wing? Been usin' my
salve? Night and morning, keepin' it clean and...."
Billy Winch, headlong, stopping his horse with a sudden pluck of the
reins when the gaunt roan had come near setting his four flickering
hoofs in their midday fire, chose to ignore the fact that the
Timber-Wolf was not alone.
But Standing, springing up, strode out to meet him, his mien anything
but friendly.
"Damn you, Billy Winch," he muttered between his teeth, too low for the
wondering Lynette to hear. She, too, had sprung up and stood leaning
against the valiant pine-tree, wondering swiftly how this latest
happening, the coming of Billy Winch into the wild-wood, was to affect
her.
Billy Winch, as gay-hearted a rascal as ever stumped on one leg or
rode a wild, half-broken horse in carelessly lopsided fashion, laughed
gleefully.
"Ho, Timber!" he cried. "If I was a whole man, 'stead of half a one,
I'd just jump down and naturally beat you to death! Bein' what I am,
all carved to thunder, you're too much all gone to proud flesh to jerk
me out of the saddle to stomp on me! So I got the age on you! And I
asks you, Johnny Wolf, man-eater, how's tricks?"
"By God, Winch!" Standing in upstarting wrath had the roan horse by the
bit, shoving it back with one savage hand so that it fell back on its
haunches. "Just because I've stood a lot off you...."
"Slow does it, Timber!" cried Winch. "This is business. I've got a man
back there, just out of sight, ready to go clean crazy unless he can
have a word with you. To put a name to him ... well, then, Mexicali
Joe!"
Now Standing, deep down within him, knew why Billy Winch had come.
Never did more faithful heart beat in human breast than that heart
thrumming away beneath Billy Winch's faded blue shirt. Winch, having
always a shrewd guess where to find his chief, when Standing took it
upon himself to disappear from headquarters, had caught at the first
excuse to come in person and make sure with his own keen eyes that all
went well with a man whom many hated and whom he, above all men, loved.
"Hang Mexicali Joe to the first stout limb you come to!"
Lynette, of impulses ungovernable, could have broken into laughter. For
the amazing thing was that what Bruce Standing, impatient almost to
fury, said he meant. He had suffered enough inconvenience at Mexicali
Joe's hands; he wanted nothing of the man nor of his dross of gold.
Winch did laugh aloud. And then, keen-eyed to see the play of his
employer's expression, he grew sober and said earnestly:
"On the level, Mr. Standing, how's the hurt comin' along? Been usin'
the salve I told you to?"
Lynette, though he had ignored her presence or because of this very
attitude of his, could not hold back from exclaiming:
"He has two wounds now! Another shot in the back! And he gives them
less attention than a sane man would give a cut finger!"
"The old fool! No more sense than a rabbit! Shot again? Twice in the
back? Plugged a second time? The old fool!"
Like a flash in his quick movements he was down from the saddle; he
left his horse with dragging reins to wait for him; over the uneven
ground he came forward rapidly, queerly, hopping like an oddly
oversized bird. He caught at Standing's shoulder, crying out:
"Let me see them hurts! I tell you, I got to see them hurts! Shot twice
from behind? You bloody baby. Let me look at 'em. Blood poison most
likely settin' in!"
"I could kill you ... you interfering fool...."
But just then Billy Winch's one foot caught at a root and he came near
falling, and Standing, instead of carrying out a threat, sprang toward
him and steadied him; and Lynette saw a sincere rough affection in the
way the big arms closed about Winch's body. Friends, these two.
"Who plugged you, Timber? And for the love of Mike, how come you to let
it happen ... _twice_? But tell me: Who plugged you the second time?"
"Taggart," said Standing; "at least that's my bet. And," he added
hastily, "it was Taggart that shot me the first time, through the
window at Gallup's!"
Billy Winch looked sharp incredulity; his eyes flickered away to
Lynette as he gave sign of seeing her for the first time.
"But, man! I thought...."
"You thought wrong! She did not shoot me. You've got my word for that,
Bill. _She did not shoot me!_"
Winch looked perplexed.
"Sure, Timber?" he demanded. "Dead sure?"
"Yes," said Standing. "Taggart didn't believe I had already changed my
papers, ruling his name out. If he could have dropped me and made it
seem clear that she had done it.... See it, Bill?"
"Well," said Winch slowly, "I guess you know or you wouldn't say so.
And Jim Taggart was a real man once. But I've seen signs of late; he's
mildewed inside, clean through. As comes of running with such as Young
Gallup."
Suddenly he whipped off his battered hat and turned a pair of bright
and smiling, and at last warmly admiring eyes upon Lynette.
"I beg your pardon, Miss," he said genially.
"Now," said Standing. "About this Mexicali Joe. You go back and tell
him for me...."
Winch interrupted quickly, saying:
"No use, Timber. You got to see him. I tell you he's clean crazy to see
you; he'll stick on your trail until he finds you. He wants only ten
minutes; five would do it."
Lynette was mildly surprised to see Standing so easily persuaded; but
she had no way of knowing the relationship of this man and his chief
henchman nor how Billy Winch never took it upon himself to suggest
unless he knew what he was about.
"All right," said Standing, though he frowned as he spoke. "Go get your
man."
Winch jerked his head about and shouted; his long, halloing call
pierced clear through the woodland silences.
"Hi, Joe! This way, on the run! _Pronto, hombre!_"
Joe came almost immediately, mounted on a scrawny mulish-looking horse,
breaking an impatient way through the brush. His dark face still
carried a frightened, furtive expression which had not been absent
from it for a matter of days; not since a handful of raw gold had been
spilled from his torn pocket.
"_Señor!_" he cried ringingly from a distance. "_Señor Caballero!_
I tell you, they keel me! I got no chances! For sure, they keel me,
robbers!"
Standing answered roughly: "And what do I care? Serve you right for the
fool you are!"
"Now, he's here," said Winch. "Look here, Timber: you can take your
time talking to him. Let me look you over. I want to see that second
bullet hole."
"Winch, you idiot," Standing growled at him; "I got it close to a week
ago. I've tended to it myself; it's all right. I don't look like a
dying man, do I?"
"_Señor!_" Joe was crying, down on the ground now, tremendously excited.
"Are you usin' my salve?" demanded Winch. "Plenty of it, night and
morning?"
"I have been using it...."
"And you're out of it _now_!" With a triumphant flourish Winch dipped
into a pocket and extracted a small package. "Here you are, Timber!
And this is extra special! I got all the ingredients this time; tried
it out day before yesterday on that new pinto pony you bought from
Ferguson; got cut in the wire fence down by the pasture. Say, it works
like magic...."
Standing groaned. "Winch, some fine day I'll carve you all up with a
hand-axe, just to give you a chance to use your own filthy mess...."
"I wouldn't have been shy a leg, would I, if that fool doctor had had a
pint of this?"
"_Señor!_" Joe was crying. "You got to listen; you got to hear what I
goin' tell you! My gold, my gold that I find, me, myself, all alone...."
"What do I care for you or your gold!" cried Standing. "I don't need
it, do I? I don't ask you anything about it, do I? I don't want to know
anything about it! Go wallow in your gold and leave me alone!"
But Joe explained, growing vehement to the point of wildness; as Winch
had put it, "he was clean crazy over the thing." How could Joe wallow
in it, much as he would like to, when always there were men like ugly
hounds on his trail? What chance had he, poor devil that he styled
himself, against such men as Jim Taggart and Young Gallup and Cliff
Shipton and Babe Deveril and Barny McCuin.... He named a score. At the
name of Babe Deveril Standing's eyes flashed and sped to a meeting
with Lynette's; into hers, too, came a quick light. Joe had caught
Standing's interest.
"What about these men?" he asked. "What about Deveril?"
"Him? The worst of them all!" wailed Joe. He went on, bursting with all
the things he had to tell. That night when, for a second time, like God
himself, the grand Señor Caballero had burst into the cabin and set
him free, he had run! God, how he had run! But then he had thought of
his savior alone against so many hard, merciless men; he had come to a
sudden stop, saying to himself: "Joe, _mi amigo_, you must not desert
him!" And then, of a sudden, had that young devil Deveril burst from
the bushes upon him ... and Joe had fled again and Deveril had sought
after him. There was no shaking off this man; twice since then in the
forest Joe had barely escaped him.... Lynette had come close, was
listening breathlessly.
"I tell you where my gold is!" cried Joe. "You take what you like, I
don't care! You give me what you like ... I know you for one fair man.
That way we save it. Any other way, they get me; they burn me with
fire; they break my teeth and my fingers; they make me tell! And they
get it all. Taggart and Gallup and Deveril and...."
He broke off, half whimpering, cursing them with all the eloquence of
the Latin tongue.
Clearly Standing hesitated. Then, amazing them all, but with his own
mind clear, he said bluntly:
"Clear out! It's your game. I don't want to know anything about it."
"_It's down in Light Ladies' Gulch!_" screamed Joe. "Not two mile from
Big Pine! I lied to them ... a big pine, with crooked roots sticking
out ... a washout.... Last year I make mistake; I think down under the
Red Cliffs. But this time I find ... four miles the other side...."
"Why, you shrivelled-souled...."
Then suddenly Standing caught himself up short; there came a new look
into his eyes; he shouted, catching Joe by the shoulder:
"_Light Ladies' Cañon!_ Just across from Big Pine? Only a mile or two!"
"As God hears me, Señor!"
Standing broke into sudden laughter. He clapped Joe upon the shoulder
so that the little man staggered and paled under the jovial blow.
"With bells on! With bells, Mexico! By high Heaven.... Here, you,
Winch! On the run, back to headquarters. Take Joe with you; mount
guard over him night and day with a rifle. No man to have a word with
him. And wait for me. And, all the while, Bill Winch, _keep your mouth
shut_!"
Winch, with one arm out as a brace against a pine, stiffened.
"I guess I know how to take orders, Mr. Standing," he said, and his
tone sounded angry. "You don't need...."
Him also Standing smote on the shoulder.
"Why, God bless you, Bill Winch, you're the only man on earth I'd
trust! Those last words weren't necessary.... You're right and I
apologize for them! But now, go! Go, I tell you; I'll do anything you
say; I'll use your poison on me three times a day.... I'll eat it, if
you say so! Only hit the high spots and keep Mexicali under cover until
I come! No matter when or how long; there's your job ... old friend!"
Billy Winch, galvanized, went hopping to his horse; he flipped after
his own fashion up into the saddle; he loosened the rifle in its
holster strapped conveniently; he called to Joe:
"Quick does it, Mexico! We're on our way!"
Bruce Standing watched them ride away among the trees and stood
laughing! He had succeeded in puzzling two men; most of all had he set
Lynette wondering....