GARVIN came into camp late, and Jeffard needed not to ask the result
of the day's quest. He had cooked the simple supper, and they ate it
together in silence--the big man too weary and dejected to talk, and
Jeffard holding his peace in deference to Garvin's mood. Over the pipes
on the doorstep Jeffard permitted himself a single query.
"No go?"
"Nary," was the laconic rejoinder.
Jeffard was the least demonstrative of men, but the occasion seemed to
ask for something more than sympathetic silence. So he said: "It's hard
luck; harder for you than for me, I imagine. Somehow, I haven't been
able to catch the inspiration of the mineral-hunt; but you have, and
you've worked hard and earned a better send-off."
"Huh! far as earnin' goes, I reckon it's a stand-off 'twixt the two of
us. You've certain'y done your share o' the pullin' and haulin', if you
have been sort o' like what the boys call a 'hoodoo.'"
Jeffard blew a cloud of smoke toward the gray rock-beard hanging
ghostly beneath the black mouth of the excavation in the opposite
hillside, and was far from taking offense. "Meaning that I haven't been
enthusiastic enough to fill the bill?" he asked.
"I guess that's about it. And it always seemed sort o' cur'ous to me.
Money'd do you a mighty sight more good than it would me."
Jeffard smoked his pipe out, debating with himself whether it was worth
while to try to explain his indifference to his companion. He did try,
finally, though more for the sake of putting the fact into words than
in any hope of making it understandable to Garvin.
"I'm afraid it isn't in me to care very much about anything," he said,
at the end of the reflective excursion. "Six months ago I could have
come out here with you and given you points on enthusiasm; but since
then I've lived two or three lifetimes. I'm a very old man, Garvin. One
day, not so very long ago, if you measure by weeks and months, I was
young and strong and hopeful, like other men; but instead of burning
the candle decently at the proper end, I made a bonfire of it. The fire
has gone out now, and I haven't any other candle."
The big prospector was good-naturedly incredulous. "You've had the
fever, and you're rattled, yet; that's all that's the matter with you.
You've been flat down on your luck, like one or two of the rest of us;
but that ain't any reason why you can't get up ag'in, is it?"
Jeffard despaired of making it clear to any simple-hearted son of the
wilderness, but he must needs try again.
"That is your view of the case, and it would be that of others who
knew the circumstances as well as you do. But it doesn't fit the
individual. David said he would wash his hands in innocency, and
perhaps he could, and did--though I doubt it. I can't. When you picked
me up that night on the shore of the pond, I'd been wandering around in
the bottomless pit and had lost my way. I knew then I shouldn't find it
again, and I haven't. I seem to have strayed into a region somewhere
beyond the place where the actual brimstone chokes you; but it's a
barren desert where nothing seems quite the same as it used to--where
nothing is the same, as a matter of fact. Do I make it plain?"
"You bet you don't," responded Garvin, out of the depths of cheerful
density. "You've been a mile or two out o' my reach for the last
half-hour 'r so. Ther' ain't no use a-cryin' over spilt milk, is what I
say; and when I go kerflummix, why, I just cuss a few lines and get up
and mog along, same as heretofore."
Jeffard laughed, but there was no mirth in him.
"I envy you; you are a lucky man to be able to do it. I wish in my soul
I could."
"What's the reason you can't?"
"That is precisely what I haven't been able to make you understand.
But the fact remains. The Henry Jeffard my mother knew is dead and
buried. In his place has arisen a man who is acquainted with evil, and
is skeptical about most other things. Garvin, if you knew me as well
as I know myself, you'd run me out of this valley with a gun before
you slept. I owe you as heavy a debt of gratitude as any one man ever
owed another, and yet if your welfare stood between the beginning and
the end of some devil's service in which I might be commissioned, you
wouldn't be safe to sleep in the same cabin with me."
"Oh, you be damned," said the big man, relapsing into a deeper depth of
incredulity. "You've got a devil 'r two, all right, maybe, but they're
the blue kind, and they'll soak out in the washin'. Fact o' the matter
is, our cussed luck in this yere hole in the ground has struck in on
you worse'n it has on me. You'll be all right when we get some place
else and strike it rich."
Jeffard refilled his pipe and gave over trying to define himself in
set terms. When next he broke silence it was to speak of the impending
migration.
"I suppose we pull out in the morning?" he said.
"Might as well. We've played the string out up yere. Besides, summer's
gone, and a month of fall, and the grub's runnin' shy."
"Where next?" inquired Jeffard.
"I dunno, hardly. 'Tain't worth while to strike furder in, this late in
the season. We've got to be makin' tracks along back t'wards the valley
afore the snow comes, and that'll be pretty quick now. What d' you say
to tryin' some o' the gulches o' the Mosquito?"
"Anywhere you say. I'm with you--if you care to take me after what I've
tried to tell you. But you'd much better go alone. You had it right a
while ago; you have yoked yourself to a Jonah."
"Jonah nothin'!" growled the soft-hearted giant. "Nex' time I set
out to devil you, I'll drill a hole aforehand and put in a pinch o'
dannymite along with the joke. Then when I tech it off, you'll know."
The moon was riding high in the black arch of the sky, and the gray
dump on the opposite mountain stood out in bold relief. Jeffard rose
and leaned against the doorpost.
"Garvin, you have never yet told me who staked us for this trip," he
said, broaching a subject which had more than once asked for speech.
The miner laughed. "You never asked. It's the same old man that staked
me when I was yere the first time."
"When you dug that hole up yonder in the hill?"
"Um--hm."
"Who is he?"
Garvin hesitated. "I had a fool notion I wouldn't tell you till we'd
struck somethin' worth while," he said finally. "If so be we've got
to go back with our fingers in our mouths, I put it up that maybe
you'd feel easier in your mind if you didn't know. You're so cussed
thin-skinned about some things that a feller has to watch out for you
continnyus."
Jeffard dug the kindly intention out of the upbraiding, and forebore to
press the question. After all, what did it matter? Whatever befell, he
was under no obligations to any one save Garvin. And in the itemizing
of that debt, an obligation which made him restive every time he
thought of it, he lost sight of the question he had intended asking
about the peculiarity of the snuff-colored rock in the abandoned tunnel.
A little later, Garvin got up with a mighty yawn, and said: "If we're
goin' to get out o' here afore noon to-morrer, I reckon we'd better be
huntin' us a little sleep."
"Turn in if you like; I'm not sleepy yet," said Jeffard; and when
Garvin was gone in, he fell to pacing up and down before the cabin door
with his hands behind him and the cold pipe between his teeth.
To what good end had he been preserved by Garvin's interference on
that night of despair two months before? Had the reprieve opened up
any practicable way out of the cynical labyrinth into which he had
wandered? Had his immense obligation to the prospector quickened any
fibre of the dead sense of human responsibility, or lighted any fire of
generous love for his kind?
He shook his head. To none of these questions could he honestly append
an affirmative. In the desolate wreck he had made of his life no good
thing had survived save his love for Constance Elliott. That, indeed,
was hopeless on the side of fruition; but he clung to it as the one
clue of promise, hoping, and yet not daring to hope, that it might
one day lead him out of the wilderness of indifference. While he
dwelt upon it, pacing back and forth in the moonlight, he recalled his
picture of her standing in the dust-filtered afternoon sunlight, with
the dim corridor for a background.
"God keep you, my darling. I may not look upon your face again, but
the memory of your loving kindness to one soul-sick castaway will live
while he lives."
He said it reverently, turning his face toward the far-away city
beyond the foot-hills; and there was no subtle sense of divination to
tell him that, at an unmapped side-track on the farther slope of the
southernmost sentinel mountain, Bartrow was at that moment handing
Constance Elliott up the steps of a diminutive sleeping-car which was
presently to go lurching and swaying on its way down the mountain in
the wake of a pygmy locomotive. Nor could he know that, a few hours
earlier, the far-seeing gray eyes, out of whose depths he had once
drawn courage and inspiration and the will to do good, had rested for a
moment on the shut-in valley.
For the southward sentinel mountain was known to the dwellers on its
farther slopes as El Reposo.