THE PROMISE OF A RAINBOW
For a week Dave Drennen lay upon the bunk in the one room dugout which
had been home for him during the winter. Stubborn and sullen and
silent at first, snarling his anger as sufficient strength came back
into him, he refused the aid which the Settlement, now keenly
solicitous, offered. He knew why the men who had not spoken to him two
weeks ago sought to befriend him now. He knew that the swift change of
attitude was due to nothing in the world but to a fear that he might
die without disclosing his golden secret.
"And I am of half a mind to die," he told the last man to trouble him;
"just to shame Kootanie George, to hang Ernestine Dumont and to drive a
hundred gold seekers mad."
During the week a boy from Joe's Lunch Counter brought him his meals
and gave him the scant attention he demanded. The boy went away with
money in his pockets and with tales to tell of a man like a wounded
bull moose. Always there were eager hands to detain him, eager tongues
to ask if Drennen had let anything drop. Always the same answer, a
shake of the head; he had learned nothing.
The day after the affair at Père Marquette's had seen MacLeod's
Settlement empty of men. Each one following his own hope and fancy
they had gone into the mountains, heading toward the north as Drennen
had headed two weeks before, some following the main trail for a matter
of many miles, others breaking off to right or to left at tempting
cross-trails, hastening feverishly, dreaming dreams and finding rude
awakenings. The snows were melting everywhere upon the slopes, the
dirty waters running down the trails making an ooze at midday which
sucked up and destroyed the tracks of the men who travelled over it in
the crisp early mornings.
There was no sign to tell whether Drennen had gone straight on during
the seven days he might have been pushing away from the camp and had
made his strike at the end of them, or whether he had turned off
somewhere hardly out of sight of the handful of shacks marking
MacLeod's Settlement. No sign to tell that the golden vein or pocket
lay within shouting distance from the Settlement or fifty, seventy-five
miles removed. And Drennen, lying on his back upon his hard bunk,
stared up at the blackened beams across his ceiling and smiled his
hard, bitter smile as he pictured the frantic, fruitless quest.
Sefton, the man with the coppery Vandyke beard, thin-jawed and with
restless eyes, had given him certain rude help at Marquette's and had
been among the first the following day to offer aid. Drennen dismissed
him briefly, offering to pay for what he had already done but saying he
had no further need of clumsy fingers fooling with his hurt. Sefton
favoured him with a keen scrutiny from the door, hesitated, shrugged
his thin shoulders and went away. Drennen wondered if the girl, who
seemed in the habit of ordering people around, had sent him.
At the end of the week Drennen was about again. He had kept his wound
clean with the antiseptic solutions to be obtained from the store and
under its bandages it was healing. He found that he was weaker than he
had supposed but with a grunt drove his lax muscles to stiffen and obey
his will. From the door he came back, found a broken bit of mirror and
looked curiously at the face reflected in it. No beautiful sight, he
told himself grimly. It was haggard, drawn and wan. A beard three
weeks old, the black of it shot through here and there with white
hairs, made the stern face uncouth.
"I look a savage," he told himself disgustedly, tossing the glass to
the cluttered table. Then, with a grim tightening of the lips, "And
why not?"
He made his way slowly, his side paining him no little, to Joe's Lunch
Counter. It was late afternoon and the street was deserted. A gleam
of satisfaction showed fleetingly in his eyes; he knew why the street
was deserted and the knowledge pleased him.
None of the Settlement was in Joe's restaurant, but the presence of the
two strangers who had come with the girl saved it from utter desertion.
They were finishing a light meal as Drennen entered and looked up at
him curiously. Drennen saw a quick glance interchanged. He knew the
meaning of this, too, knew that the story of his strike had gone its
way to them, that because of those nuggets which even now weighted his
pocket he was a marked man, a man to be reckoned with, to be watched,
to be followed, to be fawned upon if possible. He frowned at Sefton's
nod and took his place at the lunch counter.
Presently the younger of the two, Captain Sefton's companion, got up
and came to Drennen's side, offering his hand.
"I am glad to see you around again," he said, pleasantly.
Drennen did not look toward him.
"Some more coffee, Joe," he said shortly.
The young fellow stared at him a moment, a quick retort upon his lips.
It was checked however by Sefton saying quickly:
"Come on, Lemarc. It's none of your funeral if a man wants to be left
alone. Let's go find Ygerne."
Ygerne. So that was her name, Drennen thought as he stirred two
heaping spoons of sugar into his coffee and out of the corner of his
eye watched the two men go out. Well, what was the difference? One
name would do as well as another and she was an adventuress like the
rest of them in this land of hard trails. Else why should she be here
at all, and with men like Lemarc and Sefton? Had he not distrusted all
men by sweeping rule these two at least he would have distrusted for
the craft in their eyes.
He drank his second cup of coffee, stuffed his old pipe full of coarse
tobacco and went outside. Sefton and Lemarc had passed out of sight.
Drennen hesitated just a second, pausing at the door. He was pitifully
weak. He supposed that the thing for him to do was to crawl back to
his bunk for the remainder of the day and the long night to follow. He
clamped his pipe stem hard between his teeth. He'd do nothing of the
kind. Did strength, any more than anything else in the world, come to
a man who lay on his back and waited for it? He needed exercise.
So he strolled down through the quiet Settlement, turned into the trail
which leads upward along old Ironhead's flank, driving his body
mercilessly to the labour of the climb. There was a spot he knew where
he could sit and look down across the valley and from which far out
somewhere to north or south he might see fools seeking for the gold he
had found. It was a little cup set in the side of the mountain, a tiny
valley at once beautiful and aloof, and he had not been here since last
fall. In it he could rest unmolested, unwatched.
During the day there had been showers; now the sun was out warmly while
here and there the sky was hidden by clouds and in places he could see
the little mists shaken downward through the bright air. Warm rains
would mean a quickened thaw, open trails and swifter travel. In a way
a propitious season was making it up to him for the time he was losing
in idleness with a hole in his side.
An odd incident occurred that afternoon. Drennen, hard man as he was,
Inured to the heavy shocks of a life full of them, felt this little
thing strangely. He was resting, sitting upon a great boulder under a
pine tree. The cup-like valley, or depressed plateau, lay at his left,
himself upon an extreme rim of it. As he brooded he noted idly how the
sunshine was busied with the vapour filled air, building of it a
triumphant arch, gloriously coloured. His mood was not for brightness
and yet, albeit with but half consciousness, he watched. Did a man who
has followed the beck of hope of gold ever see a rainbow without
wondering what treasure lay at the far end of the radiant promise? So,
idly, Dave Drennen now.
At first just broken bits of colour. Then slowly the bits merged into
one and the arc completed, the far end seeming to rest upon the further
rim of the level open space. It seemed a tangible thing, not a
visioned nothing born of nothingness and to perish utterly in a
twinkling.
"A promise that is a lie," he said to himself bitterly. "Like the
promises of men."
And then . . . to his startled fancies she had come into being like the
rainbow, from nothingness . . . where the foot of the arch had
appeared to rest stood the girl, Ygerne. A quarter of a mile between
Drennen sitting here and her standing there, a stretch of boulder
strewn mountain side separating them, God's covenant joining them.
Drennen stiffened, started to his feet as though he had looked upon
magic. At the foot of the rainbow not just gold . . . gold he had in
plenty now . . . but a woman . . .
He laughed his old ugly laugh and settled back upon his rock, his eyes
jerked away from her, sent back down the slope of the mountain to the
green fringe of the Little MacLeod. He knew that his senses had
tricked him as one's senses are so prone to do; that she had merely
stepped into sight from behind a shoulder of blackened cliff; that the
most brilliantly coloured rainbow is just so much sunlight and water.
And he knew, too, that she would have to pass close to him on her way
back to the Settlement unless she went to considerable effort to avoid
him.
He saw her shadow upon a patch of snow in the trail where the rock
protected it. He did not turn his head. He heard her step, knew when
it had stopped and her shadow had grown motionless. She was not ten
paces from him.
Stubbornly he ignored the silent challenge of her pausing. With slope
shoulders he sat motionless upon his rock, his face turned toward the
Little MacLeod, his freshly relighted pipe going calmly. Yet he was
aware, both from the faint sound of her tread upon the soft ground and
from her shadow, cast athwart the path, that she had come on another
couple of steps, that she had stopped again, that her gaze was now no
doubt concerned with his profile. He did not seek to make it the less
harsh, to soften the expression of bitterness and uncouth hardness
which his bit of a mirror had shown him in the dugout. He found that
without turning to see he could remember just what her eyes looked
like. And he had seen them only once and that when his chief concern
was a bullet hole in his side.
While Drennen drew five or six slow puffs at his pipe neither he nor
the girl moved. Then again she drew a pace nearer, again stopped. He
sent his eyes stubbornly up and down the willow fringed banks of the
Little MacLeod. His thought, used to obeying that thing apart, his
will, concerned itself with the question of just where the gold seekers
were driving their fools' search for his gold.
Stubbornness in the man had met a stubbornness no less in the girl.
Though his attitude might not be misread she refused to heed it. He
had half expected her to go on, and was idly looking for a shrug of the
shadow's shoulders and then a straightening of them as she went past;
he half expected her to address him with some commonplace remark. He
had not thought to have her stand there and laugh at him.