A NIGHT RIDE
It was a wonderful night that the two spent wading the sea of moonlight
together on the plain. The almost unearthly beauty of the scene grew upon
them. They had none of the loneliness that had possessed each the night
before, and might now discover all the wonders of the way.
Early in the way they came upon a prairie-dogs' village, and the man would
have lingered watching with curiosity, had not the girl urged him on. It
was the time of night when she had started to run away, and the same
apprehension that filled her then came upon her with the evening. She
longed to be out of the land which held the man she feared. She would
rather bury herself in the earth and smother to death than be caught by
him. But, as they rode on, she told her companion much of the habits of
the curious little creatures they had seen; and then, as the night settled
down upon them, she pointed out the dark, stealing creatures that slipped
from their way now and then, or gleamed with a fearsome green eye from
some temporary refuge.
At first the cold shivers kept running up and down the young man as he
realized that here before him in the sage-brush was a real live animal
about which he had read so much, and which he had come out bravely to
hunt. He kept his hand upon his revolver, and was constantly on the alert,
nervously looking behind lest a troop of coyotes or wolves should be
quietly stealing upon him. But, as the girl talked fearlessly of them in
much the same way as we talk of a neighbor's fierce dog, he grew gradually
calmer, and was able to watch a dark, velvet-footed moving object ahead
without starting.
By and by he pointed to the heavens, and talked of the stars. Did she know
that constellation? No? Then he explained. Such and such stars were so
many miles from the earth. He told their names, and a bit of mythology
connected with the name, and then went on to speak of the moon, and the
possibility of its once having been inhabited.
The girl listened amazed. She knew certain stars as landmarks, telling
east from west and north from south; and she had often watched them one by
one coming out, and counted them her friends; but that they were worlds,
and that the inhabitants of this earth knew anything whatever about the
heavenly bodies, she had never heard. Question after question she plied
him with, some of them showing extraordinary intelligence and thought, and
others showing deeper ignorance than a little child in our kindergartens
would show.
He wondered more and more as their talk went on. He grew deeply interested
in unfolding the wonders of the heavens to her; and, as he studied her
pure profile in the moonlight with eager, searching, wistful gaze, her
beauty impressed him more and more. In the East the man had a friend, an
artist. He thought how wonderful a theme for a painting this scene would
make. The girl in picturesque hat of soft felt, riding with careless ease
and grace; horse, maiden, plain, bathed in a sea of silver.
More and more as she talked the man wondered how this girl reared in the
wilds had acquired a speech so free from grammatical errors. She was
apparently deeply ignorant, and yet with a very few exceptions she made
no serious errors in English. How was it to be accounted for?
He began to ply her with questions about herself, but could not find that
she had ever come into contact with people who were educated. She had not
even lived in any of the miserable little towns that flourish in the
wildest of the West, and not within several hundred miles of a city. Their
nearest neighbors in one direction had been forty miles away, she said,
and said it as if that were an everyday distance for a neighbor to live.
Mail? They had had a letter once that she could remember, when she was a
little girl. It was just a few lines in pencil to say that her mother's
father had died. He had been killed in an accident of some sort, working
in the city where he lived. Her mother had kept the letter and cried over
it till almost all the pencil marks were gone.
No, they had no mail on the mountain where their homestead was.
Yes, her father went there first because he thought he had discovered
gold, but it turned out to be a mistake; so, as they had no other place to
go to, and no money to go with, they had just stayed there; and her father
and brothers had been cow-punchers, but she and her mother had scarcely
ever gone away from home. There were the little children to care for; and,
when they died, her mother did not care to go, and would not let her go
far alone.
O, yes, she had ridden a great deal, sometimes with her brothers, but not
often. They went with rough men, and her mother felt afraid to have her
go. The men all drank. Her brothers drank. Her father drank too. She
stated it as if it were a sad fact common to all mankind, and ended with
the statement which was almost, not quite, a question, "I guess you drink
too."
"Well," said the young man hesitatingly, "not that way. I take a glass of
wine now and then in company, you know--"
"Yes, I know," sighed the girl. "Men are all alike. Mother used to say so.
She said men were different from women. They had to drink. She said they
all did it. Only she said her father never did; but he was very good,
though he had to work hard."
"Indeed," said the young man, his color rising in the moonlight, "indeed,
you make a mistake. I don't drink at all, not that way. I'm not like them.
I--why, I only--well, the fact is, I don't care a red cent about the stuff
anyway; and I don't want you to think I'm like them. If it will do you any
good, I'll never touch it again, not a drop."
He said it earnestly. He was trying to vindicate himself. Just why he
should care to do so he did not know, only that all at once it was very
necessary that he should appear different in the eyes of this girl from,
the other men she had known.
"Will you really?" she asked, turning to look in his face. "Will you
promise that?"
"Why, certainly I will," he said, a trifle embarrassed that she had taken
him at his word. "Of course I will. I tell you it's nothing to me. I only
took a glass at the club occasionally when the other men were drinking,
and sometimes when I went to banquets, class banquets, you know, and
dinners--"
Now the girl had never heard of class banquets, but to take a glass
occasionally when the other men were drinking was what her brothers did;
and so she sighed, and said: "Yes, you may promise, but I know you won't
keep it. Father promised too; but, when he got with the other men, it did
no good. Men are all alike."
"But I'm not," he insisted stoutly. "I tell you I'm not. I don't drink,
and I won't drink. I promise you solemnly here under God's sky that I'll
never drink another drop of intoxicating liquor again if I know it as long
as I live."
He put out his hand toward her, and she put her own into it with a quick
grasp for just an instant.
"Then you're not like other men, after all," she said with a glad ring in
her voice. "That must be why I wasn't so very much afraid of you when I
woke up and found you standing there."
A distinct sense of pleasure came over him at her words. Why it should
make him glad that she had not been afraid of him when she had first seen
him in the wilderness he did not know. He forgot all about his own
troubles. He forgot the lady in the automobile. Right then and there he
dropped her out of his thoughts. He did not know it; but she was
forgotten, and he did not think about her any more during that journey.
Something had erased her. He had run away from her, and he had succeeded
most effectually, more so than he knew.
There in the desert the man took his first temperance pledge, urged
thereto by a girl who had never heard of a temperance pledge in her life,
had never joined a woman's temperance society, and knew nothing about
women's crusades. Her own heart had taught her out of a bitter experience
just how to use her God-given influence.
They came to a long stretch of level ground then, smooth and hard; and the
horses as with common consent set out to gallop shoulder to shoulder in a
wild, exhilarating skim across the plain. Talking was impossible. The man
reflected that he was making great strides in experience, first a prayer
and then a pledge, all in the wilderness. If any one had told him he was
going into the West for this, he would have laughed him to scorn.
Towards morning they rode more slowly. Their horses were growing jaded.
They talked in lower tones as they looked toward the east. It was as if
they feared they might waken some one too soon. There is something awesome
about the dawning of a new day, and especially when one has been sailing a
sea of silver all night. It is like coming back from an unreal world into
a sad, real one. Each was almost sorry that the night was over. The new
day might hold so much of hardship or relief, so much of trouble or
surprise; and this night had been perfect, a jewel cut to set in memory
with every facet flashing to the light. They did not like to get back to
reality from the converse they had held together. It was an experience for
each which would never be forgotten.
Once there came the distant sound of shots and shouts. The two shrank
nearer each other, and the man laid his strong hand protectingly on the
mane of the girl's horse; but he did not touch her hand. The lady of his
thoughts had sometimes let him hold her jewelled hand, and smiled with
drooping lashes when he fondled it; and, when she had tired of him, other
admirers might claim the same privilege. But this woman of the
wilderness--he would not even in his thoughts presume to touch her little
brown, firm hand. Somehow she had commanded his honor and respect from the
first minute, even before she shot the bird.
Once a bob-cat shot across their path but a few feet in front of them, and
later a kit-fox ran growling up with ruffled fur; but the girl's quick
shot soon put it to flight, and they passed on through the dawning morning
of the first real Sabbath day the girl had ever known.
"It is Sunday morning at home," said the man gravely as he watched the sun
lift its rosy head from the mist of mountain and valley outspread before
them. "Do you have such an institution out here?"
The girl grew white about the lips. "Awful things happen on Sunday," she
said with a shudder.
He felt a great pity rising in his heart for her, and strove to turn her
thoughts in other directions. Evidently there was a recent sorrow
connected with the Sabbath.
"You are tired," said he, "and the horses are tired. See! We ought to stop
and rest. The daylight has come, and nothing can hurt us. Here is a good
place, and sheltered. We can fasten the horses behind these bushes, and no
one will guess we are here."
She assented, and they dismounted. The man cut an opening into a clump of
thick growth with his knife, and there they fastened the weary horses,
well hidden from sight if any one chanced that way. The girl lay down a
few feet away in a spot almost entirely surrounded by sage-brush which had
reached an unusual height and made a fine hiding-place. Just outside the
entrance of this natural chamber the man lay down on a fragrant bed of
sage-brush. He had gathered enough for the girl first, and spread out the
old coat over it; and she had dropped asleep almost as soon as she lay
down. But, although his own bed of sage-brush was tolerably comfortable,
even to one accustomed all his life to the finest springs and hair
mattress that money could buy, and although the girl had insisted that he
must rest too, for he was weary and there was no need to watch, sleep
would not come to his eyelids.
He lay there resting and thinking. How strange was the experience through
which he was passing! Came ever a wealthy, college-bred, society man into
the like before? What did it all mean? His being lost, his wandering for a
day, the sight of this girl and his pursuit, the prayer under the open
sky, and that night of splendor under the moonlight riding side by side.
It was like some marvellous tale.
And this girl! Where was she going? What was to become of her? Out in the
world where he came from, were they ever to reach it, she would be
nothing. Her station in life was beneath his so far that the only
recognition she could have would be one which would degrade her. This
solitary journey they were taking, how the world would lift up its hands
in horror at it! A girl without a chaperon! She was impossible! And yet it
all seemed right and good, and the girl was evidently recognized by the
angels; else how had she escaped from degradation thus far?
Ah! How did he know she had? But he smiled at that. No one could look into
that pure, sweet face, and doubt that she was as good as she was
beautiful. If it was not so, he hoped he would never find it out. She
seemed to him a woman yet unspoiled, and he shrank from the thought of
what the world might do for her--the world and its cultivation, which
would not be for her, because she was friendless and without money or
home. The world would have nothing but toil to give her, with a meagre
living.
Where was she going, and what was she proposing to do? Must he not try to
help her in some way? Did not the fact that she had saved his life demand
so much from him? If he had not found her, he must surely have starved
before he got out of this wild place. Even yet starvation was not an
impossibility; for they had not reached any signs of habitation yet, and
there was but one more portion of corn-meal and a little coffee left. They
had but two matches now, and there had been no more flights of birds, nor
brooks with fishes.
In fact, the man found a great deal to worry about as he lay there, too
weary with the unaccustomed exercise and experiences to sleep.
He reflected that the girl had told him very little, after all, about her
plans. He must ask her. He wished he knew more of her family. If he were
only older and she younger, or if he had the right kind of a woman friend
to whom he might take her, or send her! How horrible that that scoundrel
was after her! Such men were not men, but beasts, and should be shot down.
Far off in the distance, it might have been in the air or in his
imagination, there sometimes floated a sound as of faint voices or shouts;
but they came and went, and he listened, and by and by heard no more. The
horses breathed heavily behind their sage-brush stable, and the sun rose
higher and hotter. At last sleep came, troubled, fitful, but sleep,
oblivion. This time there was no lady in an automobile.
It was high noon when he awoke, for the sun had reached around the
sage-brush, and was pouring full into his face. He was very uncomfortable,
and moreover an uneasy sense of something wrong pervaded his mind. Had he
or had he not, heard a strange, low, sibilant, writhing sound just as he
came to consciousness? Why did he feel that something, some one, had
passed him but a moment before?
He rubbed his eyes open, and fanned himself with his hat. There was not a
sound to be heard save a distant hawk in the heavens, and the breathing of
the horses. He stepped over, and made sure that they were all right, and
then came back. Was the girl still sleeping? Should he call her? But what
should he call her? She had no name to him as yet. He could not say, "My
dear madam" in the wilderness, nor yet "mademoiselle."
Perhaps it was she who had passed him. Perhaps she was looking about for
water, or for fire-wood. He cast his eyes about, but the thick growth of
sage-brush everywhere prevented his seeing much. He stepped to the right
and then to the left of the little enclosure where she had gone to sleep,
but there was no sign of life.
At last the sense of uneasiness grew upon him until he spoke.
"Are you awake yet?" he ventured; but the words somehow stuck in his
throat, and would not sound out clearly. He ventured the question again,
but it seemed to go no further than the gray-green foliage in front of
him. Did he catch an alert movement, the sound of attention, alarm? Had he
perhaps frightened her?
His flesh grew creepy, and he was angry with himself that he stood here
actually trembling and for no reason. He felt that there was danger in the
air. What could it mean? He had never been a believer in premonitions or
superstitions of any kind. But the thought came to him that perhaps that
evil man had come softly while he slept, and had stolen the girl away.
Then all at once a horror seized him, and he made up his mind to end this
suspense and venture in to see whether she were safe.