AT THE TURN OF THE TRAIL
The scene in the hotel office had left Jessica in a state of mental
distraction in which reason was in abeyance. In the confusion she had
slipped into the little sitting-room unnoticed, feeling a sense almost
of physical sickness, to sit in the half-light, listening to the
diminishing noises of the spilling crowd. She was wind-swept,
storm-tossed, in the grip of primal emotions. The surprise had shocked
her, and the strange appeal of the violin had disturbed her equipoise.
The significant words of awakening spoken in the office had come to her
distinctly. In their light she had read the piteous puzzle of that gaze
that had held her motionless on the balcony. Hugh had forgotten the
past--all of it, its crime, its penalty. In forgetting the past, he had
forgotten even her, his wife! Yet in some mysterious way her face had
been familiar to him; it had touched for an instant the spring of the
befogged memory.
As she spurred through the transient twilight past the selvage of the
town and into the somber mountain slope, she struck the horse sharply
with her crop. He who had entrapped her, who had married her under the
shadow of a criminal act, who had broken her future with his, when his
whole bright life had crashed down in black ruin--could such a one look
as he had looked at her? Could he make such music that had wrung her
heart?
All at once the horse shied violently, almost unseating her. A man was
lying by the side of the road, tossing and muttering to himself. She
forced the unwilling animal closer, and, leaning from the saddle, saw
who it was. In a moment she was off and beside the prostrate form, a
spasm of dread clutching at her throat at sight of the nerveless limbs,
the chalky pallor of the brow, the fever spots in the cheeks.
A wave of pity swept over her. He was ill and alone; he could not be
left there--he must have shelter. She looked fearfully about her. What
could she do? In that town, whose intolerance and dislike she had seen
so actively demonstrated, was there no one who would care for him? She
turned her head, listening to a nearing sound--footsteps were plodding
up the road. She called, and presently a pedestrian emerged from the
half-dark and came toward her.
He bent over the form she showed him.
"It's Stires," he said with a chuckle. "I heard he'd come back." The
chuckle turned to a cough, and he shook his head. "This is sad! You
could never believe how I have labored with the boy, but"--he turned out
his hands--"you see, there is the temptation. It is his unhappy
weakness."
Jessica remembered the yellow, smirking face now. She had passed him on
the day Tom Felder had walked with her from the Mountain Valley House,
and the lawyer had told her he lived in the cabin just below the Knob,
where she so often sat. She felt a quiver of repulsion.
"He is not intoxicated," she said coldly. "He is ill. You know him,
then?"
"Know him!" he echoed, and laughed--a dry, cackling laugh. "I ought to.
And I guess he knows me." He shook the inert arm. "Get up, Hugh!" he
said. "It's Prendergast!"
There flashed through her mind the phrase of the surly hotel-keeper:
"His side-partner, Prendergast!" Could it be? Had Hugh really lived in
the cabin on which she had so often peered down during those past weeks?
And with this chosen crony!
She touched Prendergast's arm. "He is ill, I say," she repeated. "He
must be cared for at once. Your cabin is on the hillside, isn't it?"
"_His_ cabin," he corrected. "A rough place, but it has sheltered us
both. I am but guide, philosopher and friend."
She bit her lips. "Lift him on my horse," she said. She stooped and put
her hands under the twitching shoulders. "I will help you. I am quite
strong."
With her aid he lifted the swaying form on to the saddle and supported
it while Jessica led the way up the darkening road.
"Here is the cut-off," he said presently. "Ah, you know it!" for she had
turned into the side-path that led along the hill, under the gray,
snake-like flume--the shortest route to the grassy shelf on which the
cabin stood.
The by-way was steep and rugged, and rhododendron clumps caught at her
ankles, and once she heard a snake slip over the dry rustle of leaves,
but she went on rapidly, dragging at the bridle, turning back now and
then anxiously to urge the horse to greater speed. She scarcely heard
the offensively honied compliments which Prendergast offered to her
courage and resource. Her pulses were throbbing unsteadily, her mind in
a ferment.
It seemed an eternity they climbed; in reality it was scarcely twenty
minutes before they reached the grassy knoll and the cabin whose crazy
swinging door stood wide to the night air. She tied the horse, went in
and at Prendergast's direction found matches and lit a candle. The bare,
two-room interior it revealed, was unkempt and disordered. Rough bunks,
a table and a couple of hewn chairs were almost its only furniture. The
window was broken and the roof admitted sun and rain. Prendergast laid
the man they had brought on one of the bunks and threw over him a shabby
blanket.
"My dear young lady," he said, "you are a good Samaritan. How shall we
thank you, my poor friend here and I?"
Jessica had taken money from her pocket and now she held it out to him.
"He must have a doctor," she said. "You must fetch one."
The yellow eyes fastened on the bill, even while his gesture protested.
"You shame me!" he exclaimed. "And yet you are right; it is for him." He
folded it and put it into his pocket. "As soon as I have built a fire, I
will go for our local _medico_. He will not always come at the call of
the luckless miner. All are not so charitable as you."
He untied her horse and extended a hand, but she mounted without his
help. "He will thank you one day--this friend of mine," he said, "far
better than I can do."
"It is not at all necessary to tell him," she replied frigidly. "The
sick are always to be helped, in every circumstance."
She gave her horse the rein as she spoke and turned him up the steep
path that climbed back of the cabin, past the Knob, and so by a narrow
trail to the mountain road.
Emmet Prendergast stood listening to the dulling hoof-beats a moment,
then reentered the cabin. The man on the bunk had lifted to a sitting
position, his eyes were open, dazed and staring.
"That's right," the older man said. "You're coming round. How does it
feel to be back in the old shebang? Can't guess how you got here, can
you? You were towed on horseback by a beauty, Hughey, my boy--a
rip-staving beauty! I'll tell you about it in the morning, if you're
good."
The man he addressed made no answer; his eyes were on the other,
industrious and bewildered.
"I heard about the row," went on Prendergast. "They didn't think it was
in you, and neither did I." He looked at him cunningly. "Neither did
Moreau, eh, eh? You're a clever one, Hugh, but the lost-memory racket
won't stand you in anything. You hadn't any call to get scared in the
first place--_I_ don't tell all I know!"
He shoved the candle nearer on the table. "There's a queer look in your
face, Hugh!" he said, with a clumsy attempt at kindness. "That rock they
threw must have hurt you. Feel sort of dizzy, eh? Never mind, I'll show
you a sight for sore eyes. You went off without your share of the last
swag, but I've saved it for you. Prendergast wouldn't cheat a pal!"
From a cranny in the clay-chinked wall he took a chamois-skin bag. It
contained a quantity of gold-dust and small nuggets, which he poured
into a miner's scales on the table and proceeded to divide in two
portions. This accomplished, he emptied one of the portions on to a
paper and pushed it out.
"That's yours," he said.
Harry's eyes were on his with a piercing intensity now, as though they
looked through him to a vast distance beyond. He was staring through a
gray mist, at something far off but significant that eluded his direct
vision. The board table, the yellow gold, the flickering candle-light
recalled something horrifying, in some other world, in some other life,
millions of ages ago.
He lurched to his feet, overturning the table. The gold-dust rattled to
the floor.
"Your deal!" he said. Then with a vague laugh, he fell sidewise upon
the bunk.
Emmet Prendergast stared at him with a look of amazement on his yellow
face. "He's crazy as a chicken!" he said.
He sat watching him a while, then rose and kindled a fire on the unswept
hearth. From a litter of cans and dented utensils in a corner he
proceeded to cook himself supper, after which he carefully brushed up
the scattered gold-dust and returned it all to its hiding-place. Lastly
he rummaged on a shelf and found a phial; this proved to be empty,
however, and he set it on the table.
"I guess you'll do well enough without any painkiller," he said to
himself. "Doctors are expensive. Anyway, I'll be back by midnight."
He threw more wood on the fire, blew out the candle, and, closing the
door behind him, set off down the trail to the town--where a faro-bank
soon acquired the bill Jessica had given him.