Three days later, Daylight rode to Berkeley in his red car. It was for
the last time, for on the morrow the big machine passed into another's
possession. It had been a strenuous three days, for his smash had been
the biggest the panic had precipitated in California. The papers had
been filled with it, and a great cry of indignation had gone up from
the very men who later found that Daylight had fully protected their
interests. It was these facts, coming slowly to light, that gave rise
to the widely repeated charge that Daylight had gone insane. It was
the unanimous conviction among business men that no sane man could
possibly behave in such fashion. On the other hand, neither his
prolonged steady drinking nor his affair with Dede became public, so
the only conclusion attainable was that the wild financier from Alaska
had gone lunatic. And Daylight had grinned and confirmed the suspicion
by refusing to see the reporters.
He halted the automobile before Dede's door, and met her with his same
rushing tactics, enclosing her in his arms before a word could be
uttered. Not until afterward, when she had recovered herself from him
and got him seated, did he begin to speak.
"I've done it," he announced. "You've seen the newspapers, of course.
I'm plumb cleaned out, and I've just called around to find out what day
you feel like starting for Glen Ellen. It'll have to be soon, for it's
real expensive living in Oakland these days. My board at the hotel is
only paid to the end of the week, and I can't afford to stay after
that. And beginning with to-morrow I've got to use the street cars,
and they sure eat up the nickels."
He paused, and waited, and looked at her. Indecision and trouble
showed on her face. Then the smile he knew so well began to grow on
her lips and in her eyes, until she threw back her head and laughed in
the old forthright boyish way.
"When are those men coming to pack for me?" she asked.
And again she laughed and simulated a vain attempt to escape his
bearlike arms.
"Dear Elam," she whispered; "dear Elam." And of herself, for the first
time, she kissed him.
She ran her hand caressingly through his hair.
"Your eyes are all gold right now," he said. "I can look in them and
tell just how much you love me."
"They have been all gold for you, Elam, for a long time. I think, on
our little ranch, they will always be all gold."
"Your hair has gold in it, too, a sort of fiery gold." He turned her
face suddenly and held it between his hands and looked long into her
eyes. "And your eyes were full of gold only the other day, when you
said you wouldn't marry me."
She nodded and laughed.
"You would have your will," she confessed. "But I couldn't be a party
to such madness. All that money was yours, not mine. But I was loving
you all the time, Elam, for the great big boy you are, breaking the
thirty-million toy with which you had grown tired of playing. And when
I said no, I knew all the time it was yes. And I am sure that my eyes
were golden all the time. I had only one fear, and that was that you
would fail to lose everything. Because, dear, I knew I should marry
you anyway, and I did so want just you and the ranch and Bob and Wolf
and those horse-hair bridles. Shall I tell you a secret? As soon as
you left, I telephoned the man to whom I sold Mab."
She hid her face against his breast for an instant, and then looked at
him again, gladly radiant.
"You see, Elam, in spite of what my lips said, my mind was made up
then. I--I simply had to marry you. But I was praying you would
succeed in losing everything. And so I tried to find what had become
of Mab. But the man had sold her and did not know what had become of
her. You see, I wanted to ride with you over the Glen Ellen hills, on
Mab and you on Bob, just as I had ridden with you through the Piedmont
hills."
The disclosure of Mab's whereabouts trembled on Daylight's lips, but he
forbore.
"I'll promise you a mare that you'll like just as much as Mab," he said.
But Dede shook her head, and on that one point refused to be comforted.
"Now, I've got an idea," Daylight said, hastening to get the
conversation on less perilous ground. "We're running away from cities,
and you have no kith nor kin, so it don't seem exactly right that we
should start off by getting married in a city. So here's the idea:
I'll run up to the ranch and get things in shape around the house and
give the caretaker his walking-papers. You follow me in a couple of
days, coming on the morning train. I'll have the preacher fixed and
waiting. And here's another idea. You bring your riding togs in a suit
case. And as soon as the ceremony's over, you can go to the hotel and
change. Then out you come, and you find me waiting with a couple of
horses, and we'll ride over the landscape so as you can see the
prettiest parts of the ranch the first thing. And she's sure pretty,
that ranch. And now that it's settled, I'll be waiting for you at the
morning train day after to-morrow."
Dede blushed as she spoke.
"You are such a hurricane."
"Well, ma'am," he drawled, "I sure hate to burn daylight. And you and I
have burned a heap of daylight. We've been scandalously extravagant.
We might have been married years ago."
Two days later, Daylight stood waiting outside the little Glen Ellen
hotel. The ceremony was over, and he had left Dede to go inside and
change into her riding-habit while he brought the horses. He held them
now, Bob and Mab, and in the shadow of the watering-trough Wolf lay and
looked on. Already two days of ardent California sun had touched with
new fires the ancient bronze in Daylight's face. But warmer still was
the glow that came into his cheeks and burned in his eyes as he saw
Dede coming out the door, riding-whip in hand, clad in the familiar
corduroy skirt and leggings of the old Piedmont days. There was warmth
and glow in her own face as she answered his gaze and glanced on past
him to the horses. Then she saw Mab. But her gaze leaped back to the
man.
"Oh, Elam!" she breathed.
It was almost a prayer, but a prayer that included a thousand meanings
Daylight strove to feign sheepishness, but his heart was singing too
wild a song for mere playfulness. All things had been in the naming of
his name--reproach, refined away by gratitude, and all compounded of
joy and love.
She stepped forward and caressed the mare, and again turned and looked
at the man, and breathed:--
"Oh, Elam!"
And all that was in her voice was in her eyes, and in them Daylight
glimpsed a profundity deeper and wider than any speech or thought--the
whole vast inarticulate mystery and wonder of sex and love.
Again he strove for playfulness of speech, but it was too great a
moment for even love fractiousness to enter in. Neither spoke. She
gathered the reins, and, bending, Daylight received her foot in his
hand. She sprang, as he lifted and gained the saddle. The next moment
he was mounted and beside her, and, with Wolf sliding along ahead in
his typical wolf-trot, they went up the hill that led out of town--two
lovers on two chestnut sorrel steeds, riding out and away to honeymoon
through the warm summer day. Daylight felt himself drunken as with
wine. He was at the topmost pinnacle of life. Higher than this no man
could climb nor had ever climbed. It was his day of days, his
love-time and his mating-time, and all crowned by this virginal
possession of a mate who had said "Oh, Elam," as she had said it, and
looked at him out of her soul as she had looked.
They cleared the crest of the hill, and he watched the joy mount in her
face as she gazed on the sweet, fresh land. He pointed out the group
of heavily wooded knolls across the rolling stretches of ripe grain.
"They're ours," he said. "And they're only a sample of the ranch.
Wait till you see the big canon. There are 'coons down there, and back
here on the Sonoma there are mink. And deer!--why, that mountain's
sure thick with them, and I reckon we can scare up a mountain-lion if
we want to real hard. And, say, there's a little meadow--well, I ain't
going to tell you another word. You wait and see for yourself."
They turned in at the gate, where the road to the clay-pit crossed the
fields, and both sniffed with delight as the warm aroma of the ripe hay
rose in their nostrils. As on his first visit, the larks were uttering
their rich notes and fluttering up before the horses until the woods
and the flower-scattered glades were reached, when the larks gave way
to blue jays and woodpeckers.
"We're on our land now," he said, as they left the hayfield behind.
"It runs right across country over the roughest parts. Just you wait
and see."
As on the first day, he turned aside from the clay-pit and worked
through the woods to the left, passing the first spring and jumping the
horses over the ruined remnants of the stake-and-rider fence. From
here on, Dede was in an unending ecstasy. By the spring that gurgled
among the redwoods grew another great wild lily, bearing on its slender
stalk the prodigious outburst of white waxen bells. This time he did
not dismount, but led the way to the deep canon where the stream had
cut a passage among the knolls. He had been at work here, and a steep
and slippery horse trail now crossed the creek, so they rode up beyond,
through the somber redwood twilight, and, farther on, through a tangled
wood of oak and madrono. They came to a small clearing of several
acres, where the grain stood waist high.
"Ours," Daylight said.
She bent in her saddle, plucked a stalk of the ripe grain, and nibbled
it between her teeth.
"Sweet mountain hay," she cried. "The kind Mab likes."
And throughout the ride she continued to utter cries and ejaculations
of surprise and delight.
"And you never told me all this!" she reproached him, as they looked
across the little clearing and over the descending slopes of woods to
the great curving sweep of Sonoma Valley.
"Come," he said; and they turned and went back through the forest
shade, crossed the stream and came to the lily by the spring.
Here, also, where the way led up the tangle of the steep hill, he had
cut a rough horse trail. As they forced their way up the zigzags, they
caught glimpses out and down through the sea of foliage. Yet always
were their farthest glimpses stopped by the closing vistas of green,
and, yet always, as they climbed, did the forest roof arch overhead,
with only here and there rifts that permitted shattered shafts of
sunlight to penetrate. And all about them were ferns, a score of
varieties, from the tiny gold-backs and maidenhair to huge brakes six
and eight feet tall.
Below them, as they mounted, they glimpsed great gnarled trunks and
branches of ancient trees, and above them were similar great gnarled
branches.
Dede stopped her horse and sighed with the beauty of it all.
"It is as if we are swimmers," she said, "rising out of a deep pool of
green tranquillity. Up above is the sky and the sun, but this is a
pool, and we are fathoms deep."
They started their horses, but a dog-tooth violet, shouldering amongst
the maidenhair, caught her eye and made her rein in again.
They cleared the crest and emerged from the pool as if into another
world, for now they were in the thicket of velvet-trunked young
madronos and looking down the open, sun-washed hillside, across the
nodding grasses, to the drifts of blue and white nemophilae that
carpeted the tiny meadow on either side the tiny stream. Dede clapped
her hands.
"It's sure prettier than office furniture," Daylight remarked.
"It sure is," she answered.
And Daylight, who knew his weakness in the use of the particular word
sure, knew that she had repeated it deliberately and with love.
They crossed the stream and took the cattle track over the low rocky
hill and through the scrub forest of manzanita, till they emerged on
the next tiny valley with its meadow-bordered streamlet.
"If we don't run into some quail pretty soon, I'll be surprised some,"
Daylight said.
And as the words left his lips there was a wild series of explosive
thrumming as the old quail arose from all about Wolf, while the young
ones scuttled for safety and disappeared miraculously before the
spectators' very eyes.
He showed her the hawk's nest he had found in the lightning-shattered
top of the redwood, and she discovered a wood-rat's nest which he had
not seen before. Next they took the old wood-road and came out on the
dozen acres of clearing where the wine grapes grew in the wine-colored
volcanic soil. Then they followed the cow-path through more woods and
thickets and scattered glades, and dropped down the hillside to where
the farm-house, poised on the lip of the big canon, came into view only
when they were right upon it.
Dede stood on the wide porch that ran the length of the house while
Daylight tied the horses. To Dede it was very quiet. It was the dry,
warm, breathless calm of California midday. All the world seemed
dozing. From somewhere pigeons were cooing lazily. With a deep sigh of
satisfaction, Wolf, who had drunk his fill at all the streams along the
way, dropped down in the cool shadow of the porch. She heard the
footsteps of Daylight returning, and caught her breath with a quick
intake. He took her hand in his, and, as he turned the door-knob, felt
her hesitate. Then he put his arm around her; the door swung open, and
together they passed in.