A SUMMONS IN THE NIGHT
Somebody was calling on the hill behind the sheep-wagon. Mackenzie sat
up, a chill in his bones, for he had fallen asleep on watch beside the
ashes of his supper fire. He listened, the rack of sleep clearing from
his brain in a breath.
It was Dad Frazer, and the hour was past the turn of night. Mackenzie
answered, the sound of a horse under way immediately following. Dad
came riding down the hill with loose shale running ahead of him, in
such a hurry that he took the sharp incline straight.
"What's the matter?" Mackenzie inquired, hurrying out to meet him.
"I don't know," said Dad, panting from excitement as if he had run the
distance between the camps on foot. "Mary come over on her horse a
little while ago and rousted me out. She said somebody just passed her
camp, and one of 'em was Joan."
"Joan? What would she--what does Mary----?"
"That's what I said," Dad told him, sliding to the ground. "I said
Joan wouldn't be trapsin' around this time of night with nobody, but
if she did happen to be she could take care of herself. But Mary said
she sounded like she was fussin' and she thought something must be
wrong, and for me to hop her horse and come hell-for-leather and tell
you."
"How many--which way were they going?"
"Two horses, Mary said, from the sound, but she didn't hear nobody's
voice but Joan's. She got Charley up, and they run out and hollered,
but she didn't hear nothing more of Joan. The poor kid's scared out of
her 'leven senses."
"Which way did they go--did Mary say?"
"Towards Swan Carlson's ranch, she said."
Mackenzie swung into the saddle and galloped off, leaving Dad
listening to the sound of his going.
"Nutty, like the rest of 'em," said Dad.
Carlson's house was not more than eight miles from the range where
Mackenzie was running his sheep. He held his course in that direction
as he rode break-neck up hill and down. He had little belief that it
could have been Joan who passed Mary's camp, yet he was disturbed by
an anxiety that made his throat dry, and a fear that clung to him like
garments wet in the rain.
Reid could not have anything to do with it in any event, Joan or
somebody else, for Reid was horseless upon the range. But if Joan, he
was at entire loss to imagine upon what business she could be riding
the country that hour of the night. Joan had no fear of either night
or the range. She had cared for her sheep through storm and dark,
penetrating all the terrors that night could present, and she knew the
range too well to be led astray. It must have been a voice that Mary
had heard in a dream.
Mackenzie felt easier for these reflections, but did not check his
pace, holding on toward Carlson's house in as straight a line as he
could draw. He recalled curiously, with a prickling of renewed
anxiety, that he always expected to be called to Carlson's house for
the last act in the sheeplands tragedy. Why, he did not know.
Perhaps he had not expected it; maybe it was only a psychological
lightning-play of the moment, reflecting an unformed emotion. That
likely was the way of it, he reasoned. Surely he never could have
thought of being called to Carlson's ranch.
In that fever of contradiction he pushed on, knees gripping his horse
in the tensity of his desire to hasten, thinking to hold the animal up
from stumbling as an anxious rider in the night will do. Now he
believed it could not have been Joan, and felt a momentary ease; now
he was convinced that Mary could not have mistaken her sister's voice,
and the sweat of fear for her burst on his forehead and streamed down
into his eyes.
From the side that he approached Carlson's house his way lay through a
valley at the end, bringing him up a slight rise as he drew near the
trees that stood thickly about the place. Here he dismounted and went
on, leading his horse. A little way from the house he hitched his
animal among the trees, and went forward in caution, wary of a dog
that might be keeping watch beside the door.
There was no moon. The soft glow of a few misty, somnolent stars gave
no light among the trees, no light shone from the house. Mackenzie
recalled the night he had first approached that door and come suddenly
around the corner into the pale beam of Hertha Carlson's lantern. Now
the kitchen door might be shut, and there was no window on that side.
Mackenzie stopped to listen, his senses as keen as a savage's under
his strain. One who has not approached danger and uncertainty,
listening and straining in the night, cannot conceive the exquisite
pitch to which human nerves can be attuned. The body then becomes a
tower set with the filaments of wireless telegraphy, each of the
thousand nerves straining forth to catch the faintest sound, the most
shadowy disturbance. Even premonitions become verities; indistinct
propositions tangible facts.
In that exalted pitch of nervous sensibility Mackenzie stood
listening, fifty feet or less from the kitchen door. No sound, but a
sharp scent of cigarette smoke came blowing from the dark house.
Mackenzie's heart seemed to gorge and stop. Earl Reid was there.
Perhaps Mary had not heard a voice in a dream.
At the closed door Mackenzie listened. For a little, no sound; then a
foot shifted on the floor. Almost immediately someone began walking up
and down the room, pushing a chair aside as if to clear the way.
Mackenzie remembered the window high in the wall beside the stove and
went hastily around the house to it, restraining himself from bursting
precipitately into something which might be no concern of his or
warrant his interference at all. It seemed so preposterous even to
suspect that Joan was there.
Reid was pacing up and down the room, a lantern standing on the floor
beside the chair from which he had risen. The place had been
readjusted since the ruin that fell over it in Mackenzie's fight with
Swan; the table stood again in the place where he had eaten his supper
on it, the broken leg but crudely mended.
Reid seemed to be alone, from what of the interior of the house
Mackenzie could see, shifting to bring the door of the inner room to
view. It was closed; Joan was not there.
Mackenzie watched Reid as he paced up and down the kitchen floor.
There was a nervousness over him, as of a man who faced a great
uncertainty. He walked with bent head, now turning it sharply as he
stood listening, now going on again with hands twitching. He threw
down his cigarette and stamped it, went to the kitchen door, opened it
and stood listening.
A little while Reid stood at the door, head turned, as if he harkened
for the approach of somebody expected. When he turned from the door he
left it open, rolled a cigarette, crossed to the door of the inner
room, where he stood as if he debated the question of entering. A
little while in that uncertain, hesitant way; then he struck a match
on the door and turned again to his pacing and smoking.
Mackenzie almost decided to go to the open door and speak to Reid, and
learn whether he might be of assistance to him in his evident stress.
He was ready to forgive much of what had passed between them, blaming
it to Reid's chafing against the restraint that was whetting him down
to a bone.
Mackenzie felt now that he had not handled Reid in the right way. Reid
was not of the slow, calculative, lead-balanced type of himself. He
was a wolf of civilization, to whom these wilds were more galling than
the bars of a prison. The judge who had agreed to this sentence had
read deeply in the opaque soul of the youth.
Prison would not have been much of a penance for Reid. There he would
have found intrigue, whispering, plottings; a hundred shadowy
diversions to keep his perverted mind clear and sharp. Here he met
only the silence of nature, the sternest accuser of a guilty soul.
Reid could not bear the accusation of silence. Under it his mind grew
irritable with the inflammation of incipient insanity. In a little
while it would break. Even now he was breaking; that was plain in his
disordered eyes.
Still Mackenzie hesitated to speak to him, watching him as he went
with increasing frequency to the open door to listen. It was not his
affair; Joan could not be there. Even if she were there, she must have
come for a purpose good and justifiable, and of her own free will. But
she was not there, and Reid was waiting for somebody to come. Swan
Carlson or his wife, it must be, and what business they had before
them in this unrighteous hour Mackenzie could not imagine. But plainly
it had nothing to do with Joan.
Mackenzie's thoughts reverted to the night he came to that cabin among
the trees, guided thither by the plaintive melody of Hertha Carlson's
song. What a fool he had been to linger on there that night waiting to
see Swan, in the mistaken kindness to the woman the wild fellow had
made his slave. If he had gone on that night, leaving the still waters
of trouble unstirred, he would have walked in peace through his
apprenticeship. Surely his crowding of trouble at Swan Carlson's door
that night was the beginning of it all.
There was that door closed now on the inner room; on that night it
stood open, the long chain that bound the Swede's wife running through
it from the staple driven into the log. Mackenzie had not noticed the
thickness of the door's planks that night, or the crudity of its
construction. The handiwork of Swan Carlson was proclaimed from that
door; it was rough and strong, like himself, without finish, loosely
joined. Its planks were oak; great nails in them marked the Z of its
brace.
Then Mackenzie turned his eyes upon Reid again. Reid went back to the
inner door, pushed it, tried it with his foot. It seemed to be
fastened within. Perhaps there was a reason for its strength; maybe
Swan kept his crude treasures locked there in that small stronghold of
logs while he roamed the range after his sheep. Reid did not appear
greatly interested in the door, or what lay behind it. He turned from
it almost at once, drew his chair in front of it, sat down, his right
hand toward Mackenzie, the lantern light strong on the lower part of
his body, his face in shadow from the lantern's top. Mackenzie
quickened with a new interest, a new speculation, when he saw that
Reid's holster hung empty at his belt.
At once Mackenzie decided to speak to Reid, certain that he had been
through some misadventure in which he had suffered loss. He drew away
from the window, going around the front part of the house to come to
the kitchen door, thinking it might be wise to know the way the land
lay around those premises.
This part of the house was little larger than the shack of boards that
had been built to it. There was no opening in its solid log walls,
neither of window or door save alone the door opening into the
kitchen. The place was a vault.
Somebody was approaching, riding rapidly up the valley. There was more
than one horse, Mackenzie could well make out as he stood at the
corner of the house, listening. He saw Reid's shadow fall in the light
that spread through the open door, and turned back to keep his watch
at the window.
It was not the moment to offer friendship or sympathy to Reid.
Something of Reid's own brewing was coming to a boil there, some
business of his own was drawing to a head in that lonely cabin among
the whispering trees.
Reid took up the lantern, stood a moment as if indecisive, placed it
on the stove. Not satisfied with the way the light of it struck him
there, apparently, he removed it and stood it in a corner. Whoever was
coming, Reid did not want it known at a glance that his scabbard was
empty. Mackenzie pressed a little nearer the window. When a man
prepared for a meeting with that caution, he would do to watch.
Reid went to the open door, where he stood like a host to receive his
guests. The riders were among the trees; coming on more slowly. Now
they stopped, and Reid turned to light a fresh cigarette. The flash of
the match showed his face white, hat pulled down on his brows, his
thin, long gamester's fingers cupped round the blaze.
There fell a moment of silence, no sound of word, no movement of horse
or foot upon the ground. Insects among the trees were grinding their
scythes for tomorrow's reaping, it seemed, whirring in loud, harsh
chorus such as one never heard out on the grazing lands.
Now the sound of footsteps approaching the door. Reid came back into
the room, where he stood drawing a deep breath of smoke like a man
drinking to store against a coming thirst. He dropped the cigarette,
set his foot on it, crushed it to sparks on the floor.
Swan Carlson was in the door, the light dim on his stern, handsome
face. Behind him stood his woman, a white wimple bound on her forehead
like a nun.