brooding moods. Besides, he wanted to weigh her words. How significant
they were! To-day more than ever she had let down. Humility and
simplicity seemed to abide with her. And her brooding boded a storm.
Tappan’s heart swelled in his broad breast. Was life going to dawn rosy
and bright for the lonely prospector? He had money to make a home for
this woman. What lay in the balance of the hour? Tappan waited, slowly
realizing the charged atmosphere.
Madge’s somber eyes gazed out over the great void. But, full of thought
and passion as they were, they did not see the beauty of that scene.
But Tappan saw it. And in some strange sense the color and wildness and
sublimity seemed the expression of a new state of his heart. Under him
sheered down the ragged and cracked cliffs of the Rim, yellow and gold
and gray, full of caves and crevices, ledges for eagles and niches for
lions, a thousand feet down to the upward edge of the long green slopes
and canyons, and so on down and down into the abyss of forested ravine
and ridge, rolling league on league away to the encompassing barrier of
purple mountain ranges.
The thickets in the canyons called Tappan’s eye back to linger there.
How different from the scenes that used to be perpetually in his sight!
What riot of color! The tips of the green pines, the crests of the
silver spruces, waved about masses of vivid gold of aspen trees, and
wonderful cerise and flaming red of maples, and crags of yellow rock,
covered with the bronze of frostbitten sumach. Here was autumn and
with it the colors of Tappan’s favorite season. From below breathed
up the low roar of plunging brook; an eagle screeched his wild call;
an elk bugled his piercing blast. From the Rim wisps of pine needles
blew away on the breeze and fell into the void. A wild country,
colorful, beautiful, bountiful. Tappan imagined he could quell his
wandering spirit here, with this dark-eyed woman by his side. Never
before had Nature so called him. Here was not the cruelty or flinty
hardness of the desert. The air was keen and sweet, cold in the shade,
warm in the sun. A fragrance of balsam and spruce, spiced with pine,
made his breathing a thing of difficulty and delight. How for so
many years had he endured vast open spaces without such eye-soothing
trees as these? Tappan’s back rested against a huge pine that tipped
the Rim, and had stood there, stronger than the storms, for many a
hundred years. The rock of the promontory was covered with soft brown
mats of pine needles. A juniper tree, with its bright green foliage
and lilac-colored berries, grew near the pine, and helped to form a
secluded little nook, fragrant and somehow haunting. The woman’s dark
head was close to Tappan, as she sat with her elbows on her knees,
gazing down into the basin. Tappan saw the strained tensity of her
posture, the heaving of her full bosom. He wondered, while his own
emotions, so long darkened, roused to the suspense of that hour.
Suddenly she flung herself into Tappan’s arms. The act amazed him. It
seemed to have both the passion of a woman and the shame of a girl.
Before she hid her face on Tappan’s breast he saw how the rich brown
had paled, and then flamed.
“Tappan!... Take me away.... Take me away from here--from that life
down there,” she cried, in smothered voice.
“Madge, you mean take you away--and marry you?” he replied.
“Oh, yes--yes--marry me, if you love me.... I don’t see how you
can--but you do, don’t you?--Say you do.”
“I reckon that’s what ails me, Madge,” he replied, simply.
“_Say_ so, then,” she burst out.
“All right, I do,” said Tappan, with heavy breath. “Madge, words don’t
come easy for me.... But I think you’re wonderful, an’ I want you. I
haven’t dared hope for that, till now. I’m only a wanderer. But it’d be
heaven to have you--my wife--an’ make a home for you.”
“Oh--Oh!” she returned, wildly, and lifted herself to cling round his
neck, and to kiss him. “You give me joy.... Oh, Tappan, I love you. I
never loved any man before. I know now.... An’ I’m not wonderful--or
good. But I love you.”
The fire of her lips and the clasp of her arms worked havoc in Tappan.
No woman had ever loved him, let alone embraced him. To awake suddenly
to such rapture as this made him strong and rough in his response. Then
all at once she seemed to collapse in his arms and to begin to weep. He
feared he had offended or hurt her, and was clumsy in his contrition.
Presently she replied:
“Pretty soon--I’ll make you--beat me. It’s your love--your
honesty--that’s shamed me.... Tappan, I was party to a trick to--sell
you a worthless ranch.... I agreed to--try to make you love me--to fool
you--cheat you.... But I’ve fallen in love with you.--An’ my God, I
care more for your love--your respect--than for my life. I can’t go on
with it. I’ve double-crossed Jake, an’ all of them.... Now, am I worth
lovin’? Am I worth havin’?”
“More than ever, dear,” he said.
“You will take me away?”
“Anywhere--any time, the sooner the better.”
She kissed him passionately, and then, disengaging herself from his
arms, she knelt and gazed earnestly at him. “I’ve not told all. I will
some day. But I swear now on my soul--I’ll be what you think me.”
“Madge, you needn’t say all that. If you love me--it’s enough. More
than I ever dreamed of.”
“You’re a man. Oh, why didn’t I meet you when I was eighteen instead
of now--twenty-eight, an’ all that between.... But enough. A new life
begins here for me. We must plan.”
“You make the plans an’ I’ll act on them.”
For a moment she was tense and silent, head bowed, hands shut tight.
Then she spoke:
“To-night we’ll slip away. You make a light pack, that’ll go on your
saddle. I’ll do the same. We’ll hide the horses out near where the
trail crosses the brook. An’ we’ll run off--ride out of the country.”
Tappan in turn tried to think, but the whirl of his mind made any
reason difficult. This dark-eyed, full-bosomed woman loved him, had
surrendered herself, asked only his protection. The thing seemed
marvelous. Yet she knelt there, those dark eyes on him, infinitely more
appealing than ever, haunting with some mystery of sadness and fear he
could not divine.
Suddenly Tappan remembered Jenet.
“I must take Jenet,” he said.
That startled her. “Jenet--Who’s she?”
“My burro.”
“Your burro. You can’t travel fast with that pack beast. We’ll be
trailed, an’ we’ll have to go fast.... You can’t take the burro.”
Then Tappan was startled. “What! Can’t take Jenet?--Why, I--I couldn’t
get along without her.”
“Nonsense. What’s a burro? We must ride fast--do you hear?”
“Madge, I’m afraid I--I must take Jenet with me,” he said, soberly.
“It’s impossible. I can’t go if you take her. I tell you I’ve got to
get away. If you want _me_ you’ll have to leave your precious Jenet
behind.”
Tappan bowed his head to the inevitable. After all, Jenet was only a
beast of burden. She would run wild on the ridges and soon forget him
and have no need of him. Something strained in Tappan’s breast. He did
not see clearly here. This woman was worth more than all else to him.
“I’m stupid, dear,” he said. “You see I never before ran off with a
beautiful woman.... Of course my burro must be left behind.”
* * * * *
Elopement, if such it could be called, was easy for them. Tappan did
not understand why Madge wanted to be so secret about it. Was she not
free? But then, he reflected, he did not know the circumstances she
feared. Besides, he did not care. Possession of the woman was enough.
Tappan made his small pack, the weight of which was considerable
owing to his bags of gold. This he tied on his saddle. It bothered
him to leave most of his new outfit scattered around his camp. What
would Jenet think of that? He looked for her, but for once she did
not come in at meal time. Tappan thought this was singular. He could
not remember when Jenet had been far from his camp at sunset. Somehow
Tappan was glad.
After he had his supper, he left his utensils and supplies as they
happened to be, and strode away under the trees to the trysting-place
where he was to meet Madge. To his surprise she came before dark, and,
unused as he was to the complexity and emotional nature of a woman, he
saw that she was strangely agitated. Her face was pale. Almost a fury
burned in her black eyes. When she came up to Tappan, and embraced him,
almost fiercely, he felt that he was about to learn more of the nature
of womankind. She thrilled him to his depths.
“Lead out the horses an’ don’t make any noise,” she whispered.
Tappan complied, and soon he was mounted, riding behind her on the
trail. It surprised him that she headed down country, and traveled
fast. Moreover, she kept to a trail that continually grew rougher.
They came to a road, which she crossed, and kept on through darkness
and brush so thick that Tappan could not see the least sign of a trail.
And at length anyone could have seen that Madge had lost her bearings.
She appeared to know the direction she wanted, but traveling upon it
was impossible, owing to the increasingly cut-up and brushy ground.
They had to turn back, and seemed to be hours finding the road. Once
Tappan fancied he heard the thud of hoofs other than those made by
their own horses. Here Madge acted strangely, and where she had been
obsessed by desire to hurry she now seemed to have grown weary. She
turned her horse south on the road. Tappan was thus enabled to ride
beside her. But they talked very little. He was satisfied with the fact
of being with her on the way out of the country. Some time in the night
they reached an old log shack by the roadside. Here Tappan suggested
they halt, and get some sleep before dawn. The morrow would mean a long
hard day.
“Yes, to-morrow will be hard,” replied Madge, as she faced Tappan in
the gloom. He could see her big dark eyes on him. Her tone was not
one of a hopeful woman. Tappan pondered over this. But he could not
understand, because he had no idea how a woman ought to act under
such circumstances. Madge Beam was a creature of moods. Only the day
before, on the ride down from the Rim, she had told him with a laugh
that she was likely to love him madly one moment and scratch his eyes
out the next. How could he know what to make of her? Still, an uneasy
feeling began to stir in Tappan.
They dismounted, and unsaddled the horses. Tappan took his pack and put
it aside. Something frightened the horses. They bolted down the road.
“Head them off,” cried the woman, hoarsely.
Even on the instant her voice sounded strained to Tappan, as if she
were choked. But, realizing the absolute necessity of catching the
horses, he set off down the road on a run. And he soon succeeded in
heading off the animal he had ridden. The other one, however, was
contrary and cunning. When Tappan would endeavor to get ahead, it would
trot briskly on. Yet it did not go so fast but what Tappan felt sure
he would soon catch it. Thus walking and running, he put some distance
between him and the cabin before he realized that he could not head off
the wary beast. Much perturbed in mind, Tappan hurried back.
Upon reaching the cabin Tappan called to Madge. No answer! He could not
see her in the gloom nor the horse he had driven back. Only silence
brooded there. Tappan called again. Still no answer! Perhaps Madge
had succumbed to weariness and was asleep. A search of the cabin and
vicinity failed to yield any sign of her. But it disclosed the fact
that Tappan’s pack was gone.
Suddenly he sat down, quite overcome. He had been duped. What a fierce
pang tore his heart! But it was for loss of the woman--not the gold.
He was stunned, and then sick with bitter misery. Only then did Tappan
realize the meaning of love and what it had done to him. The night wore
on, and he sat there in the dark and cold and stillness until the gray
dawn told him of the coming of day.
The light showed his saddle where he had left it. Near by lay one of
Madge’s gloves. Tappan’s keen eye sighted a bit of paper sticking out
of the glove. He picked it up. It was a leaf out of a little book he
had seen her carry, and upon it was written in lead pencil:
“I am Jake’s wife, not his sister. I double-crossed him an’ ran off
with you an’ would have gone to hell for you. But Jake an’ his gang
suspected me. They were close on our trail. I couldn’t shake them. So
here I chased off the horses an’ sent you after them. It was the only
way I could save your life.”
Tappan tracked the thieves to Globe. There he learned they had gone
to Phoenix--three men and one woman. Tappan had money on his person.
He bought horse and saddle, and, setting out for Phoenix, he let his
passion to kill grow with the miles and hours. At Phoenix he learned
Beam had cashed the gold--twelve thousand dollars. So much of a
fortune! Tappan’s fury grew. The gang separated here. Beam and his
wife took stage for Tucson. Tappan had no trouble in trailing their
movements.
Gambling dives and inns and freighting posts and stage drivers told
the story of the Beams and their ill-gotten gold. They went on to
California, down into Tappan’s country, to Yuma, and El Cajon, and San
Diego. Here Tappan lost track of the woman. He could not find that
she had left San Diego, nor any trace of her there. But Jake Beam had
killed a Mexican in a brawl and had fled across the line.
Tappan gave up for the time being the chase of Beam, and bent his
efforts to find the woman. He had no resentment toward Madge. He only
loved her. All that winter he searched San Diego. He made of himself a
peddler as a ruse to visit houses. But he never found a trace of her.
In the spring he wandered back to Yuma, raking over the old clues, and
so on back to Tucson and Phoenix.
This year of dream and love and passion and despair and hate made
Tappan old. His great strength and endurance were not yet impaired, but
something of his spirit had died out of him.
One day he remembered Jenet. “My burro!” he soliloquized. “I had
forgotten her.... Jenet!”
Then it seemed a thousand impulses merged in one drove him to face the
long road toward the Rim Rock country. To remember Jenet was to grow
doubtful. Of course she would be gone. Stolen or dead or wandered off!
But then who could tell what Jenet might do? Tappan was both called and
driven. He was a poor wanderer again. His outfit was a pack he carried
on his shoulder. But while he could walk he would keep on until he
found that last camp where he had deserted Jenet.
October was coloring the canyon slopes when he reached the shadow of
the great wall of yellow rock. The cabin where the Beams had lived--or
had claimed they lived--was a fallen ruin, crushed by snow. Tappan saw
other signs of a severe winter and heavy snowfall. No horse or cattle
tracks showed in the trails.
To his amaze his camp was much as he had left it. The stone fireplace,
the iron pots, appeared to be in the same places. The boxes that had
held his supplies were lying here and there. And his canvas tarpaulin,
little the worse for wear of the elements, lay on the ground under the
pine where he had slept. If any man had visited this camp in a year he
had left no sign of it.
Suddenly Tappan espied a hoof track in the dust. A small track--almost
oval in shape--fresh! Tappan thrilled through all his being.
“Jenet’s track, so help me God!” he murmured.
He found more of them, made that morning. And, keen now as never before
on her trail, he set out to find her. The tracks led up the canyon.
Tappan came out into a little grassy clearing, and there stood Jenet,
as he had seen her thousands of times. She had both long ears up high.
She seemed to stare out of that meek, gray face. And then one of the
long ears flopped over and drooped. Such perhaps was the expression of
her recognition.
Tappan strode up to her.
“Jenet--old girl--you hung round camp--waitin’ for me, didn’t you?” he
said, huskily, and his big hands fondled her long ears.
Yes, she had waited. She, too, had grown old. She was gray. The winter
of that year had been hard. What had she lived on when the snow lay so
deep? There were lion scratches on her back, and scars on her legs. She
had fought for her life.
“Jenet, a man can never always tell about a burro,” said Tappan. “I
trained you to hang round camp an’ wait till I came back.... ‘Tappan’s
burro,’ the desert rats used to say! An’ they’d laugh when I bragged
how you’d stick to me where most men would quit. But brag as I did, I
never knew you, Jenet. An’ I left you--an’ forgot. Jenet, it takes a
human bein’--a man--a woman--to be faithless. An’ it takes a dog or a
horse or a burro to be great.... Beasts? I wonder now.... Well, old
pard, we’re goin’ down the trail together, an’ from this day on Tappan
begins to pay his debt.”
III
Tappan never again had the old _wanderlust_ for the stark and naked
desert. Something had transformed him. The green and fragrant forests,
and brown-aisled, pine-matted woodlands, the craggy promontories and
the great colored canyons, the cold granite water springs of the
Tonto seemed vastly preferable to the heat and dust and glare and the
emptiness of the waste lands. But there was more. The ghost of his
strange and only love kept pace with his wandering steps, a spirit that
hovered with him as his shadow. Madge Beam, whatever she had been, had
showed to him the power of love to refine and ennoble. Somehow he felt
closer to her here in the cliff country where his passion had been
born. Somehow she seemed nearer to him here than in all those places he
had tracked her.
So from a prospector searching for gold Tappan became a hunter, seeking
only the means to keep soul and body together. And all he cared for was
his faithful burro Jenet, and the loneliness and silence of the forest
land.
He was to learn that the Tonto was a hard country in many ways, and
bitterly so in winter. Down in the brakes of the basin it was mild in
winter, the snow did not lie long, and ice seldom formed. But up on the
Rim, where Tappan always lingered as long as possible, the storm king
of the north held full sway. Fifteen feet of snow and zero weather were
the rule in dead of winter.
An old native once warned Tappan: “See hyar, friend, I reckon you’d
better not get caught up in the Rim Rock country in one of our big
storms. Fer if you do you’ll never get out.”
It was a way of Tappan’s to follow his inclinations, regardless of
advice. He had weathered the terrible midnight storm of hot wind in
Death Valley. What were snow and cold to him? Late autumn on the Rim
was the most perfect and beautiful of seasons. He had seen the forest
land brown and darkly green one day, and the next burdened with white
snow. What a transfiguration! Then when the sun loosened the white
mantling on the pines, and they had shed their burdens in drifting dust
of white, and rainbowed mists of melting snow, and avalanches sliding
off the branches, there would be left only the wonderful white floor
of the woodland. The great rugged brown tree trunks appeared mightier
and statelier in the contrast; and the green of foliage, the russet
of oak leaves, the gold of the aspens, turned the forest into a world
enchanting to the desert-seared eyes of this wanderer.
With Tappan the years sped by. His mind grew old faster than his body.
Every season saw him lonelier. He had a feeling, a vague illusive
foreshadowing that his bones, instead of bleaching on the desert sands,
would mingle with the pine mats and the soft fragrant moss of the
forest. The idea was pleasant to Tappan.
* * * * *
One afternoon he was camped in Pine Canyon, a timber-sloped gorge far
back from the Rim. November was well on. The fall had been singularly
open and fair, with not a single storm. A few natives happening across
Tappan had remarked casually that such autumns sometimes were not to be
trusted.
This late afternoon was one of Indian summer beauty and warmth. The
blue haze in the canyon was not all the blue smoke from Tappan’s
camp-fire. In a narrow park of grass not far from camp Jenet grazed
peacefully with elk and deer. Wild turkeys lingered there, loth to
seek their winter quarters down in the basin. Gray squirrels and red
squirrels barked and frisked, and dropped the pine and spruce cones,
with thud and thump, on all the slopes.
Before dark a stranger strode into Tappan’s camp, a big man of middle
age, whose magnificent physique impressed even Tappan. He was a rugged,
bearded giant, wide-eyed and of pleasant face. He had no outfit, no
horse, not even a gun.
“Lucky for me I smelled your smoke,” he said. “Two days for me without
grub.”
“Howdy, stranger,” was Tappan’s greeting. “Are you lost?”
“Yes an’ no. I could find my way out down over the Rim, but it’s not
healthy down there for me. So I’m hittin’ north.”
“Where’s your horse an’ pack?”
“I reckon they’re with the gang thet took more of a fancy to them than
me.”
“Ahuh! You’re welcome here, stranger,” replied Tappan. “I’m Tappan.”
“Ha! Heard of you. I’m Jess Blade, of anywhere. An’ I’ll say, Tappan, I
was an honest man till I hit the Tonto.”
His laugh was frank, for all its note of grimness. Tappan liked the
man, and sensed one who would be a good friend and bad foe.
“Come an’ eat. My supplies are peterin’ out, but there’s plenty of
meat.”
Blade ate, indeed, as a man starved, and did not seem to care if
Tappan’s supplies were low. He did not talk. After the meal he craved
a pipe and tobacco. Then he smoked in silence, in a slow realizing
content. The morrow had no fears for him. The flickering ruddy light
from the camp fire shone on his strong face. Tappan saw in him the
drifter, the drinker, the brawler, a man with good in him, but over
whom evil passion or temper dominated. Presently he smoked the pipe
out, and with reluctant hand knocked out the ashes and returned it to
Tappan.
“I reckon I’ve some news thet’d interest you,” he said.
“You have?” queried Tappan.
“Yes, if you’re the Tappan who tried to run off with Jake Beam’s wife.”
“Well, I’m that Tappan. But I’d like to say I didn’t know she was
married.”
“Shore, I know thet. So does everybody in the Tonto. You were just meat
for thet Beam gang. They had played the trick before. But accordin’ to
what I hear thet trick was the last fer Madge Beam. She never came back
to this country. An’ Jake Beam, when he was drunk, owned up thet she’d
left him in California. Some hint at worse. Fer Jake Beam came back a
harder man. Even his gang said thet.”
“Is he in the Tonto now?” queried Tappan, with a thrill of fire along
his veins.
“Yep, thar fer keeps,” replied Blade, grimly. “Somebody shot him.”
“Ahuh!” exclaimed Tappan with a deep breath of relief. There came a
sudden cooling of the heat of his blood.
After that there was a long silence. Tappan dreamed of the woman who
had loved him. Blade brooded over the camp fire. The wind moaned
fitfully in the lofty pines on the slope. A wolf mourned as if in
hunger. The stars appeared to obscure their radiance in haze.
“Reckon thet wind sounds like storm,” observed Blade, presently.
“I’ve heard it for weeks now,” replied Tappan.
“Are you a woodsman?”
“No, I’m a desert man.”
“Wal, you take my hunch an’ hit the trail fer low country.”
This was well meant, and probably sound advice, but it alienated
Tappan. He had really liked this hearty-voiced stranger. Tappan thought
moodily of his slowly ingrowing mind, of the narrowness of his soul.
He was past interest in his fellow men. He lived with a dream. The
only living creature he loved was a lop-eared, lazy burro, growing old
in contentment. Nevertheless that night Tappan shared one of his two
blankets.
In the morning the gray dawn broke, and the sun rose without its
brightness of gold. There was a haze over the blue sky. Thin,
swift-moving clouds scudded up out of the southwest. The wind was
chill, the forest shaggy and dark, the birds and squirrels were silent.
“Wal, you’ll break camp to-day,” asserted Blade.
“Nope. I’ll stick it out yet a while,” returned Tappan.
“But, man, you might get snowed in, an’ up hyar thet’s serious.”
“Ahuh! Well, it won’t bother me. An’ there’s nothin’ holdin’ you.”
“Tappan, it’s four days’ walk down out of this woods. If a big snow set
in, how’d I make it?”
“Then you’d better go out over the Rim,” suggested Tappan.
“No. I’ll take my chance the other way. But are you meanin’ you’d
rather not have me with you? Fer you can’t stay hyar.”
Tappan was in a quandary.
Some instinct bade him tell the man to go. Not empty-handed, but to
go. But this was selfish, and entirely unlike Tappan as he remembered
himself of old. Finally he spoke:
“You’re welcome to half my outfit--go or stay.”
“Thet’s mighty square of you, Tappan,” responded the other, feelingly.
“Have you a burro you’ll give me?”
“No, I’ve only one.”