CHAPTER XV
THE SUPERB MOMENT
FOR a time which he had no way of measuring he knew he was beside himself. He was Carron, perhaps, but he was Carron translated, caught up in the flesh into paradise. Voices from the earth were shouting anxiously, "Look out, look out, he'll get away! That stuff will never stand it!" He laughed at them. It was only canvas—but hadn't Carron set it up there? That was reason enough for its never coming down. He published himself the conqueror of the unconquerable, and, staggering with success, he still remembered to order some of those vague people around him to make sure the gate closing the corral was fast. He had a coil of rope in his hand, ready with the lasso lest there be any danger of escape. Himself with the others made sure of the barrier by light of lanterns and the clouded moon. His heart was going a hundred to the minute, but his watch measured off the minutes as it had measured them two weeks ago, or an hour ago. The caps of the mountains stood steady, extraordinarily insensible against the sky.
Amazing how still everything was! He heard only the chuckle of the water, the brittle crash of men's footsteps in the brush, and the pacing of the thing inside. That moved as if it never would be still again. Sometimes he saw it, a black bulk among the trees, then black and silver swinging through the moonlight space, to be swallowed again in trees. It was like a disappearing appearing form in a dream. It looked so improbable to him he half expected it must melt before his eyes, and change into something else. Then the moon set, and he no longer saw, only heard. Reality retreated further from him, and at rare intervals when the sound of the hoofs stopped, it seemed as though the horse must have vanished. At last the flood of night and magic ran out and left him with his captive, visible, real and still in his hands.
In his hands, not figuratively only, but in fact. Carron remembered for a long time the moment when he first touched the body which had appeared to him like a vision. It lost nothing in value, though he had proved it to be flesh, though he fastened it with ropes. Rather the value increased to him. For now he could see every detail of beauty and found them perfect—perfect proportion, form without a blemish, youth in the teeth, and lineage in the fierce, full eye. The inheritance from remote, illustrious sires spoke there, and in the small head, and fine thin mane. But there was another inheritance in the creature that manifested itself strangely. Bound, held immovable, strained into humiliating contortions, there was still a look of aloofness in him.
While the ropes cut into his flesh, they had to believe they handled him; but once the ropes were off all sense of controlling him or ever having controlled him, was gone. With his foreleg doubled back and fastened sharply up beneath his belly, lunging at every step, the illusion of liberty still hung about him. Something that was big in his narrow brain, something that did not understand what bondage was, seemed even in the narrow inclosure to take him away from them. It seemed almost as if the famous heritage the Indians claimed for him was truth. Carron, with a hot heart of triumph, with cool, calculating eyes, surveyed the creature, and decided that he would take a deal of letting alone. Let him alone for the first twelve hours; let him get used to himself in his new conditions. To-morrow they could put the halter on him, and perhaps be able, the next day, to lead him out. Meanwhile the horse-breaker made tentative experiments in driving him, and had plentiful examples of how obstinate, fierce and quick an animal with only three legs to use might be.
They had hobbled Son of the Wind while morning was yet small and golden on the tops of the hills. Afternoon, rushing upon them, found their camp established. No need to cover trail now. The place in the wilderness was like a box broken open, the treasure of its inviolability gone. Trails were trampled, horses picketed. There was the reek of tobacco, the smoke of fires; and the odor of cooking was blown to noble, unhuman, indignant nostrils. Even on the other side of the Sphinx, ready for the man who wanted to make the shorter journey, a pony browsed among blowing fodder that had been strewn for him there. All was filled with the clutter of human expedients—beautiful if a man looks to the expedient—and Carron did. Some uneasy change in the atmosphere, sharpening odors of dead leaves, deepening of distance colors, intensifying of cold, warned him that time for what he wanted was growing short. How short he could not tell. Dawn of the next day showed him. The cold rose in the east lighted an ominous prospect. The sky, which yesterday had been violet, was blue like a sword; there was an edge in the air that went to the bone. A cloud stretched in a pathway from the east to the zenith, and its edges of opaque gray continually spread toward the north and south. Nature measures her seasons with no thought of giving a background for the prodigious performances of men. Oftener their plans are dashed to pieces against her immovable system. So Carron thought, staring up at the cloud. By that he had two days. He calculated hours and events.
The first, most important, was a thing quite outside the business in hand, but it was a precaution, and necessary. He felt a vague distaste for what he was about to do without knowing why. His momentous affair took all his mind. Every person and thing about him was absorbed into that interest. Ferrier no longer existed to him as an individual. Ferrier was simply the factotum of the camp, and had no connection in Carron's thoughts with any other place or moment. He explained to Ferrier what was expected of him: to take the pony waiting at the foot of the Sphinx, get in to Beckwith as fast as possible, meet the vaquero coming up on the morning train, bring him down to the place where the trail passed Ferrier's house, and direct him along the way. "That will be all I want of you," he concluded; "we will be on the lookout for him on the other side. You need not come back." He added that Ferrier would better stop in at the Raders' and tell them that Carron would not return to-night as he had expected, but probably the day after to-morrow. He ended with a feeling of triumph that at last he had done with this most unpleasant assistance, and might kick it behind him, and forget that he had ever had it.
But here arose the most unlooked for complication. The man refused to go. Why did Carron want to send a message to the Raders anyway, he asked, if he wasn't going back there again? He had the horse, hadn't he? Then why didn't he get out as quietly and quickly as he could?
Carron was annoyed. It was inconvenient to have his old lie come up at him just here. He replied evasively with what was a part of the truth, that if no message was sent the Raders might become anxious and despatch some one in search of him, and people coming upon him here in his present situation was certainly the last thing he wanted. It was not probable, but in this case he preferred to be on the safe side. If Ferrier was afraid of questions he could carry a written message, and he could tell Mrs. Rader that a half-breed had brought it to him at his house. This reassurance did not seem at all to touch the point of the man's fear. He would not, could not, dared not face the Raders! He was afraid to go back. He was afraid to go home. He was afraid, it appeared, of everything outside of Carron's shadow. He clung to that as if the horse-breaker were his one protector and friend.
"But you will have to go back some time!" Carron insisted. "You will have to go day after tomorrow when I am gone. Why not now? What's the difference?" He was exasperated, but he couldn't help smiling. Ferrier was a humorous figure. He had been stopped on his way up the trail with stuff from the first camp they had made down the river. A camp kettle hung upon one arm; a rifle lay in the hollow of the other; a tragic stubbornness was in his face. "There is a difference," he said. In the pause they heard Son of the Wind renew his plungings, making the hollow stream bed multiply echoes. Ferrier glanced at the trees, at the steep ascent of the Sphinx in front of him, then at Carron. He seemed to be a man with more than one dread. "When you are gone, you're gone," he began rapidly, "and the horse too, and then I'll be certain they'll never find out. But while I know you are here, if I should see them, and anything should be said, I'd get rattled; I know I would! I'd give it away! They'd get it out of me."
Carron's lips opened to laughter. "Come! That's no reason at all—a girl's reason!" He glanced past Ferrier to the opening in the trees, which gave a glimpse of the ford at a little distance. He had been at broad grin, and the expression continued to draw his lips, but in his mind he ceased to be amused. His forehead wrinkled in anxiety to make out what sort of thing he was seeing.
Ferrier swung around on his heel. "Oh Lord!" he said.
The apparition was no dreadful one. It was planted leg-deep in the middle of the stream, the body a little crouched together, the head held low on a stretched neck, elbows bent, hands carried forward—no, those must be paws. It was an animal that had scented, just risen to its hind legs for observation. Carron watched to see it drop back on all fours, and experienced a vague uneasy astonishment when it began to move forward still upright on two feet, wading through the ford. With each step forward the animal aspect melted; by the time it had climbed the bank and emerged upon the level the illusion was gone; yet, what remained, or rather what had evolved itself, though it was not beast, certainly was scarcely human. It was in fact that being which Ferrier had never called his brother, and which as it advanced, appeared indeed to have no relation to the man on the road, or to any man. A shaggy deity of the forest might have stared with such foreign, incommunicable eyes, not cruel, not crafty, not even vacant, but containing nothing human intelligence can understand. Behind him the sound of horses' feet was audible, tramping, continuously circling, now on the rock, now in the water.
"How did he get out here?" Carron demanded, turning upon his companion.
"I don't know! How should I know? He goes all over the country. He's everywhere. What difference does it make how he got here?" Ferrier retorted breathlessly. "He is here. Don't you see? He's been over there—he's seen it! He's seen me! I'm afraid—" He shrank into Carron's shadow. "Don't let him get by! Don't let him go!" he whispered.
"Why not? He doesn't understand anything?"
"Not what he hears—but when he sees a thing; and he saw me!"
"And he sees me. Steady," Carron murmured. "He isn't trying to pass us. He's coming toward us."
The boy had diverged a little from the path, and was approaching them through the trees with great deliberation. His movements were smooth—no pause, no quickening; slow, yet apparently without reluctance. His gaze never wavered from Carron's face. What did he want? Was he bringing a message? He had not the aspect of a messenger whose purpose would be haste, and here there seemed to be a purpose in very slowness. It claimed the attention. A man might fancy himself stalked by a beast. That was the gait; and that the diffuse light of the eyes, yet there was something else there too, beneath the surface glare—something discriminating and personal that does not belong to the beast, and certainly not to insanity. As the creature drew closer it appeared as though centered deep in each pupil there was a live, concentrated spark. It shone there dimly, as if from behind a veil. He was in front of Carron when the veil seemed to lift, and the meaning blazed at him—hate, man's high prerogative, that, for a moment, transformed the nameless little being into a man.
A hot wave went over Carron, hotter than dislike or disgust. The senses acknowledged an equal, were ready for their opponent before the mind could think. George Ferrier was furtively advancing his foot, and beginning very slowly to extend his hand. The horse-breaker watched it, feeling himself attacked, yet not knowing what this gentle approach could threaten. He reckoned how hard he could strike to stun without killing. The tips of the fingers had almost touched him when the boy leaped, not forward upon his adversary, nor backward from him, but sidewise like a cat, and darted past him.
Carron clutched at him, grasped air, and stumbled forward on hands and knees. He heard something dash past him up the slope, the ringing of an iron kettle on the ground. He got to his feet in time to see the boy dive into the underbrush like a fox, Bert Ferrier at the edge of it like a hound off the scent, hanging back, whimpering, "Stop him, stop him!"
Shouting to Ferrier, to Esmeralda Charley to beat the bush, Carron ran up the trail. It swung far to the right, then as far to the left, and the first sharp turn commanded the sweep of underwood to the river. From here he looked down the sea of dull green, saw the half-breed floundering in the bristling stuff, saw Ferrier running along the edge of it, his rifle still in his hand. He was frantically waving the other arm, and seemed in terror, a divided terror, half lest their prey escape, and half lest it spring unexpectedly upon him out of the scrub. But out of it came only a few birds, rising on wings to their air trails. All else was motionless.
Suddenly Esmeralda Charley yelled, and pointed up, far up at some point over Carron's shoulder. The watcher looked behind him.
Perhaps a rod higher on the slope a quivering was perceptible in the underbrush as if some animal was traveling swiftly toward the hills. He stared, too confounded to realize what it was, or what had happened.
Ferrier came up the trail panting, "It's no use! It's no use! You'll never catch him from here!"
"D'yer mean to tell me that's he?" the other demanded, pointing to where the ripple was running like a snake along the tops of the bushes.
"Lord, yes! He can go as fast as a coyote! You'll never get up to him now!" His face was red, and his voice piped through his laboring breath. He looked furiously at Carron. "Why didn't you hold on to him? Why in hell did you let him get by you?"
"How in hell was I to know he was going by? He was coming toward us, as if he wanted something."
The elder Ferrier snarled with disdain. "Of course! That's what he meant you to think! That's what he was aiming for from the start—that's how he fooled you." He triumphed in Carron's discomfiture; was proud for once of his brother's attainment. "Oh, he fooled you fast enough! He's smart enough sometimes! Look, look!" His voice broke off its scorn, and quavered suddenly sharp. Both men stared aloft.
Above the scrub, higher than the trees, against the face of the bare rock, the wild figure had reappeared. It stood poised, looking down upon them; and to their over-alert senses it wore an air of mocking triumph. The sight of it was too much for Ferrier. An inarticulate grunt came from between his teeth, and before the other could realize what he was about, he had thrown his gun up to his shoulder. Carron was quick enough. He knocked up the muzzle, and the bullet sang harmless into the sky.
"What do you mean? Are you crazy?"
"I won't kill him!" Ferrier cried. "I only want to get him in the arm or leg to stop him! He'll get away! He'll get away!"
"Drop it or you'll get a slug in your own body," the horse-breaker said sternly. He took the gun, threw off the cock and glanced up at the side of the Sphinx. The boy had disappeared.
Ferrier sat down and howled.
Carron looked at him and felt far more like laughing. What ailed the fool? There was nothing the boy could report but that he had seen a horse in a corral. And how could he report it at all? With what could he communicate? What gesture, what intelligible sound? Now that the bewilderment of the unexpected was past, the appearance of George Ferrier ceased to be alarming. It seemed to Carron one of those accidents, dramatic and arresting in aspect, which in fact are no more portentous than a dream. It had gone like a dream. All that remained to him of it was a faint shiver of the flesh. He touched Ferrier rather compassionately.
"You are used up," he said. "You'd better get some sleep." He had been shocked at Ferrier's performance, but it had opened his eyes to the man's abject state of nerves. It was clear he would never do for a messenger. He might blurt out the secret to the first face.
Carron made himself ready, giving the half-breed final instructions. He was to give Ferrier coffee, all the black coffee he wanted, but no whisky on his life. He was to drive the stallion into the open part of the corral—Ferrier must help him with that—and put up the second wall of canvas at the edge of the trees. Better leave the two mares in the corral, and from time to time try driving the horse with them.
The little brown man listened attentively, and offered no comment. There was the man to leave!—a fellow with a dog's faith, and no ideas in his head but the ones Carron put into it. He hated to leave him here with the whole weight of responsibility, and said so. Suppose any part of the corral should prove weak?
The man contemptuously smiled. Fifty horses like that, he represented, couldn't get out of it.
"There aren't fifty like that, Charley," Carron said—"there isn't one." His sweater was pulled to his ears, his cap over his eyes, his quirt in his hand.
The morning was half gone and there was no time to be lost. Whistling, he climbed the terraces of stone, and passing through the window of the Sphinx, descending, took horse on the other side.
The first maddest elation had subsided. He had come down from the skies, but he was still Carron seated on top of the world. His nerves ached with the last three nights of prolonged tension. He had wrenched his shoulder in spoiling Ferrier's aim, and an old rheumatic pain stabbed him with intermittent fury. Yet he had never been so happy in his life. The hot, sweet consciousness of achievement coursed with his blood—not the dubious achievement of the mind, not the quality of facts, but the fact itself, the incontrovertible success of the hands. He had succeeded before. As far as he could remember he had always succeeded; but it had been with lesser things; and then to get one thing he had invariably had to give up another. He had put that down as a rule of life; had never expected anything better; but now he had, at once, the two things of all the world he most wanted. He had only to keep them apart very quietly that the one should not know of the other. It was a dizzying discovery. Never, since he had been a boy, had life seemed so filled to the brim with everything for him, so limitless in possibilities. It appeared to him that nothing would ever say no to him again. He leaned forward into the wind. He breathed deep as if drawing the future to him. If he had done as he pleased he would have returned with his man from Beckwith straight to the camp in the shadow of the Sphinx. But there was no avoiding the stop at Raders'. Since he had told them he would be back that night it would be safe to put in an appearance and let them know that everything was all right, especially since that appearance of George Ferrier. It was midday before he left his vaquero to wait for him at the foot of Rader's Hill and ascended the road between the bending trees.
All this country which for so long had lain asleep in the sun was beginning to stir uneasily in the shadow of the cloud. A shiver, rather than a wind, was in the wood. The road was without its diamonds of light; the clearing before the house without its noon circle of sun. The house itself looked as small to him and as frail as a paper box. He felt that he could kick it over. There was a continuous, dry rustling of dead stuff. The rushing of the pines sounded like surf. It was glorious weather! He jumped out of saddle and ran along the porch. How beautiful to rush in on them and tell them about it! Why, in the name of Heaven, were women such strange sweet fools?
He heard the barking of a dog inside, and opening the door, Beetles met him, hailed him with leaps and crouchings as his deliverer, his master, his adored and worshipped god, returned at last; from where, was of no interest to Beetles. Carron caressed him, assured him that he was an excellent little dog, but not at all the person wanted, and went on in search. At this hour the women would probably be in the kitchen together, but the room was empty. A cloth was flung on a chair as it might have fallen from a busy hand. The sink was full of tins. "They will be back in a moment," Carron thought; but inspection showed the water to be cold, and the fire in the stove nearly out. In the dining-room dishes stood on the table as they had been left from breakfast, the shades were drawn high, a cold light filled the place, and flies sung in the panes. Impatient at not finding people where he expected them when he wanted them, he ran up-stairs. No answers to his knocks. Down-stairs again, and an inspiration seized him. It was possible that they were employed in some way about the greater house. He opened the door which led from the little hall into the large dining-room. Here he experienced the curious sensation of whoever enters suddenly a room in which they have been on only one occasion, with which they have only one association. Carron had not been here since his first morning in the house, when Blanche had led him through, and now the odor of the place, dry and inclosed, revivified the past moment. He had a flying recollection of how she had looked to him, that clear first impression of personality, just how she had walked across the floor between the tables and the army of chairs. It seemed almost she must be crossing it now, one foot advanced with the temptation to slide, glancing at him with serious, sidelong turn of her head.
No one was crossing it. The tables had been pushed back against the wall. A glassy surface stretched uninterrupted, reflecting like a pool of water, but at the other side of it the sole figure, the scholar, was standing. He was fronting Carron, but did not appear to see him or hear him. He had the look of being adrift in the large place, stranded by the table, a limp body without volition. His gaze was fixed upon a white sugar bowl as though it contained the secret of the universe. Carron looked at him affectionately. This was his fellow conspirator who was responsible for to-day's triumph. He was more glad to see the scholar at this moment than any other person in the house. He wanted to shout out the good news from where he stood, to wring his hand with congratulations. "Hello," he said, "are you getting lost, Mr. Rader?"
The scholar raised his head with a nervous toss peculiar and characteristic, and stood at gaze. Just so, surprised and blank, he might have regarded the appearance of a stranger.
In sheer high spirits Carron took a run and make a slide across that shining floor. "Didn't you expect me?" he asked.
Rader had backed a little as if this onslaught had nearly put him to flight, and now confronted immediately by the man and the question, "No," he said, and looked down.
"I told you I would be back to-night."
"Yes, but—" his air was embarrassed and shy. He seemed unable to get any further.
"I have dashed in on him too suddenly and scared him out of his thoughts," Carron reflected. Aloud he said smiling, "I have had good luck." He couldn't resist that much, though he knew he was treading dangerous ground.
The scholar raised his large blue eyes suddenly, and fixed them on the young man. There was a spark in the center of each, the flame of a most acute distress. It reached Carron even in the secure citadel of his success.
"What's happened?" he said. Still he was smiling. Everything that happened, or might still be happening, among the people of this house looked far beneath him and small as the things on earth appear to a voyager in a balloon. "Has Ferrier been blowing me up behind my back? Has Mrs. Rader heard yet, I mean the facts about us, eh?"
"Yes," Rader answered, "she—"
The outer door closed and a precipitous step came along the hall.
"Oh Lord!" he said helplessly.
Carron shook. "Brace up. It's all right. It's only Blanche."
"It's Mrs. Rader," the scholar said. "She—"
He had started again to speak of his wife, but if he wanted to give Carron a hint of any sort he was too late with it. The young man would have wagered it was the girl's step he had heard; but the door opened upon the older woman. Her hair was blown, and a shawl was held over her shoulders. He scarcely knew her coming in with this determined, headlong manner. She saw him and stopped irresolute, biting her lips. The draft carried the door to behind her with a clap that sounded like a gun of defiance.
Here was no time for smiling, however much he might feel like it. The feminine fates were against him—and he must pull a sober face. He went quickly, propitiatorily forward. "Mr. Rader tells me you know about it."
She did not speak, but holding the shawl around her with nervous ringers, kept looking at him in a way that made him uncomfortable. "I am sorry you don't like it," he said.
She turned from him abruptly upon her husband. "Are you a man?" she demanded. "You could stand here and let him come in?"
"How could I help it?" Rader inquired querulously. "He was in here before I knew." He sat down disconsolately in one of the army of chairs.
"You wouldn't have kept him out anyway," she retorted. "You care more about what you want to do than about your own blood."
The subject of this discussion stood hearing it as if it were of some third indefinite person they were speaking. He was astonished that any one could feel so violently about anything but his one interest. "Mrs. Rader," he urged, "I know very well that from the first you haven't liked me, but I am not such a bad sort as you seem to think."
The woman's breast heaved as if her narrow frame were too small to contain her emotion.
"You know what Blanche thinks about it, I suppose?" he added.
"Yes." The words came like a lash.
"Where is she?"
"You won't see her!"
"My dear Mrs. Rader," Carron protested, and began to feel irritated. "I wonder if you have heard the facts?"
"I have heard enough."
"For instance?"
"I have heard about the horse."
With the word everything, even Rader's aspect, had become serious. "What horse?" he said coldly.
"The wild horse."
He looked at her steadily. He felt that if his eyes wavered an instant something in his mind would waver too, and lose grasp of the situation. A dozen thoughts were struggling there for first place. "Did that boy George tell you?"
"It wasn't George. It was Bert."
He almost shouted at her. "He couldn't!"
"Why? Did you think he was loyal to you?" she asked.
Carron didn't hear her sarcasm, her triumph; heard nothing but the preposterous fact. He shot a glance into the past and saw the passionate futile figure of the man on the road that he had laughed at. That fellow immolated in confession, blazing up at the last with courage enough to dash down his own hope with his rival's? Admirable desperation, who could have dreamed he had that much in him! Carron could have sworn he knew his man to the hilt. He couldn't imagine how Ferrier could have looked meeting the pinch of the facts. "Exactly what did he say?" he asked.
Mrs. Rader looked inquiringly. She seemed to find something in his manner she did not understand. "He said he met you on the road coming up here, and that you asked him where there was a house that would take you in overnight; and he directed you to this one."
Carron's attentive ear marked the omission. "Well—and then?"
"He said that after you had been here a few days you asked him if he knew the whereabouts of this horse, and he told you he had never heard of such a creature. He said, too, that you had tried to find out from Blanche."
"When did he tell you all this?"
"It was three—no, it was four days ago that he told me about the horse; but since you first came he has been saying you were only playing with Blanche."
"I see! He said that, did he?" Carron was feeling hot and white. "And did you ask him, by any chance, how in the first place I had heard there was such a thing as this horse?"
"Yes, but he said he didn't know. He supposed that some one in the house must have told you."
Carron smiled, a rather ragged grin. It was a commentary on his belief in miracles. It was a commentary also on his understanding of the science of cowards and of lies. It seemed to him he had been a mere child in Ferrier's hands, in superb security in himself, never reckoning how easy it would be for Ferrier to scamp the story. "Your husband did not tell me," he said, "if that is what Ferrier made you think. I knew before I saw Mr. Rader. What I got from him I got out of him without his knowing. I got it out of all of them. I got it out of Blanche in the same way; but I got it out of Ferrier in the first place. He was drunk, and part of that was my responsibility, but he knew what we were about well enough afterward. He didn't tell you he was paid for it? Naturally! Loyal to me? He hasn't been loyal to any one—she or you or me! Why he—" Carron saw wide pictures of memory—Ferrier bargaining him away from Raders' by promises of the horse; hailed out of his house trembling, reluctant to fulfil his promise—weeping by the trail that he had been seen there—seen! What use of repeating it all? The man was weaker than water. Mrs. Rader was eying him challengingly. "Then you don't deny you came here for the horse?"
"No—it's true enough."
"And now you have him?"
"Pardon me, how do you know that?"
She showed a little trepidation, as if she felt herself advancing into deep water. "Because in the first place I didn't believe Bert's story. It sounded like a made-up tale. A wild horse running in the mountains, that he knew about, and Blanche, and even Mr. Rader, and that I had never heard of! He wouldn't tell me a word!" She flashed an unforgiving glance toward where the scholar sat drooping. "But afterward, when I had thought it over, how strange it was that you should have come here—a man like you! And then when you went away again, and said you had gone hunting, and stayed so long, I began to be afraid. Then I sent George out."
He interrupted.
"How did you know where to send him?"
"Bert had told me the place. He told me everything he could think of to make me believe him."
"How could you make George understand?"
She faltered an instant. "George is strange. Places he seems to remember, and that is a place they all knew when they were children. Besides, are you sure he didn't see you start in that direction? It seems to me he must have seen something or I couldn't have made him know what I meant."
Carron mused, and nodded. "Yes, he may have seen something in the way of direction, I remember now. But how could he make you understand what he had seen?" He looked at her hard. There was something equivocal in her expression.
"I—I don't know how, exactly, but he did."
"Well, it is a fact," he said. "I have got the horse. So, that's understood, isn't it? All right! Now will you tell me what that has to do with my marrying your daughter?"
"With your marrying?" She seemed confounded with that simple fact which had been accepted in his mind so completely that he thought it had been his intention for ever.
"Yes, didn't she tell you?"
"No—yes—at least she did say something about it, but Bert said you had only let her think it because you wanted—"
"Well, of course! He would like to marry her himself!"
"But he said you wanted—"
"In Heaven's name," he burst out exasperated, "can't a man want two things? You seem to think it's impossible I should care about her. I'd like to know why. She's beautiful, isn't she? She's a most extraordinary sort of girl, isn't she?"
He wasn't sure that Mrs. Rader had fully taken in his revelation of Ferrier's treachery, or of his own double dealing. If she had, she seemed to set it at naught. One fact she understood. He had unequivocally declared himself when he could have no diplomatic reason for doing so. She felt the force of that circumstance, but the knowledge only rooted her there with ebbing anger, and with a blank distressed stare.
"Oh," she said, and again "Oh!" nervously twisting her hands one in another. "Why didn't you tell me before?"
"We told you as soon as we knew ourselves what we were about!" The exasperated voice of youth spoke from him, angry at age who, with cold blood, sees so clearly. "At least," he added, "she meant to tell you four days ago—the same day I told Mr. Rader."
"Has he known, all this while?" She flashed a glance at that third person, sitting forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his large hands hanging limp from the wrists. It was plain he was unaware of the conflict, the whirlwind of words going on before him. His trouble, which was seated so plainly in his eyes, was fixed upon some circumstance, remote from the present, perhaps not even spoken by these two so bitterly concerned.
"He probably forgot all about it," Carron said cheerfully. "There's no harm, only we'll have to see that Ferrier holds his tongue."
She reflected his returning rush of spirits with a wan, anxious smile. They looked at each other like people who feel themselves emerging from a chasm of dangers safe into the air. With an impetuousness that was her daughter's she took him by the sleeve. "Come; tell her what you have told me; make her see it as you have shown me."
He held back. "What are you talking about?"
Still anxious, but with a rising confidence, she supported his look. "Why, when George came back he didn't come to me—he went to her. I thought you understood, she knows about it. I didn't want to tell you at first, but of course she is the only one who can understand him."
Carron's knees felt loosened. A faint cold breath seemed to run through his veins. He was not aware of speaking, or of even wanting to speak, but he heard a voice sounding too high and complaining to be his own which yet was moving his own throat. "Now in the name of what made you meddle in my affairs!"
"It was her affair too! If you had told me! But what difference does it make now?" She looked ready to laugh at him. "You will have to make her believe you love her; and she will believe you, she must believe you."
"But she knows it now!"
"Ah, no she doesn't." Mrs. Rader's tone was significant.
"Why, what did she say?" he inquired uneasily.
Rader's voice entered the conversation suddenly. He could not have overheard them. He must have spoken from the heart of his own thought. "She doesn't speak—she doesn't look at me—she hasn't moved since she came back an hour ago."
The words produced the impression of a weight falling, awakening a silence. "Back from where?" Carron asked. "Where has she been?"
"The place where it is, the cañon, the cave," Mrs. Rader explained. "She wouldn't believe us. She wouldn't even believe George. She went out there herself to see."
To see! He understood what those words meant. All the tongues in the world could not have convinced her; but the sight of the eyes, that power to stir up passions! Here was an end to silence, to dreaming, to everything but facts. It did not appear to Carron then that men had a part in the making of facts. They looked entirely the work of fate. "Where is she?" he asked.
"In the stable. She sits there just as she got off the horse." There came a slight quiver of the mother's lips at the memory. "I can't make her come away."
She was looking to him to do that apparently, since he had been the doer of everything. But this stupid, timid woman had undone the whole. All his diplomacy in a wreck, all he had hoped to save for both in agonizing nerves and suffering confidence, all, all precipitated around his ears. That bridge of silence with which he had hoped to get her across unscathed all gone. Nothing was left but to take her up in the strong grasp of his own conviction and carry her through the rough current of the truth. "She will have to suffer while I go through with this business," he thought. That confident smile Mrs. Rader wore made him furious. He pulled his sleeve from her grasp and walked quickly out of the room. With all his astonishment and anger he was horribly conscious of the slipping past of the hours. Time, the enemy of triumph, of rapture, of the perfect moment, was streaming past. He began to run.
Past noon, and rain in that cloud! This moment he ought to be climbing the Sphinx, and setting foot in her sacred window. The hard floor changed to strewn pine needles beneath his feet, and a cold wind blew upon him. He ought to be on the very ground this instant, with the captive in his hands. He saw his pony tethered a rod distant. It would have been easy to catch stirrup and get away, to the great affair. No, it wouldn't do! Flight would be the worst thing at this minute. The thought of Blanche's eyes, meek as they had last looked up at him, those eyes drowned in tears made him shiver. Over-confident, over-sensitive she was. One could fancy the storm of her weeping, and ugh! how it could drench a man's spirits!
He dived into the barn as into a cavern. It was dark, and echoes followed his heels. The door of the smaller stable stood ajar. There was nothing unusual here that he could see, only the odor of harness and fodder, the empty space of floor, and not a sound except that of a horse eating. Looking into the stall he saw the mustang still saddled, with his bridle trailing neglected underfoot. A few steps farther, and he found the rider.
She was sitting on the lowest stair of the ascent to the loft, and except for her gloves and the whip she held in one hand, she might have merely strolled over from the house and stopped here a moment to dream. Hard to believe that red and white gown looking so woman-like and of the fireside, had fluttered bold in the face of the mountains. The knot of her hair had slipped, and, still twisted with its pins, lay on her neck. A longish lock escaped and hung at her cheek. Her chin rested on her hand. Her eyes were fixed on one certain spot on the floor. Her forehead was smooth, her lips relaxed, and not the trace of a tear. In the dark light her cheek shone like a pearl. She was prettier than usual; prettier than ever! Had the Raders suffered hallucination or had he? Everything that had passed in the house appeared like a nightmare. He felt a rush of astonishment and delight. "Why, Blanche—my dear girl!" That was what she was to him! He was so grateful to her for not being a fountain.
She did not look up. His impression was she had not heard him. Yet he knew she was awake, her eyes open, their lashes winked. He put his hand over hers. The muscles did not stiffen, nor show any consciousness of his touch. She did not move. Her profile had a look of being fastened in an eternal attitude.
He sat down, pushing for room on the step, and put his arm around her. Her breathing made her insensibleness the more uncanny. "Blanche, what ails you? Speak to me!"
Her lips seemed to have lost the consciousness of everything they were made for, speech or kissing. But when he touched her cheek a shiver passed over her, and, as if she had felt the small wing of an insect, she brushed at him. He turned her face toward him and had the full look of her eyes, wide, dull and gray. He could not tell whether they saw him or not. A strange sensation!
"Blanche!" Mrs. Rader's voice broke sharply upon his ears. She had come through the door, and stood now directly in front of them. That smile that had exasperated him so was gone. She looked frightened. "Why don't you answer?" she asked. "Don't you know, it's Mr. Carron."
"Don't you know me?" Carron repeated.
Blanche moved her head with a jerk, shaking off his hand. The concentrated gaze and the voices had reached her, galvanizing her into a consciousness of the world. She got up. The effort of muscles was convulsive, a frozen body waking to living again. The motion carried her to the middle of the floor. She looked around her. It was the impulse for flight. Her body was drawn together for the dash. Even now she did not appear to see them, only to feel them as a pressure, closing in upon them. When Carron made a movement forward her hands went to her face, pressing her temples as if there she felt the attack most. "Don't come, don't come!" she said. Her voice sounded mechanical and flat.
"But I want to talk to you."
Staring between the narrow pent-house of her fingers, her gaze fixed upon him, intensified with the beginnings of recognition. "Don't speak! I can't bear it!"
"But you must!"
"Oh-h -h!" she moaned, turning her head restlessly from side to side as if to avoid some unendurable sight.
"It is a bad business," Carron said quickly. "But it is not what you were thinking. It doesn't mean that things between us are any different. They're not! I feel about you exactly as I did in the first place."
Her eyes, unreassured, unwilling, were fixed upon him as though she doubted what that feeling could have been which he had had in the first place, which he had now.
"I know what they have been telling you," he insisted. "They've been telling you that I have been here only—well—for the sake of getting at the horse. It's utter nonsense! When I came to this place and found you I forgot about the horse. While we were here together I never even thought of it. When I asked you to marry me I didn't care whether I ever heard of him again or not! I wanted only you."
"But then, you took him!"
The cry was there, the prick, the point of all her bewilderment. "Yes, but I saw him! It makes a difference. I couldn't help it then. No man could. Why, he's the best thing I shall ever see! Nothing, nothing I'll ever see will even come near him! And I've been after him so long!"
"Why didn't you tell me?" she said.
He was silent. That question seemed to him to answer itself. He heard a stir behind him, and a breath drawn in like a sob. He had forgotten the third presence, which all the while had been behind him and silent; but now inarticulately audible, sounded an echo to her daughter's cry—understanding of it, confirmation.
"If I had wanted something of you," Blanche insisted in her rapid uneven voice, "I would have gone to you. Why didn't you come to me? Why did you go to them? And they—oh, oh!" She took her head between her hands. "I can't understand it! He has been my friend all my life. I've been so sure of my father. I told him everything; yet he told you, the moment he saw you, everything." She raised her eyes to the little dusty window high up the stable walls as if beyond that she could see the other not present presence. "I've known him ever since I was a little girl, and trusted him, and he said he loved me; but he told you, the moment he saw you, everything." She turned to Carron. "And I am yours, am I? I thought I was closer to you than to any one in the world. I showed you what I loved because I thought that you, you too—"
"Yes, I know," he groaned, "I know, Blanche—I've been a brute. I ought to have had it all out square with you, but it's done now all wrong. You've got to forgive me!"
It was the first time in his life he had ever made that statement. He had to drag the words out of his proud throat. She stood looking imploringly at him as if what he demanded of her was as hard for her as what he had exacted of himself.
"It wasn't done in cold blood; part was done before I even saw you, and after I saw the horse I give you my word I hardly knew what I was doing! I forgot how you could feel! I forgot how every one but I felt." He put his arm around her and pulled her toward him. Her body, tense as a bow, strained away from him; but just the grasp of her, having her again tangibly his own, faintly responsive in spite of herself, was comfort enough after the horrid moments of separation. He pressed her face against his own. "Come," he entreated, "it's for you to be generous! Be good to me, forgive!"
She trembled reluctant, but as if the contact was too much for reason she pressed her cheek against his. "I can't bear to say it. I can't bear to have that word spoken between us! I don't want to forgive you. I'd much rather have you forgive me. I want to have you right, always, always, beyond anything, anything I could say!"
The words poured into his ear in a half whisper, her breath sweet and close upon his face, like the touching of lips. He adored the humility, the heavenly abnegation, the stooping from her wrong and forgiving of transgression—the beautiful fit attitude for women. Since his manhood had stiffened in him he had not known tears; but now he felt them forcing up into his eyes. "My dear, you'll have to take me as I am, an ordinary fellow."
She sighed, and the sigh seemed to take possession of her whole body, shivering from breast to fingertips. "But, if you had only told me first!"
"Yes, but if I had? Why, you would never have let me come near it!"
"Ah, no! and that would have been so much better! It would have saved us all this suffering. It would have saved him too."
"Yes—but—"
"I know what you are going to say." She leaned her head back to look up earnestly in his face. "But it will not be the same with him again any more than it will be the same with us. There'll be that difference always with him for being caught once, even if always afterward he is free."
Carron's hold on her relaxed. "Lord, you don't expect me to let him go again, do you?"
He could feel her fingers that had grasped his arms with such energy growing limp on his sleeve. Her eyes, growing cold, were fixed on his, all the woman, body and mind, suddenly deprived of motion. "You're not going to keep him," she said, and let the end of the sentence fall as if that fact had been fixed before the world began.
"But I have him!" Carron objected. He felt astonished that she did not see the argument there, how perfectly achievement gives the right to hold. That had been the fixed sign of his life. He never doubted it. The comprehension of what she expected of him, the full, preposterous size of it, shot up before him, and he laughed. "Turn him loose again now? That's too much to ask, too much to ask of any man!"
"But you said—" She looked bewildered, a lost traveler, stumbling in a dark continent. "You said it was a bad business. You said it was all wrong—that you hadn't known what you were doing—You asked me to forgive you!"
"Yes, I know," he explained patiently, wondering how she could be so stupid. "But that was for not telling you what I had done, deceiving you, if you like to call it that—not for taking the horse. There's nothing wrong with that."
"There is, there is!" Her voice, without rising, gave a tremendous sense of the rising tide of will. A flush covered her face like a cloud and in the middle of that her eyes looked singularly pale and bright. "He isn't meant to be tame! He can't be."
"Now, my dear girl," he broke in, "we've had all that out before, and it's absurd. Am I to lose the thing I came here for, and have gone through God knows what to come at, and got, because you have a notion or a dream?"
In the pause he was aware of the close odor of the stable stuffing his nostrils. He heard the mustang eating steadily, and the stumble as the creature caught its foot in the trailing bridle. He heard above his head, somewhere higher up than the roof of the place, a restless rushing like the audible passing of the hours. Beneath his eyes the girl's face appeared a silvery oval, most curiously quiet except that her hand was pressed against her throat, and queer little convulsive movements disturbed her mouth. "You asked me to be good to you," she said suddenly. "You asked me to be generous; you said you loved me. Be good to me now. Be generous to me! Show me that what you said is true. Even if you can't understand why I want it, just because I want it so much, because it means everything to me, let him go."
"But, there is no reason in it!" he burst out.
"Reason?" she said in a voice that threw reason into the pit.
"Yes, reason. You are talking about something you don't understand. You think this is a brutal business, but it is nothing of the sort. It isn't broncho-busting. It 's the best, most humane way ever invented for handling horses. It's my way!" He offered that as the final argument not to be doubted. "You saw him at the wrong time. They all look their worst when they are first caught!"
She shivered, and hung back from him, but he held her fast by the arms.
"Wait, wait, give me half a chance. I'll show you how beautiful he'll be when I get through with him."
With a wrench she freed herself. He had held her so fast he didn't know how she had managed, but suddenly he found a fighting creature in his arms; then all that remained of her to his touch was a bit of red and white from her sleeve. There she was, standing at a distance from him—distance between them, and she as strange as another world! All his conscious, angry blood was aware of her repulsion of him. He had expected her grief and rage at the capture of the horse. He had encountered them, and they had passed. She had forgiven him, but this brutal dissension of the will had sprung upon him unawares. He couldn't understand it. It was a cruel trick that had transformed her, a panting creature with challenging eyes. "Are you going to let him go?"
The metallic tone calling him up to judgment rasped on his tight nerves. "No!" he almost shouted the words. "I'm going to break him—do you understand?—to break him!"
She closed her fingers on the light whip she still held, as if it were as much as she could do to keep from bringing it down on his head. Her face was bleak. The high bridge of the nose looked higher than usual and sharp. All the pretty mirage of tenderness had melted, all vision of themselves as lovely bodies invested with radiant intentions. They looked at each other, and knew each other over again from the beginning, people of jealous conceit, without charity, with passionate wills for their own predilections, born enemies, who had thought themselves lovers. Her lips tightened without a smile, showed a flash of teeth. "You can't!" she said.
The words struck him like a flat palm in the face. "Don't you teach me what I can or can't do," he said hardily. "I know my business, and it isn't a woman's business." He emphasized each word with a nod of his head. "You keep out of it!"
Her eyes opened wide as if to take in to the full the altered circumstance confronting her. "Yes, yes, yes!" The words broke from her in a wail more of fury than of sorrow. "I'll keep out of it! I will never see that again! I'll not see you again! Never, in all my life!" She made a wild gesture of hands, sweeping everything away from her.
"Of course, you'll see me again," he said, indignant she should impugn his honor. "I shall be back to-morrow."
"Once you are out of here, don't come back."
He looked at her in stupefaction. What she was saying seemed to him a most absurd and ridiculous thing. Planted there in front of them she appeared as immovable as marble. With a last passionate outburst all feeling in her seemed to have spent itself. Her eyes had a blind look as though they were fixed so steadily on her one determination they could not take in anything else. "I will never see you again," she said slowly. "I wish you had died before I had seen you, before you had done all this harm."
"Blanche!" Mrs. Rader's voice crying out drove against Carron's ears, a cross current in the conflict. The sudden appearance of her with her loosened hair, and the drapery of her blown shawl was like a warning apparition, a figure that had been carried there by the wind.
"You don't know what you are saying!" she cried at her daughter. "What is the horse to you, or fifty like it? What is that to you beside the man you want?"
The girl looked at her.
"I don't want him," she said in her monotonous voice. "He's not mine. I don't know him. I have never even heard of him."
"Don't be a fool!" Mrs. Rader said. The words came out with a dry sound, almost with a smile. "You know him as well as any woman can. You think you have been badly used," she went on with increasing bitterness, "you think you're suffering, you think this is the end of everything. It 's nothing—it's only the beginning! You'll forgive worse things than this before you're through, and you'll be glad to. You don't know how different everything looks afterward. I tell you a year after you're married the horse will be nothing to you, and everything you ever thought or wanted when you were a girl will be like a dream. But you'll remember that man all your life, and you'll be sorry all your life if you let him go!"
As well have spoken to the winds, or Son of the Wind himself, leaping against the barrier.
"See what you've done to her!" the woman cried, turning to Carron. "Why weren't you careful? Why didn't you make it easy for her? Now, there'll be no stopping, there'll be no changing her. Oh, speak to her!" she entreated. "Blanche, listen to him!"
The contending voices beating on Carron's ears seemed to be holding him back. He heard words. He heard, but did not grasp their significance, only felt the force behind them, a tremendous inflated opposition to him. He wanted to lift his arms and dash down the clamor that was heaping up around him. If only they would wait, just wait, with all their demands and questions, which were nothing but words, only words in the air, until the great action was complete. Then there could be time in plenty for talks. He thought he spoke this to them, he thought he said they would have all night to settle their questions in, but for this business of his there was not an hour to waste, not a minute. Yet he was not sure what he had spoken, his mind was too full of a broad threshing tide of mixed emotions. He did not even remember how he left the women, nor at the moment of his going, which might have been the last time he was to see those two faces, how the faces had looked. Their memory was blank, as it is sometimes at crises, when the intense sensations of the soul obliterate the conscious vision. He heard his feet hurrying muffled upon the earth. He heard over his head more clearly now the audible rushing past of the hours. It was indeed the sound of the wind, rising and traveling in the pines above him.