CHAPTER XIV
THE MAN IN SADDLE
COLOR of night was draining out of the sky when the riders took horses again at the foot of the Sphinx. Black and white were rolled in gray, shadows were melting thin, the moon had drifted far down the west, constellations were sinking. All the luster, all the full pulse of midnight were flowing out; and the pulses of the man too were at ebb. His blood ran thin. The sky stood dim and luminous at the hour of neither moon nor sun; and his mind stood between thought and action, dim, dreamy with amazement beyond piercing. If conscious thought had turned upon itself it would not have known what forms were taking shape in the unconscious depth. Memories shone upon the surface, disappeared and appeared again—Son of the Wind as he had advanced down the slope toward the water, sides of silk for knees that dared to press them, head bent waywardly sidewise, at play with its own liberty, and the slow undulation of the mane.
Where had the creature hidden himself between the fading hours? Carron could not remember how he had looked at his departing. But who remembers the retreat of a king? It was the advance, and again the advance, that returned to him—the roulade of hoofs afar off in the forest, the sharp music on the rocky slope, the body breaking through the trees. Yet, he did not see it quite as it had come in fact; for to the imagination, the back, that shining hollow that had shivered at a white moth's weight, was not empty. It was bestrode. Once the eye had seen, the brain seized its object. The man was in saddle; and though fancy pictured Son of the Wind in the citadel of the cañon, or speeding among mountains beyond possible human ways, the persistent phantom would not be unseated. Where is the use of sides of silk without heel to guide, or of feet that can chant the song of swiftness if no purpose profit by their speed?
Across the cañon, where night was complete, and upward, under branches, into the high open ascents, mysterious, peaceful, colorless in the beginnings of dawn, he came, his mind filled with images of contentions and conquests. Near the horizon Venus burned white, but the star above his head was Sirius, red and troubled. The woman beside him made a faint rustling as she moved through the leaves. She, who had been quick, filled with double energy of life, now trailed. Her face was a ghost's, her eyes dull gray as the sky, and whenever he looked at her they were fixed upon him, expectant, waiting a word. He held her, led her, but his desires were not toward her. They rushed forward like fire. Visions of beauty swept through his mind, but it was not her beauty. There was no room there for anything but one thought. No room for wonder at the curious path he had followed, nor at the thought of a man and a woman abroad at such an hour; no fear lest the clearing before the house, or the house itself that received them, should be aware of their coming. They went in by the outside stair. In his room objects were beginning to show themselves, the bed broad and pale, the walls gray. Last night. they had worn brocade of white and black. Looking at them he had thought of Blanche. Now he looked at her, and thought of something else. He took her wrists and laid her hands against his shoulders. She leaned upon him exhausted, looking up with confident eyes.
"How did you find it?" he said.
"I didn't. It was a chance. I know the place. I've always known it. We camped there one summer when I was a child, and then I found the cave and always wanted to go back to it. It was too far and too hard to get there from here. Up the cañon takes eight hours. I had to find a shorter way, and one day I tried the Sphinx's window."
"One day?"
"Well, yes—and afterward one night."
"You told me you never had been out so far in the middle of the night."
She smiled faintly. "I didn't say quite that; and if I did give you that impression it was just as well. I didn't know you then. It wouldn't have been good to tell you my ways. This country is my garden. Sometimes, at full moon when I can't sleep, I am all about it. One of those times I went farther than I ever had before and saw what I showed you tonight."
"Have you never shown it to any one else?" he asked.
Her eyelids fluttered. "No—never. I didn't mean to show it to you; but you are just myself. I had to show you my possession."
"Your possession?" The way she used that word was strange.
"Yes, he is mine. He's mine the way my thoughts are. He is the only thing I have ever known that couldn't be tied and held by the common things in the world. When he moves he doesn't seem to touch earth."
Carron looked at her dully.
"There will not be another like him," she said. "These wonderful things don't happen twice."
"No," he answered. This was something he could understand. It seemed to him an oracle had spoken. He took her to the door of her room, kissed her on the forehead and left her. The touch of her stirred him with tenderness, but when he turned his back it was forgotten. He was not thinking of her.
The sun came like an enemy and surprised him sitting on the edge of his bed, his head sunk in his hands. He heard the barking of a dog, the flight of birds in the trees, the sound of footsteps, the opening of doors. The flare of yellow had wakened the world into action. His vision of last night with its incredibility and tremendous reality, its silver and black, was melting, and with it all the footless hopes and fancies that had followed him home through the gray air. The power for vision of future or past was gone, and he found himself staring with concentration at a round floating spot of light upon the wall, while his brain repeated over and over: "Why need she know of it? Why need she know? Why need she know?"
He stared at the significance of this, too surprised to reflect whence those words had sprung, born in his own mind or planted there by some other's thought. They were words any man might speak of any woman in any affair. The idea was fundamental. It streamed upon his mind like the day into his room. He was confounded by the clarity, the brilliance, the wonderful way it banished cruelty and made everything right. All he had to do was to surround himself with silence. He had no doubt of his motive. The thing sprang bold before him, something he believed in and had many times put to proof, the natural hardy motive of his life. To break, to tame, to change the compound of fury and timidity into the docile and controlled, useful to the controller, sent out among civilized things.
But Carron did not follow his creations thither. He belonged neither among wild nor tame. He stood at the point of transition, where the herds of the primitive passed through his hands into civilization. He stood between the two, to break, always to break. That was his affair in the world. But this instance was raised above his common experience of the world, his work still—but it transcended itself, as the horse his eyes were fixed upon now transcended his kind. For the creature was so far above his fellows; as Blanche had said, he seemed to travel upon wings, a little above the earth. So Carron's hopes. They were proud. He would have published them with trumpets had it not been for the one curious reason. That made the silence. It was not on his account, but on hers. It was on her account, because of that strange idea she had, that woman idea, which has nothing to do with the activities of men, that must be set aside very carefully so as not to be hurt, and not to interfere. Therefore silence, absolute, impenetrable! No action, no word, no glance to give any hint to her of what was going forward.
And, since no hint to her on his life, no hint to any other! That would be treachery. But with silence treachery vanished. Silence is darkness. To the eye that sees no color there is none; and to the mind that does not know of an action, that action does not exist. And the action itself would rob her of nothing. For what was it Rader had said? The horse was only an idea to her. She would not lay fingers on the actual creature. She must know that some day she would cease to find it, and be left with her idea and her dream.
What a fool he was sitting here in the sodden garments of yesterday while the hours of to-day ran past him. High impossibilities lay between him and his object, but nothing looked too high for him now. Only a mountain to overleap, and then to mount the back of the wind. Reason might cry, "No man has ever ridden the wind," but a man's will would answer, "Time then for some one to be about it." He was ready to begin, even though he could not see an inch of his way before him. Yet, as soon as he looked in the prosaic morning light he saw the first step to take.
He rose and searched among his clothes that were flung pell-mell in the valise, and brought out the message he had written to Esmeralda Charley a day or two before. He looked back at that point in past time as though over a distance of years. What had he meant with such words? An age of passions and events had rolled over him since. He put a match to the paper and threw it in the grate; then made haste to write out another message very plainly.
Unwashed, unshaven, with last night's dust and clay still upon him, he came out of the house into the cool, yellow light. The dawn looked fresh, undisturbed by the overcrowded events that were threatening the day. He made the descent of the hill at a good pace, and hailed the stage, as, plunging on its springs, sending up dust above the tree-tops, it came up from the dip of the creek bed. He mounted nimbly on the wheel, and inquired whether the driver would have time at the end of his journey to do a kindness for a stranger.
The autocrat on the high seat, looking the young man over, inquired what it might be.
It appeared to be this: to take a message to a half-breed, by name Esmeralda Charley. This Indian had orders to meet every stage that came in, and he obeyed orders. But the fellow couldn't read; and if the driver would be so good as not only to deliver the paper, but to read it to the man, Carron would remain his debtor for life.
The driver, opening the paper then and there, read the message aloud to the tree-tops.
"Take the stuff out of storage, and bring it with the horses over the watershed, past the first fork of the road, and through the gap into the next cañon. I will be waiting on the road. Be there by eleven.
"Carron."
The driver cocked his eye at the name. "F. A. Carron? Rancho Caballo?"
Carron admitted it.
The man extended his hand. "Put it there." When the ceremony was over—"See that off leader?" he inquired. "Best horse I ever had. Mouth ain't spoiled nor his temper. Busted on the Rancho Caballo."
Carron expressed himself as gratified, and was in fact. Cigars passed into the driver's hand. The horse-breaker dropped from the wheel, confident of his message being safely taken. What he touched was shaped to his way. He was no poet to imagine fate in this. He saw that it came from his own power. But with this business despatched, and the next problem rising to the front of his mind, he felt a chill upon the warmth of his satisfaction.
He had not foreseen the moves in his game. This one sprang upon him as the other receded. He stared at it, incredulous to find anything so at odds with all his determinations, yet so immovably insisting on being a part of his scheme. There was no going forward without it. It was necessary, if he were to get the thing he wanted; but what was to become of his perfect and justifying theory of silence? It would not be destroyed. It would be workable still, and safe enough no doubt, but it would become a makeshift thing—to be passed over hastily, and not too closely scrutinized.
He tossed the question in his mind as he hurried up the road where the dust the wheels of the stage had stirred hovered in a thin fog. Time and necessity were at his heels; he realized he was going to accept the exigencies of his position—but he cursed fate, that put such ugly deviations upon the path of clear enterprise; he cursed Ferrier for being such as he was, and for the first time in his life, for the instant, had an ugly glimpse of himself. Reluctantly he turned down the steep and weedy way that led to the clearing, and knocked at Ferrier's door. He waited, and in the pause had a memory of how last night Blanche had told him Ferrier was not there. Suppose he had not returned yet. It was still so early in the morning. Suppose he did not return all day—how was a man to find him—and where? Reluctance vanished. Ferrier became the person in all the world Carron most desired to see. He knocked again, loud and imperative. A voice within the house called aloud. The sound was formless, but he thought it was a summons.
He entered on a long darkish room, disorderly and as cluttered with incongruous stuff as Ferrier's mind. Clothes were strewn on the floor; old saddles rested on chairs; crockery, cartridges and food on the table, dogs lying under it; no windows open, a stale air in the place. Close under a window on a bench, the boy George had a gun and a greased rag in his hand. His shoulders were gathered into such a lump that he looked deformed. He had stopped his work of polishing and sat looking at the intruder with pale eyes, the lids of which were fixed.
"Where is your brother?" Carron asked.
Without seeming to hear what had been said, without moving, the boy opened his mouth and emitted the sound that Carron had mistaken for a summons to himself. Evidently it had been meant to call another person, for now an inner door opened quickly and a man half dressed appeared at the aperture.
Seeing Carron his face flushed. "Just a minute," he muttered, backing quickly from the door, and would have had it shut but Carron's foot was already in the opening.
"Just a minute," he said, unconsciously repeating Ferrier's words, though with quite another meaning. Booted and belted, he felt his advantage, moral and imaginative, over this fellow who was scantily clad and had bare feet. It would be good not to give him time to clothe himself or arm his mind. Carron pressed through into the room beyond as Ferrier retreated, pitifully embarrassed, and by his glances behind him and around him a little apprehensive.
"Sorry to be so hasty, but I can't wait," the horse-breaker said. "I had to see you immediately. I am going up into the mountains to-day and I shall need your help. Get ready to meet me in a couple of hours."
Ferrier gulped. "I don't think—" he began.
"I've got the grub," Carron went on, as though he had not heard the protestation. "You won't need anything but a blanket and a sweater. Take ammunition if you want it—you won't need it, though. I'll only want you for a couple of days."
"But I'm not going, I tell you!" Ferrier burst out as if the idea that he was not, made him furious.
"What do you mean?" Carron demanded. "I'm only accepting a proposition you made yourself yesterday! Have you forgotten it?"
"No," Ferrier said doggedly. He stooped so that his face was hidden, and began to fumble nervously for his shoes. "But I can't do it."
"Why?"
"I'm afraid."
"Of what?"
Ferrier gave him a darting upward glance.
"Of what?" Carron insisted. "You weren't afraid of anything yesterday. Has there been any change in the situation since?"
"No—no, no!" Ferrier cried vehemently. He looked frightened.
"Well, I didn't suppose there had been," Carron said coolly, "and in that case you're going to stick to your bargain. Come," he added more kindly, as Ferrier continued to fix him with his panicky eyes, "I'm not asking much of you, only that you show me the trail, and perhaps a few hours' work when we get to the end of it. You needn't see the game we're after. " He paused, and considered his hesitating opponent. "And there's one part of your bargain we are not going to stick to. We are going to revert to mine. I mean that one hundred dollars I promised you if you would take me to the place. You will get that, of course."
Ferrier, kneeling, holding one boot, stared before him and breathed hard through open lips. It was strange to see him there, struggling to face the idea of possible consequences, calculating value, weighing the chance of what he might lose against what he might gain, when, as the horse-breaker knew shrewdly enough, as far as this man was concerned there were no chances left. What Ferrier was afraid to lose he had already lost, days ago, when for twenty dollars he had told Carron the way to Raders', Yet he was too stupid to realize the truth. He was wavering as if he still held fate in his own hands.
"If they should find out I went—" Ferrier began at last.
"How could they?"
"By going out there."
"They won't." He stuck religiously to that indefinite plural—as though it could deceive either of them.
"But if they should hear?"
Carron aimed each word slowly and distinctly at the miserable man in front of him. "How are they going to hear if I don't tell them?"
Ferrier's face grew perceptibly paler. His mouth opened a little into a round shape, remained speechless as if the words it was formed for had been blown away.
"And I am not going to tell them," the horse-breaker concluded emphatically. There was a ring of magnanimity in these words that he did not quite like; it sounded as if only Ferrier was to benefit by this silence. Yet after all wasn't that the best thing for the fellow to think? Let him think what he would. He was not to be explained to in this matter any more than he was to be lied to. He was to be commanded. He looked now scarcely so much reassured by Carron's words as carried off his feet by a stronger will.
He moistened his lips. "And afterward you will go?"
"Yes."
"Right afterward?"
"Yes," Carron repeated impatiently, and with the repetition hated himself more for stooping to deceive such a poor creature. It was no lie in the letter, and was the worse for that; for the meaning the promise had, in fact, was very different from the meaning it had for Ferrier. A look of relief spread over his face.
"All right," he said. "I'll be there."
"If you're not—" Carron stood a moment and looked the poor soul through. "He's more afraid of me than he is of himself," he thought. "Very good," he said aloud, and turned about. "And where is this place that I am to find you?"
Ferrier pulled on his other boot and got upon his feet. "I can show you from the other room," he said, and led the way.
In his excitement he seemed to be oblivious of the squalid surroundings he had blushed for, his own half-clad condition, and even the presence of the boy George. He walked to the window and shoved him aside as if he had been inanimate stuff to make room for Carron. The horse-breaker touched his companion's arm. "You had better send him out, hadn't you?"
Ferrier threw a hasty glance at the child who sat, as he had been pushed, a little farther along on the bench. "Lord, no! he never understands anything, we might talk all day. Look down there," he broke off, pointing through the dirty glass, "down there by the edge of the pines where you see that one that is taller than the others. That is the place where the trail begins. That's where I'll be."
"But," Carron began quickly, astonished, and forgetting everything but astonishment, "on that trail you can't get a horse through."
"Thought you didn't know about it," Ferrier said, turning.
Without a quiver Carron caught up his mistake and made capital of it. "I know what I see from here," he said coldly, "and it looks to me very much as if your trail ran into those hills. It does, doesn't it, eh?" He pointed. "Over there?"
Ferrier corrected, "No, over there." With outstretched arm he indicated the place farther along, just out of their sight, where the Sphinx stood.
"Here or there," the horse-breaker insisted, "I've seen something of such hills and I'll be willing to bet we can't get horses through."
Ferrier looked sullen. "I'd forgotten you had to have them. I suppose, then, we'll have to go the long way."
Carron was relieved. He hadn't been certain Ferrier knew the long way. Blanche had mentioned it so casually. She had not said that he knew. Carron had only inferred and snatched at the inference. Now he was at the end of his doubts. He made short work of the tale. He had it all in a few moments, the place where they were to meet and the hour. He reckoned that, allowing time for packing the canvas, the half-breed would get in with the led horses in three hours. That would make their meeting at eleven, say. It was now past eight o'clock.
He left the house, and plunged into fresh air as into a bath. The excursion he had had to make from his high resolves of silence was over. It had been more unpleasant than he had expected. And at the end, in spite of his care, he had not quite succeeded in keeping Ferrier under heel. The man had made conditions with him. But now at last the unfortunate incident was behind him. The lie straight out to the Raders would not be hard. It was a part of his robust scheme. It was in the cause of silence—that good and decent cause—that he intended to speak, giving the women sound invented reasons for not coming back to-night, or even the next night, as a man must sometimes give to his own people. Certainly that was what these people were to him; and with them also he wanted to square certain other matters, to have them out as clear as he kept the other dark, before he went.
Had Mrs. Rader wanted to abet his project she could not have done better for him than give him the room with the outside stair. On this occasion it enabled him to enter the Raders' unseen, bathe, change, and appear down-stairs looking as debonair as if he had passed the night in dreams. After a little searching he found Blanche with her father in the study. Rader, his long chin in his hand, scarcely looked at him. Carron thought that, since their talk of the night before, perhaps the scholar had given him up, a hopeless case; or it might be only that he was surrounded as he was usually in the morning, with his habitual mist of thoughts. But Blanche raised great, prompt eyes from her business of copying, and gave him a look difficult to interpret—love, envy of his gay morning looks, and the intent, insinuative gaze of one who would recall to another a secret, remind him of some wonderful thing both knew, and no one else in the world. How at that look, last night's adventure returned to him like a ghost rising in broad daylight—the race with the moon, the ascent of the Sphinx. Footsteps on the edge of death! He was appalled at the risks he had let her take. He must have been insane last night! And when she was alone, think of it! It was good all this was to end.
Sitting on the table, between father and daughter, Carron explained himself. He was off, he said, for his last two days of hunting. He expected to be back day after to-morrow night. He wondered if the scholar would suspect anything from this—but Rader's eyes which seemed fixed upon him were probably fixed on some theory a hundred miles beyond him.
He wondered if Blanche would think his departure strange, coming so quickly on the heels of last night's revelation. He wondered if she would expect him to stay, to talk over with her what had happened, to hear more from her about it. This he did not want, even if the time had been his. He gave her a glance as he got off the table, but her answering look said, "I didn't need that. I'm coming anyway."
She followed him out into the hall. No sooner was the door shut upon them than she clasped him around the neck. "Don't go, don't go! I am so afraid something dreadful will happen to you."
This gave him an unpleasant start. What was she talking about, he wondered.
"Last time you came back with your head hurt," she said in a trembling voice. "I'm so afraid."
He laughed, relieved. "Not a bit of danger. That was sheer clumsiness." Yet somehow her caresses, and her fears for him did not flatter him. He felt uneasy in their enfolding. He had not called her out here for any lovers' scene. He had a desire to keep to business. "I'm only going to get a peace offering of venison, for your mother," he said. "Tell me, what did she say when you told her about us, eh?"
Blanche leaned coaxingly toward him, tilting her head sidewise until the brown crown of it came caressingly against his ear. It was a way she had of luring him out of seriousness, and beguiling him, but in this case it didn't do.
He took her by the shoulders and held her off from him. "Didn't you tell her?"
She drooped guiltily. "Don't be angry. I was going to, but then I thought about last night—of showing you what I did, and I couldn't seem to think about anything else. I thought I would tell her today instead."
He found himself a little jerked back in the ease of his arrangements. He had expected to find this matter settled. "Then go and tell her on the spot, and ask if I may see her before I go. Never mind if you don't feel like it," he added, as the girl hesitated. "We ought to get this thing straightened out."
"It isn't that," Blanche explained, "but I am afraid I can't, not now. She isn't up, you see, at least she isn't out of her room. She has a bad headache."
"Can't you speak to her just the same?"
"I'm afraid I can't. Her door is locked, and she says she mustn't be disturbed. I knocked a little while ago, but she doesn't answer. I think she is asleep."
Carron bit his lip. He was afraid to press the point too hard lest the girl suspect something in the wind; and yet to have to leave everything in this doubtful mess! He had meant to have his relation to Blanche well understood before he went. That was in case Ferrier should see fit to talk while he was away. And then suppose anything should happen to himself. He knew of course nothing ever did, but a man had to consider it.
"What is the matter? Is something wrong?" Blanche's voice was anxious. Evidently she was unsuspicious of anything threatening her mother's peace of mind, and it was as well that she should be. It would be better to keep her quiet, yes, as quiet as possible, where Ferrier was concerned.
"Nothing is wrong, but suppose your mother had heard of this from some one before she heard it from you. It would have hurt her." He was righteous and austere, and Blanche was impressed. "As soon as you can, tell her about it," he said. He understood from her humility that this time she would, without any doubt. He was beginning to get control of the situation, to gather it together under him, tightening all the reins in his hands. "And there is something else I want you to promise me. You won't like it, but I want you to do it."
They had come to the end of the passage to the little hall of many doors and the single stair.
"Yes?" she stood looking up at him questioningly, languidly. Blue shadows were beneath her eyes. The cheek below the temple looked hollow. Poor child! It showed him eloquently how right he was. This business of a Son of the Wind was no business for a woman. She ought never to have been in it, or known anything about it. What he was about to do appeared magnanimous to him.
"About what we saw last night," he said; "don't go any more."
She fixed him with such forlorn and dreary amazement that he forgot his scrupulous feeling for not touching her, and took her face between his hands. "It was beautiful, but it is too much for you, it is too far away. You are worn out. You look like a ghost."
"But I am always like this afterward."
"So much the worse! Besides, the journey is too dangerous. It is awful for you, and awful to think of you alone in the middle of the night!"
"But I have always—"
"Promise me!"
"Then I shall never see him again!" She stood, an intense and tragic little figure. The spectacle of her suffering made him ache, but the feeling in it he knew was absurd.
"Remember," he prompted, "you are certain to lose him soon. With the first rains he will be gone." He bent her head back until it rested upon his shoulder and he looked directly down upon her sullen lids. "Why not have the night we saw him together the last night?" With his instinct for managing unreasonable creatures he had hit upon the right argument. He could see it working upon her. Then he added the last touch. "And next week you will be gone."
That brought up her eyes as if they saw the future in one wide flash, an unknown landscape stretched out before her and beneath her, into which she must descend, through which she must travel. She shivered. He felt her relax. Her weight rested upon him. The color between her lashes was wet blue, and reflected him—a little purer in line, and finer than he was in fact, still himself. Her promise was not made in words, but he understood her well enough not to exact that. It was a curious thing, beautiful and rather awesome, to have a creature whose unspoken thought was a sworn oath. It was more than most men could circle with two arms. He thought this as he held her.
She raised her hands, resting them on his shoulders, and smiled at him. "I'm glad we did see him together, though. Remember the white moth—how he hated it, even that weight?"
Carron did not know why such a simple sentence should make him uncomfortable. He took her hands from his shoulders. "My dear," he said, "you are far too good!"
She looked as indignant as if he had accused her of a sin. "I'm not!" she said vehemently.
"I mean to me," he explained, amused in spite of himself. "It's your one amiable weakness, and it's made me late. I've got to hurry."
Something he had said seemed to have embarrassed her. She was a study of indecision; looked down, looked sidelong, opened her lips to speak, swallowed her breath.
"I will see you in three days," he said. "Back Thursday morning." He had taken the first steps of the stair, when she called his name.
The sharp and quavering sound made him turn quickly. She ran to the foot of the stair as if she was afraid he might dash away from her.
"There is something I must tell you," she began hastily. "Last night I said something that was not true. I didn't mean to—I didn't think! I thought afterward! I told you that no one but you had seen the horse, but Bert Ferrier has seen it."
This was scarcely news to Carron. He had heard this fact so long ago that he had come to take it for granted, but she was tremulous with compunction. Conscience sat in her eyes. She took hold of him as if she was afraid he might break away from her in rage. "I couldn't help it," she protested. "The trail, you see, goes past his house. I was very careful, but one night he saw me. I didn't know it. He followed me."
"Yes, yes, yes," Carron said hastily. His attention was all awake. "And now something has happened that makes it necessary for you to tell me?"
She nodded. "Yes. When you were talking about my not telling mother, that I shouldn't have put it off, and all that, it came to me that I was putting off telling you this in the same way; and then, when you said I was too good, I couldn't bear it! But you went away so fast!" She panted. "So I ran after you."
Carron felt mystified. "Well, what is it?"
She looked puzzled. "Why, that is it."
He laughed. "My dear child, what difference does it make so long as it doesn't affect our—" he had almost said "my"—"affairs?"
"Oh, but," she opened large eyes at him, "you must know everything about me. You ought, because we are so close, you see. Everything should be said between us."
"For fear sometime I might hear, and be angry, eh?"
"No. Even if you never should, even though I knew you never could! All the more because of that. It would be dreadful for me to keep things from you because I knew you would never find out."
He pushed a distressed hand across his forehead. "Yes, yes, I see!" but he didn't in the least. He only felt as if a weight were upon him, that could not detain him from going in the direction he wanted, but could make the going hard work. What a heavy necklace a woman could be when a man was straining after something else!
"And there is another thing," she continued, "that may really make a difference in our affairs. I don't know what you will think about it, but you see when he followed me—"
She had come to a full stop, and again fear rose in him. "Well, when he followed you?"
"I didn't see him until we were on the other side of the Sphinx, almost at the cave; and I couldn't make him go back. I didn't dare spend time to try even, for fear it might come and be frightened away for ever. So he came into the cave. And afterward he wouldn't promise not to tell. It wasn't that he wanted the horse," she continued hurriedly, "but because he wanted—" again she stopped, beginning afresh. "I was so excited and so afraid I told him if he would hold his tongue I would do anything that he wanted. That was what he wanted, you see. He asked me to marry him then."
Carron's eyebrows rose, his lips fell a little apart. This was an unexpected joker in the pack. He didn't know what it meant. She stood there, nervously clasping and unclasping her hands in front of her. "Did you say you would?" His voice sounded with such a short note that she looked frightened.
"No—I didn't; but I couldn't say I would not, either, you see. I didn't know what to do. It wasn't fair! He knew I didn't mean I would do such a thing as that. But he believes I will now, after what I promised. He believes he can make me." She held her hands locked, and looked at him beseechingly. "I don't think he can hold me to it—do you?"
Carron began to shake with laughter. "No, my dear—never! You can be sure he won't even try." He seized her, and, in an access of wild spirits, whirled her. "Don't be troubled by that for a moment. I'll look after him!" The sight of her perplexed face struggling with a smile, because she saw, since he laughed, something must be amusing, sent him off again. He would have liked to wring the wretched Ferrier's neck, but the thing was infernally funny. Blanche, confessing the awful wrong she had done him; with her naive compunctions for keeping her word to that little black hound, who had so secretly, shamefully broken his to her! She had never been so dear nor so funny to Carron as now, her hands lost in his, her cheeks like satin—exquisite surfaces to touch—and all surrounded by that curious limit, the ideal; looking at him through the clear element of innocence, taking his word for everything, as if it had been the fall of fate. Leaving her he looked back at her, down at her, standing between the dark walls of the stair. Strange, inexplicable being! What trifles looked large to her, what gauzy ideas seemed real, what nonsense she talked, that was the very devil to get out of his ears. If only she had retained that one little elision of truth between them, kept on her side one piece of double dealing, it wouldn't have made his business quite so hard!
Hard? He wondered what he meant by that word. The scheme wasn't hard, it was easy; and what she had told him made it easier. It made one more security for Ferrier's silence. He looked around the room where every morning her hands had made disorder smooth, and was aware of a vague irritation beneath the surface of his spirits. He laid hold of materials as if they had been his enemies. His guns were folly—play acting! but he had to take them. Everything else could be inclosed in the roll of blankets and that was light. He worked feverishly, knowing himself late, a thing he hated. He had meant to be at the place of meeting before the men. Waiting had a bad effect on a courage like Ferrier's. As well expect a rabbit to wait! He hoped Blanche would not appear again to say good-by.
Going out into the hall he thought he heard a stir in Mrs. Rader's room. He stopped. Perhaps she was coming out to speak with him. He would not mind having a word with her before he went. He listened. Presently the noise came again, and this time he recognized it. It was not any one moving. That sharp sound, so quick to transfix a man, held him motionless, and staring at the door. He had not thought of Mrs. Rader as a woman who cried. Still, women with headaches—But was it thus women with headaches cried, as though the whole of unhappiness had been made audible in a single sound?
There was something unusual here. An unusual impulse sprang in him to meet it. He advanced toward the door with the courage to knock, but, confronted by the blank wood that covered silence, his fingers grew limp. Suppose she were only in pain, and wanted to be let alone, what a fool he would be blundering in there! And even suppose Ferrier had kept his promise of yesterday? How much time would he spend in reassuring her when Blanche could reassure her just as well—better! He hung on his heel, hesitating. Riding as hard as he could he would scarcely make his appointment. He slung his roll on his shoulder and went briskly down the hall. He did not fail to make his steps audible, thinking if Mrs. Rader had anything to say to him she yet might open her door. But there were no more figures to start up at him and stop him, it seemed, and no more voices to call him back. At last, he was away!
A wind was blowing down through the pines, making the branches creak. At midday the air was keen. Thin white clouds were streaming and perpetually shifting in the sky. Only at the zenith remained a piece of clear blue. He looked up at it and smiled. The thought of Blanche returned to him, not this time as a being made of scruples, but as a pleasure, arms at the end of a journey, a living color fixed for him, for ever in the gray changeable face of life. Now for the sharp adventure!
The chestnut felt the mood of her rider, shivered and danced with sympathetic spirits. "Ah, my pretty girl," Carron murmured caressingly, "if you knew where you were taking me you wouldn't be in such a hurry to get there." His eye was critical upon her. His pet, the pick of herds, aping the thoroughbred, now appeared to him over-narrow in the chest, too hollow in the back, weak in the withers. "Your rival, my dear," he cruelly assured her, "and a lot more than your rival besides!"
This was what he had come for, and what he expected of himself, and it was thus he recognized himself, moving under open skies with men, no matter whom, as long as they obeyed him, at any hour of the day or night, it didn't matter which. But in this case, to the familiar conditions there was added an unfamiliar surrounding. There were mountains where he was accustomed to see plains. He had a few scant days where he was accustomed to use as many weeks, and he saw ahead of him all the difficulties, unexperienced and uncalculated, arising from new conditions. The very trail was unknown to him. Every step he took forward was strange. No time now to look back. His only retrospection was when he reached the place of meeting, and saw the half-breed waiting there—and Ferrier. At the first glimpse, "You little hound!" he thought. He shook inwardly with amusement. Everything the fellow did was ugly, yet somehow it looked trivial. Carron would have liked to pick him up by the collar and pitch him aside, anywhere, down the cañon for instance, but unfortunately it was necessary to have him, a guide and a leader for horses.
Their point of departure from the road was at the very place from which, more than two weeks ago, he had looked longingly up the "Highway of the Gods," felt he was turning aside from the right way, yet thought that way impassable. Had he stepped just off the road and, stooping a little, looked down toward the right, he would have seen the trail, very faint, discernable only to the mountaineer's eye, gliding past, protected on either hand by rock and timber. Had he done this he might then and there have followed it, found alone the dark hills and the river, seen, alone, what he had been led to last night. So chance might have befriended him. Just as well, she might have led him astray. He had spent some strange days on a side track, but it had led him back again in one of those circuitous, long routes compounded of character and circumstance which men call fate, to this place where he had fixed his fancy first, with the gates growing nearer in front of him, and the blue garden of mountains beyond.
It was not an easy trail, and getting away on a trail into the mountains is much like getting away from the coast to sea. There was hard choppy going, tacking and changing before they began to get the hang of it, get into the swing of their pace, see the tops of eminences all around them like tops of breakers, lose sight of the road and all thought of roads, and rejoice to find themselves voyaging in the welter of heights. Carron's activities had begun, and plunging into them, he stripped himself of the vanities and comforts of life as a runner throws aside garments. Necessities appeared luxuries, and as the impetus gathered headway the necessity for motion left other necessities behind. Food was the first, for he had started at daybreak with most casual foraging. He had forgotten there could be such a thing as set hours when people gathered at table. Eating had become an act that gave a man energy for greater acts. It was something to be snatched at a moment by the way. As for sleeping, the owls had more anticipation of it than he when night brought the sky black above them, and the moon like an apple of silver. He, who had tossed on a bed and thought of a woman, now felt the rocking saddle under him, heard the river, heard the wind in his ears, saw the rising stars.
Men and horses, they slipped in among the black hills at eight in the evening, too late for work or for anything but turning in. Men and horses camped some half mile below the ford, Carron himself lying close in the cave. He had expected nothing for that night, yet when nothing came, no sound challenging silence, no shadow on the broad moonlighted open, he experienced a sense of defeat. His heart was a house of doubts. Reason asserted that it could not be every night the creature came to drink. He might watch out two nights, three perhaps, before the moment came. The fear remained in his mind that before it came again he might watch for ever.
He contested this idea, refused to believe it, reckoned the past, and perceived that because he had refused to fail he had never done so. Then certainly this was to be a success. Problems that rose upon him for the next day restored his courage. They were difficult. They required the whole of his brain in cooperation with imagination—the imagination of the mathematician calculating toward an unknown quantity, making the brain servant to the inspiration. In a few years he had worked out his problem, perfecting it, a method of capture all his own. Now in a few hours he had to readapt the formula of the plains to the mountains, to reckon what must be added, what could be left out. It must be a triumph of omissions, both because time was to be husbanded and because of the difficulty of work in the forest without leaving the signs of work. On the plains the trails of men are more easily erased. The footsteps are covered with dust carried by the wind, and the same wind in the wide open carries away the human scent; but here with forest on every side, the spongy soil underfoot, and an air shut in among heights, there were delicate surfaces on every side to take the print of the human, and report his elicit presence to delicate, superhuman senses.
The men moved as guardedly as thieves in a house. A broken branch would have been a warning to the wary master of the solitude, a wisp of smoke an alarm. Therefore no camp-fires were kindled—not even a pipe lighted. Therefore no timber was hewn. Carron used the strength of the forest, making the posts of his barrier growing trees. These were thick on three sides. On the fourth where the river ran they used the poles, sinking them in the sand of the ford, and where that failed, and the water flowed away into rock, the canvas was stretched as tight as three men could draw it along the high bank until the forest could give it support again. It was finished by noon of the second day. All that was left was the harder task of waiting.
That night black clouds rose with the moon, and unheated, uncomforted, they shivered and endured. Carron was so far advanced into the intense strain of the approaching crisis that he believed himself calm. He believed it did not matter whether anything came or failed to come. Let come what would, nothing could move him again. At one o'clock or a little later, the false calm went into a thousand pieces. With the first sounds in the distance his nerves began to cry out. Uncertainty plucked apart resolution. Will the creature detect the change? the barrier hidden, the runway in the forest? No—still coming, drawing nearer. Now, he is stopping! He has scented it. He must already have entered it. Surely that edged instinct that has never been surrounded will feel the unseen barrier creeping upon him, drawing in from each side! The shadows of the pines on the moonlighted space were an embroidery of gray that moved before Carron's disordered sight, the moon was like a white flower in the clouds, a vague blossom of light, when the thing happened.
The sound of a ridden horse crashing in the forest came behind the rhythmic approaching trot, and instantly a double rushing of hoofs. Hark! which way is the driven one running? Is he coming, or has he turned to charge his pursuer? The man's excited ears, sounding with their own pulses, could not distinguish. He heard the night broken by alarms and echoes. He scrambled from his hiding, and remained half fallen upon the rocks, gaping like a terrified boy seeing a visible thunderbolt. It seemed to be going clean over the barrier over the stream. Then the recoil too quick for the eye, the turn. The moonlighted space was empty; but there was a sound of a passing like a storm among the trees. Away for ever—away to the other side of the world—away from the man who thought to corral the wind. Hola! There it came again, the swing about. What had happened? Carron's bewildered senses recognized the flight of terror. Now he heard it on the right, now on the left among the trees; and at intervals his eyes saw a black, gleaming body shooting like an apparition across the open space. It disappeared and turned on itself, and appeared again! The water was churned white in the ford.
That was a fine charge of fate, a brave challenge of the inevitable—but not over it! The hoofs that could dash out a man's brains scattered pebbles. Swiftness that had covered long distances straight now ran in a circle like insanity. Birth of the winds, skimmer over the world, by all miracles he was real! He was caught between walls of earthly stuff; and a little drunken human being, drunk with his moment of power, danced among the boulders, threw up his hat idiotically toward the moon, and raised his voice in a quavering cheer.