CHAPTER X
"Wouldn't you like to know when I'm going home?"
Io Welland looked up from beneath her dark lashes at her hostess with a
mixture of mischief and deprecation.
"No," said Miss Van Arsdale quietly.
"Ah? Well, I would. Here it is two full weeks since I settled down on
you. Why don't you evict me?"
Miss Van Arsdale smiled. The girl continued:
"Why don't I evict myself? I'm quite well and sane again--at least I
think so--thanks to you. Very well, then, Io; why don't you go home?"
"Instinct of self-preservation," suggested the other. "You're better off
here until your strength is quite restored, aren't you?"
The girl propped her chin in her hand and turned upon her companion a
speculative regard. "Camilla Van Arsdale, you don't really like me," she
asserted.
"Liking is such an undefined attitude," replied the other,
unembarrassed.
"You find me diverting," defined Io. "But you resent me, don't you?"
"That's rather acute in you. I don't like your standards nor those of
your set."
"I've abandoned them."
"You'll resume them as soon as you get back."
"Shall I ever get back?" The girl moved to the door. Her figure swayed
forward yieldingly as if she would give herself into the keeping of the
sun-drenched, pine-soaked air. "Enchantment!" she murmured.
"It is a healing place," said the habitant of it, low, as if to herself.
A sudden and beautiful pity softened and sobered Io's face. "Miss Van
Arsdale," said she with quiet sincerity; "if there should ever come a
time when I can do you a service in word or deed, I would come from the
other side of the world to do it."
"That is a kindly, but rather exaggerated gratitude."
"It isn't gratitude. It's loyalty. Whatever you have done, I believe you
were right. And, right or wrong, I--I am on your side. But I wonder why
you have been so good to me. Was it a sort of class feeling?"
"Sex feeling would be nearer it," replied the other. "There is something
instinctive which makes women who are alone stand by each other."
Io nodded. "I suppose so. Though I've never felt it, or the need of it
before this. Well, I had to speak before I left, and I suppose I must go
on soon."
"I shall miss you," said the hostess, and added, smiling, "as one misses
a stimulant. Stay through the rest of the month, anyway."
"I'd like to," answered Io gratefully. "I've written Delavan that I'm
coming back--and now I'm quite dreading it. Do you suppose there ever
yet was a woman with understanding of herself?"
"Not unless she was a very dull and stupid woman with little to
understand," smiled Miss Van Arsdale. "What are you doing to-day?"
"Riding down to lunch with your paragon of a station-agent."
Miss Van Arsdale shook her head dubiously. "I'm afraid he'll miss his
daily stimulant after you've gone. It has been daily, hasn't it?"
"I suppose it has, just about," admitted the girl. "The stimulus hasn't
been all on one side, I assure you. What a mind to be buried here in the
desert! And what an annoying spirit of contentment! It's that that
puzzles me. Sometimes it enrages me."
"Are you going to spoil what you cannot replace?" The retort was swift,
almost fierce.
"Surely, you won't blame me if he looks beyond this horizon," protested
Io. "Life is sure to reach out in one form or another and seize on him.
I told him so."
"Yes," breathed the other. "You would."
"What were you intending to do with him?"
There was a hint of challenge in the slight emphasis given to the query.
"I? Nothing. He is under no obligation to me."
"There you and he differ. He regards you as an infallible mentor." A
twinkle of malice crept into the slumbrous eyes. "Why do you let him
wear made-up bow ties?" demanded Io.
"What does it matter?"
"Out here, nothing. But elsewhere--well, it does define a man, doesn't
it?"
"Undoubtedly. I've never gone into it with him."
"I wonder if I could guess why."
"Very likely. You seem preternaturally acute in these matters."
"Is it because the Sears-Roebuck mail-order double-bow knot in polka-dot
pattern stands as a sign of pristine innocence?"
In spite of herself Miss Van Arsdale laughed. "Something of that sort."
Io's soft lips straightened. "It's rotten bad form. Why shouldn't he be
right? It's so easy. Just a hint--"
"From you?"
"From either of us. Yes; from me, if you like."
"It's quite an intimate interest, isn't it?"
"'But never can battle of men compare With merciless feminine fray'"--
quoted Io pensively.
"Kipling is a sophomore about women," retorted Miss Van Arsdale. "We're
not going to quarrel over Errol Banneker. The odds are too unfair."
"Unfair?" queried Io, with a delicate lift of brow.
"Don't misunderstand me. I know that whatever you do will be within the
rules of the game. That's the touchstone of honor of your kind."
"Isn't it good enough? It ought to be, for it's about the only one most
of us have." Io laughed. "We're becoming very serious. May I take the
pony?"
"Yes. Will you be back for supper?"
"Of course. Shall I bring the paragon?"
"If you wish."
Outside the gaunt box of the station, Io, from the saddle sent forth her
resonant, young call:
"Oh, Ban!"
"'Tis the voice of the Butterfly; hear her declare, 'I've come down to
the earth; I am tired of the air'"
chanted Banneker's voice in cheerful paraphrase. "Light and preen your
wings, Butterfly."
Their tone was that of comrades without a shade of anything deeper.
"Busy?" asked Io.
"Just now. Give me another five minutes."
"I'll go to the hammock."
One lone alamo tree, an earnest of spring water amongst the dry-sand
growth of the cactus, flaunted its bright verdency a few rods back of
the station, and in its shade Banneker had swung a hammock for Io.
Hitching her pony and unfastening her hat, the girl stretched herself
luxuriously in the folds. A slow wind, spice-laden with the faint, crisp
fragrancies of the desert, swung her to a sweet rhythm. She closed her
eyes happily ... and when she opened them, Banneker was standing over
her, smiling.
"Don't speak to me," she murmured; "I want to believe that this will
last forever."
Silent and acquiescent, he seated himself in a camp-chair close by. She
stretched a hand to him, closing her eyes again.
"Swing me," she ordered.
He aided the wind to give a wider sweep to the hammock. Io stirred
restlessly.
"You've broken the spell," she accused softly. "Weave me another one."
"What shall it be?" He bent over the armful of books which he had
brought out.
"You choose this time."
"I wonder," he mused, regarding her consideringly.
"Ah, you may well wonder! I'm in a very special mood to-day."
"When aren't you, Butterfly?" he laughed.
"Beware that you don't spoil it. Choose well, or forever after hold your
peace."
He lifted the well-worn and well-loved volume of poetry. It parted in
his hand to the Rossetti sonnet. He began to read at the lines:
"When Work and Will awake too late, to gaze After their life sailed by,
and hold their breath."
Io opened her eyes again.
"Why did you select that thing?"
"Why did you mark it?"
"Did I mark it?"
"Certainly, I'm not responsible for the sage-blossom between the pages."
"Ah, the sage! That's for wisdom," she paraphrased lightly.
"Do you think Rossetti so wise a preceptor?"
"It isn't often that he preaches. When he does, as in that sonnet--well,
the inspiration may be a little heavy, but he does have something to
say."
"Then it's the more evident that you marked it for some special reason."
"What supernatural insight," she mocked. "Can you read your name between
the lines?"
"What is it that you want me to do?"
"You mean to ask what it is that Mr. Rossetti wants you to do. I didn't
write the sonnet, you know."
"You didn't fashion the arrow, but you aimed it."
"Am I a good marksman?"
"I suppose you mean that I'm wasting my time here."
"Surely not!" she gibed. "Forming a link of transcontinental traffic.
Helping to put a girdle 'round the earth in eighty days--or is it forty
now?--enlightening the traveling public about the three-twenty-four
train; dispensing time-tables and other precious mediums of education--"
"I'm happy here," he said doggedly.
"Are you going to be, always?"
His face darkened with doubt. "Why shouldn't I be?" he argued. "I've got
everything I need. Some day I thought I might write."
"What about?" The question came sharp and quick.
He looked vaguely around the horizon.
"Oh, no, Ban!" she said. "Not this. You've got to know something besides
cactuses and owls to write, these days. You've got to know men. And
women," she added, in a curious tone, with a suspicion of effort, even
of jealousy in it.
"I've never cared much for people," he said.
"It's an acquired taste, I suppose for some of us. There's something
else." She came slowly to a sitting posture and fixed her questioning,
baffling eyes on his. "Ban, don't you want to make a success in life?"
For a moment he did not answer. When he spoke, it was with apparent
irrelevance to what she had said. "Once I went to a revival. A reformed
tough was running it. About every three minutes he'd thrust out his
hands and grab at the air and say, 'Oh, brothers; don't you yearn for
Jesus?'"
"What has that to do with it?" questioned Io, surprised and impatient.
"Only that, somehow, the way you said 'success in life' made me think of
him and his 'yearn for Jesus.'"
"Errol Banneker," said Io, amused in spite of her annoyance, "you are
possessed of a familiar devil who betrays other people's inner thoughts
to you. Success _is_ a species of religion to me, I suppose."
"And you are making converts, like all true enthusiasts. Tell, tell me.
What kind of success?"
"Oh, power. Money. Position. Being somebody."
"I'm somebody here all right. I'm the station-agent of the Atkinson and
St. Philip Railroad Company."
"Now you're trying to provoke me."
"No. But to get success you've got to want it, haven't you?" he asked
more earnestly. "To want it with all your strength."
"Of course. Every man ought to."
"I'm not so sure," he objected. "There's a kind of virtue in staying
put, isn't there?"
She made a little gesture of impatience.
"I'll give you a return for your sonnet," he pursued, and repeated from
memory:
"What else is Wisdom? What of man's endeavor Or God's high grace, so
lovely and so great? To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate. And shall not Loveliness be loved
forever?"
"I don't know it. It's beautiful. What is it?"
"Gilbert Murray's translation of 'The Bacchae.' My legal mentors had a
lapse of dry-as-dustness and sent it to me."
"'To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait,'" murmured the girl.
"That is what I've been doing here. How good it is! But not for you,"
she added, her tone changing from dreamy to practical. "Ban, I suspect
there's too much poetry in your cosmos."
"Very probably. Poetry isn't success, is it?"
Her face grew eager. "It might be. The very highest. But you've got to
make yourself known and felt among people."
"Do you think I could? And how does one get that kind of desire?" he
asked lazily.
"How? I've known men to do it for love; and I've known them to do it for
hate; and I've known them to do it for money. Yes; and there's another
cause."
"What is it?"
"Restlessness."
"That's ambition with its nerves gone bad, isn't it?"
Again she smiled. "You'll know what it is some day."
"Is it contagious?" he asked solicitously.
"Don't be alarmed. I haven't it. Not now. I'd love to stay on and on and
just 'breathe and wait,' if the gods were good."
'"Dream that the gods are good,'" he echoed. "The last thing they ever
think of being according to my reading."
She capped his line;
"We twain, once well in sunder, What will the mad gods do--'"
she began; then broke off, jumping to her feet. "I'm talking sheer
nonsense!" she cried. "Take me for a walk in the woods. The desert
glares to-day."
"I'll have to be back by twelve," he said. "Excuse me just a moment."
He disappeared into the portable house. When he rejoined her, she asked:
"What did you go in there for? To get your revolver?"
"Yes."
"I've carried one since the day you told me to. Not that I've met a soul
that looked dangerous, nor that I'd know how to shoot or when, if I
did."
"The sight of it would be taken as evidence that you knew how to use
it," he assured her.
For a time, as they walked, she had many questions to put about the tree
and bird life surrounding them. In the midst of it he asked her:
"Do you ever get restless?"
"I haven't, here. I'm getting rested."
"And at home I suppose you're too busy."
"Being busy is no preventive. Somebody has said that St. Vitus is the
patron saint of New York society."
"It must take almost all the time those people have to keep up with the
theaters and with the best in poetry and what's being done and thought,
and the new books and all that," he surmised.
"I beg your pardon; what was that about poetry and books?"
"Girls like you--society girls, I mean--read everything there is, don't
they?"
"Where do you get that extraordinary idea?"
"Why, from knowing you."
"My poor, innocent Ban! If you were to try and talk books and poetry,
'Shakespeare and the musical glasses,' to the average society girl, as
you call her, what do you suppose would happen?"
"Why, I suppose I'd give myself away as an ignoramus."
"Heaven save you for a woolly lambkin! The girl would flee, shrieking,
and issue a warning against you as a high-brow, a prig, and a hopeless
bore. They don't read books, except a few chocolate-cream novels. They
haven't the time."
"But you--"
"Oh, I'm a freak! I get away with it because I'm passably good-looking
and know how to dress, and do what I please by the divine right
of--well, of just doing it. But, even so, a lot of the men are rather
afraid of me in their hearts. They suspect the bluestocking. Let 'em
suspect! The market is plenty good enough," declared Io flippantly.
"Then you just took up books as a sort of freak; a side issue?" The
disappointment in his face was almost ludicrous.
"No." A quiet gravity altered her expression. "I'll tell you about me,
if you want to hear. My mother was the daughter of a famous classical
scholar, who was opposed to her marriage because Father has always been
a man of affairs. From the first, Mother brought me up to love books and
music and pictures. She died when I was twelve, and poor Father, who
worshiped her, wanted to carry out her plans for me, though he had no
special sympathy with them. To make things worse for him, nobody but
Mother ever had any control over me; I was spoiled and self-willed and
precocious, and I thought the world owed me a good time. Dad's business
judgment of human nature saved the situation, he thoroughly understood
one thing about me, that I'd keep a bargain if I made it. So we fixed up
our little contract; I was to go through college and do my best, and
after I graduated, I was to have a free hand and an income of my own, a
nice one. I did the college trick. I did it well. I was third in my
class, and there wasn't a thing in literature or languages that they
could stop me from getting. At eighteen they turned me loose on the
world, and here I am, tired of it, but still loving it. That's all of
me. Aren't I a good little autobiographer. Every lady her own Boswell!
What are you listening to?"
"There's a horse coming along the old trail," said Banneker.
"Who is it?" she asked. "Some one following us?"
He shook his head. A moment later the figure of a mounted man loomed
through the brush. He was young, strong-built, and not ill-looking.
"Howdy, Ban," he said.
Banneker returned the greeting.
"Whee-ew!" shrilled the other, wiping his brow. "This sure does fetch
the licker outen a man's hide. Hell of a wet night at the Sick Coyote
last night. Why wasn't you over?"
"Busy," replied Banneker.
Something in his tone made the other raise himself from his weary droop.
He sighted Io.
"Howdy, ma'am," he said. "Didn't see there was ladies present."
"Good-morning," said Io.
"Visitin' hereabouts?" inquired the man, eyeing her curiously.
"Yes."
"Where, if I might be bold to ask?"
"If you've got any questions to ask, ask them of me, Fred," directed
Banneker.
While there was nothing truculent in his manner, it left no doubt as to
his readiness and determination.
Fred looked both sullen and crestfallen.
"It ain't nothin'," he said. "Only, inquiries was bein' made by a gent
from a Angelica City noospaper last week."
"Somebody else meant," asserted Banneker. "You keep that in mind, will
you? And it isn't necessary that you should mention this lady at all.
Savvy, Fred?"
The other grunted, touched his sombrero to Io and rode on.
"Has a reporter been here inquiring after me?" asked Io.
"Not after you. It was some one else."
"If the newspapers tracked me here, I'd have to leave at once."
"They won't. At least, it isn't likely."
"You'd get me out some way, wouldn't you, Ban?" she said trustfully.
"Yes."
"Ban; that Fred person seemed afraid of you."
"He's got nothing to be afraid of unless he talks too much."
"But you had him 'bluffed.' I'm sure you had. Ban, did you ever kill a
man?"
"No."
"Or shoot one?"
"Not even that."
"Yet, I believe, from the way he looked at you, that you've got a
reputation as a 'bad man'?"
"So I have. But it's no fault of mine."
"How did you get it?"
"You'll laugh if I tell you. They say I've got a 'killer's' eye."
The girl examined his face with grave consideration. "You've got nice
eyes," was her verdict. "That deep brown is almost wasted on a man; some
girl ought to have it. I used to hear a--a person, who made a deep
impression on me at the time, insist that there was always a flaw in the
character of a person with large, soft brown eyes."
"Isn't there a flaw in every character?"
"Human nature being imperfect, there must be. What is yours; suppressed
murderousness?"
"Not at all. My reputation is unearned, though useful. Just before I
came here, a young chap showed up from nowhere and loafed around
Manzanita. He was a pretty kind of lad, and one night in the Sick Coyote
some of the old-timers tried to put something over on him. When the
smoke cleared away, there was one dead and six others shot up, and
Little Brownie was out on the desert, riding for the next place, awfully
sore over a hole in his new sombrero. He was a two-gun man from down
near the border. Well, when I arrived in town, I couldn't understand why
every one looked so queerly at my eyes, until Mindle, the mail-driver,
told me they were exactly like the hair-trigger boy's. Cheap and easy
way to get a reputation, isn't it?"
"But you must have something back of it," insisted the girl. "Are you a
good shot?"
"Nothing fancy; there are twenty better in town."
"Yet you pin some faith to your 'gun,'" she pointed out.
He glanced over his shoulder to right and left. Io jumped forward with a
startled cry. So swift and secret had been his motion that she hardly
saw the weapon before--PLACK--PLACK--PLACK--the three shots had sounded.
The smoke drifted around him in a little circle, for the first two shots
had been over his shoulder and the third as he whirled. Walking back, he
carefully examined the trunks of three trees.
"I'd have only barked that fellow, if he'd been a man," he observed,
shaking his head at the second mark.
"You frightened me," complained Io.
"I'm sorry. I thought you wanted to see a little gun-play. Out here it
isn't how straight you can shoot at a bull's-eye, but how quick you can
plant your bullets, and usually in a mark that isn't obliging enough to
be dead in line. So I practice occasionally, just in case."
"Very interesting. But I've got luncheon to cook," said Io.
They returned through the desert. As he opened the door of the shack for
her, Banneker, reverting to her autobiographical sketch, remarked
thoughtfully and without preliminary:
"I might have known there couldn't be any one else like you."
CHAPTER XI
Although the vehicle of his professional activities had for some years
been a small and stertorous automobile locally known as "Puffy Pete,"
Mr. James Mindle always referred to his process of postal transfer from
the station to the town as "teamin' over the mail." He was a frail,
grinny man from the prairie country, much given to romantic imaginings
and an inordinate admiration for Banneker.
Having watched from the seat of his chariot the brief but ceremonial
entry of Number Three, which, on regular schedule, roared through
Manzanita at top speed, he descended, captured the mail-bag and, as the
transcontinental pulled out, accosted the station-agent.
"What'd she stop for, Ban?"
"Special orders."
"Didn't say nothin' about havin' a ravin' may-ni-ac aboard, did theh?"
"No."
"Ban, was you ever in the State of Ohio?"
"A long time ago."
"Are Ohio folks liable to be loony?"
"Not more than others, I reckon, Jimmy."
"Pretty enthoosiastic about themselves, though, ain't theh?"
"Why, I don't know. It's a nice country there, Jimmy."
"There was one on Number Three sure thought so. Hadn't scarcely come to
a stop when off he jumps and waves his fins and gives three cheers for
it."
"For what?"
"Ohio. I'm tellin' you. He ramps across the track yippin' 'Ohio! Ohio!
Ohio!' whoopity-yoop. He come right at me and I says, 'Watch yehself,
Buddy. You'll git left.'"
"What did he say to that?" asked Banneker indulgently.
"Never looked at me no more than a doodle-bug. Just yelled 'Ohio!'
again. So I come back at him with 'Missourah.' He grabs me by the
shoulder and points to your shack. 'Who owns that little shed?' says he,
very excited. 'My friend, Mr. Banneker,' says I, polite as always to
strangers. 'But I own that shoulder you're leanin' on, and I'm about to
take it away with me when I go,' I says. He leaned off and says, 'Where
did that young lady come from that was standin' in the doorway a minute
ago?' 'Young lady,' Ban. Do you get that? So I says, 'You're lucky, Bud.
When I get 'em, it's usually snakes and bugs and such-like rep-tyles.
Besides,' I says, 'your train is about to forgit that you got off it,' I
says. With that he gives another screech that don't even mean as much as
Ohio and tails onto the back platform just in time."
Said Ban, after frowning consideration:
"You didn't see any lady around the shack, did you, Jimmy?"
"Not on your life," replied the little man indignantly. "I ain't had
anything like that since I took the mail-teamin' contract."
"How good time do you think Puffy Pete could make across-desert in case
I should want it?" inquired the agent after a pause.
The mail-man contemplated his "team," bubbling and panting a vaporous
breath over the platform. "Pete ain't none too fond of sand," he
confessed. "But if you want to _git_ anywhere, him and me'll git you
there. You know that, Ban."
Banneker nodded comradely and the post chugged away.
Inside the shack Io had set out the luncheon-things. To Banneker's eyes
she appeared quite unruffled, despite the encounter which he had
surmised from Jimmy's sketch.
"Get me some flowers for the table, Ban," she directed. "I want it to
look festive."
"Why, in particular?"
"Because I'm afraid we won't have many more luncheons together."
He made no comment, but went out and returned with the flowers. Meantime
Io had made up her mind.
"I've had an unpleasant surprise, Ban."
"I was afraid so."
She glanced up quickly. "Did you see him?"
"No. Mindle, the mail transfer man, did."
"Oh! Well, that was Aleck Babson. 'Babbling Babson,' he's called at the
clubs. He's the most inveterate gossip in New York."
"It's a long way from New York," pointed out Banneker.
"Yes; but he has a long tongue. Besides, he'll see the Westerleys and my
other friends in Paradiso, and babble to them."
"Suppose he does?"
"I won't have people chasing here after me or pestering me with
letters," she said passionately. "Yet I don't want to go away. I want to
get more rested, Ban, and forget a lot of things."
He nodded. Comfort and comprehension were in his silence.
"You can be as companionable as a dog," said Io softly. "Where did you
get your tact, I wonder? Well, I shan't go till I must.... Lemonade,
Ban! I brought over the lemons myself."
They lunched a little soberly and thoughtfully.
"And I wanted it to be festive to-day," said Io wistfully, speaking out
her thoughts as usual. "Ban, does Miss Camilla smoke?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"Because if she does, you'll think it all right. And I want a cigarette
now."
"If you do, I'll _know_ it's all right, Butterfly," returned her
companion fetching a box from a shelf.
"Hold the thought!" cried Io gayly. "There's a creed for you! 'Whatever
is, is right,' provided that it's Io who does it. Always judge me by
that standard, Ban, won't you?... Where in the name of Sir Walter
Raleigh's ghost did you get these cigarettes? 'Mellorosa' ... Ban, is
this a Sears-Roebuck stock?"
"No. It came from town. Don't you like it?"
"It's quite curious and interesting. Never mind, my dear; I won't tease
you."
For all that Io's "my dear" was the most casual utterance imaginable, it
brought a quick flush to Banneker's face. Chattering carelessly, she
washed up the few dishes, put them away in the brackets, and then,
smoking another of the despised Mellorosas, wandered to the
book-shelves.
"Read me something out of your favorite book, Ban.... No; this one."
She handed him the thick mail-order catalogue. With a gravity equal to
her own he took it.
"What will you have?"
"Let the spirit of Sears-Roebuck decide. Open at random and expound."
He thrust a finger between the leaves and began:
"Our Special, Fortified Black Fiber Trunk for Hard Travel. Made of
Three-Ply Ven--"
"Oh, to have my trunks again!" sighed the girl. "Turn to something else.
I don't like that. It reminds me of travel."
Obedient, Banneker made another essay:
"Clay County Clay Target Traps. Easily Adjusted to the Elevation--"
"Oh, dear!" she broke in again. "That reminds me that Dad wrote me to
look up his pet shot-gun before his return. I don't like that either.
Try again."
This time the explorer plunged deep into the volume.
"How to Make Home Home-like. An Invaluable Counselor for the Woman of
the Household--"
Io snatched the book from the reader's hand and tossed it into a corner.
"Sears-Roebuck are very tactless," she declared. "Everything they have
to offer reminds one of home. What do you think of home, Ban? Home, as
an abstract proposition. Home as the what-d'you-call-'em of the nation;
the palladium--no, the bulwark? Home as viewed by the homing pigeon?
Home, Sweet Home, as sung by--Would you answer, Ban, if I stopped
gibbering and gave you the chance?"
"I've never had much opportunity to judge about home, you know."
She darted out a quick little hand and touched his sleeve. The raillery
had faded from her face. "So you haven't. Not very tactful of me, was
it! Will you throw me into the corner with Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck,
Ban? I'm sorry."
"You needn't be. One gets used to being an air-plant without roots."
"Yet you wouldn't have fitted out this shack," she pointed out shrewdly,
"unless you had the instincts of home."
"That's true enough. Fortunately it's the kind of home I can take along
when they transfer me."
Io went to the door and looked afar on the radiant splendor of the
desert, and, nearer, into the cool peace of the forest.
"But you can't take all this," she reminded him.
"No. I can't take this."
"Shall you miss it?"
A shadow fell upon his face. "I'd miss something--I don't know what it
is--that no other place has ever given me. Why do you talk as if I were
going away from it? I'm not."
"Oh, yes; you are," she laughed softly. "It is so written. I'm a
seeress." She turned from the door and threw herself into a chair.
"What will take me?"
"Something inside you. Something unawakened. 'Something lost beyond the
ranges.' You'll know, and you'll obey it."
"Shall I ever come back, O seeress?"
At the question her eyes grew dreamy and distant. Her voice when she
spoke sank to a low-pitched monotone.
"Yes, you'll come back. Sometime.... So shall I ... not for years ...
but--" She jumped to her feet. "What kind of rubbish am I talking?" she
cried with forced merriment. "Is your tobacco drugged with hasheesh,
Ban?"
He shook his head. "It's the pull of the desert," he murmured. "It's
caught you sooner than most. You're more responsive, I suppose; more
sens--Why, Butterfly! You're shaking."
"A Scotchman would say that I was 'fey.' Ban, do you think it means that
I'm coming back here to die?" She laughed again. "If I were fated to die
here, I expect that I missed my good chance in the smash-up. Fortunately
I'm not superstitious."
"There might be worse places," said he slowly. "It is the place that
would call me back if ever I got down and out." He pointed through the
window to the distant, glowing purity of the mountain peak. "One could
tell one's troubles to that tranquil old god."
"Would he listen to mine, I wonder?"
"Try him before you go. You can leave them all here and I'll watch over
them for you to see that they don't get loose and bother you."
"Absolution! If it were only as easy as that! This _is_ a haunted
place.... Why should I be here at all? _Why_ didn't I go when I should?
Why a thousand things?"
"Chance."
"Is there any such thing? Why can't I sleep at night yet, as I ought?
Why do I still feel hunted? What's happening to me, Ban? What's getting
ready to happen?"
"Nothing. That's nerves."
"Yes; I'll try not to think of it. But at night--Ban, suppose I should
come over in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, and call
outside your window?"
"I'd come down, of course. But you'd have to be careful about rattlers,"
answered the practical Ban.
"Your friend, Camilla, would intercept me, anyway. I don't think she
sleeps too well, herself. Do you know what she's doing out here?"
"She came for her health."
"That isn't what I asked you, my dear. Do you know what she's doing?"
"No. She never told me."
"Shall I tell you?"
"No."
"It's interesting. Aren't you curious?"
"If she wanted me to know, she'd tell me."
"Indubitably correct, and quite praiseworthy," mocked the girl. "Never
mind; you know how to be staunch to your friends."
"In this country a man who doesn't is reckoned a yellow dog."
"He is in any decent country. So take that with you when you go."
"I'm not going," he asserted with an obstinate set to his jaw.
"Wait and see," she taunted. "So you won't let me send you books?" she
questioned after a pause.
"No."
"No, I thank you," she prompted.
"No, I thank you," he amended. "I'm an uncouth sort of person, but I
meant the 'thank you.'"
"Of course you did. And uncouthness is the last thing in the world you
could be accused of. That's the wonder of it.... No; I don't suppose it
really is. It's birth."
"If it's anything, it's training. My father was a stickler for forms, in
spite of being a sort of hobo."
"Well, forms make the game, very largely. You won't find them
essentially different when you go out into the--I forgot again. That
kind of prophecy annoys you, doesn't it? There is one book I'm going to
send you, though, which you can't refuse. Nobody can refuse it. It isn't
done."
"What is that?"
Her answer surprised him. "The Bible."
"Are you religious? Of course, a butterfly should be, shouldn't she?
should believe in the release of the soul from its chrysalis--the
butterfly's immortality. Yet I wouldn't have suspected you of a leaning
in that direction."
"Oh, religion!" Her tone set aside the subject as insusceptible of
sufficient or satisfactory answer. "I go through the forms," she added,
a little disdainfully. "As to what I believe and do--which is what one's
own religion is--why, I assume that if the game is worth playing at all,
there must be a Judge and Maker of the Rules. As far as I understand
them, I follow them."
"You have a sort of religious feeling for success, though, haven't you?"
he reminded her slyly.
"Not at all. Just human, common sense."
"But your creed as you've just given it, the rules of the game and that;
that's precisely the Bible formula, I believe."
"How do you know?" she caught him up. "You haven't a Bible in the place,
so far as I've noticed."
"No; I haven't."
"You should have."
"Probably. But I can't, somehow, adjust myself to that advice as coming
from you."
"Because you don't understand what I'm getting at. It isn't religious
advice."
"Then what is it?"
"Literary, purely. You're going to write, some day. Oh, don't look
doubtful! That's foreordained. It doesn't take a seeress to prophesy
that. And the Bible is the one book that a writer ought to read every
day. Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs. Pretty much all the Old Testament, and a
lot of the New. It has grown into our intellectual life until its
phrases and catchwords are full of overtones and sub-meanings. You've
got to have it in your business; your coming business, I mean. I know
what I'm talking about, Mr. Errol Banneker--_moi qui parle_. They
offered me an instructorship in Literature when I graduated. I even
threatened to take it, just for a joke on Dad. _Now_, will you be good
and accept my fully explained and diagrammed Bible without fearing that
I have designs on your soul?"
"Yes."
"And will you please go back to your work at once, and by and by take me
home and stay to supper? Miss Van Arsdale told me to ask you."
"All right. I'll be glad to. What will you do between now and four
o'clock?"
"Prowl in your library and unearth more of your secrets."
"You're welcome if you can find any. I don't deal in 'em."
When Banneker, released from his duties until evening train time,
rejoined her, and they were riding along the forest trail, he said:
"You've started me to theorizing about myself."
"Do it aloud," she invited.
"Well; all my boyhood I led a wandering life, as you know. We were never
anywhere as much as a month at a time. In a way, I liked the change and
adventure. In another way, I got dead sick of it. Don't you suppose that
my readiness to settle down and vegetate is the reaction from that?"
"It sounds reasonable enough. You might put it more simply by saying
that you were tired. But by now you ought to be rested."
"Therefore I ought to be stirring myself so as to get tired again?"
"If you don't stir, you'll rust."
"Rust is a painless death for useless mechanism."
She shot an impatient side-glance at him. "Either you're a hundred years
old," she said, "or that's sheer pose."
"Perhaps it is a sort of pose. If so, it's a self-protective one."
"Suppose I asked you to come to New York?"
Intrepid though she was, her soul quaked a little at her own words,
foreseeing those mail-order-cut clothes and the resolute butterflyness
of the tie greeting her on Fifth Avenue.
"What to do?"
"Sell tickets at the Grand Central Station, of course!" she shot back at
him. "Ban, you _are_ aggravating! 'What to do?' Father would find you
some sort of place while you were fitting in."
'No. I wouldn't take a job from you any more than I'd take anything
else."
"You carry principles to the length of absurdity. Come and get your own
job, then. You're not timid, are you?"
"Not particularly. I'm just contented."
At that provocation her femininity flared. "Ban," she cried with
exasperation and appeal enchantingly mingled, "aren't you going to miss
me at all when I go?"
"I've been trying not to think of that," he said slowly.
"Well, think of it," she breathed. "No!" she contradicted herself
passionately. "Don't think of it. I shouldn't have said that.... I don't
know what is the matter with me to-day, Ban. Perhaps I _am_ fey." She
smiled to him slantwise.
"It's the air," he answered judicially. "There's another storm brewing
somewhere or I'm no guesser. More trouble for the schedule."
"That's right!" she cried eagerly. "_Be_ the Atkinson and St. Philip
station-agent again. Let's talk about trains. It's--it's so reliable."
"Far from it on this line," he answered, adopting her light tone.
"Particularly if we have more rain. You may become a permanent resident
yet."
Some rods short of the Van Arsdale cabin the trail took a sharp turn
amidst the brush. Halfway on the curve Io caught at Banneker's near
rein.
"Hark!" she exclaimed.
The notes of a piano sounded faintly clear in the stillness. As the
harmonies dissolved and merged, a voice rose above them, resonant and
glorious, rose and sank and pleaded and laughed and loved, while the two
young listeners leaned unconsciously toward each other in their saddles.
Silence fell again. The very forest life itself seemed hushed in a
listening trance.
"Heavens!" whispered Banneker. "Who is it?"
"Camilla Van Arsdale, of course. Didn't you know?"
"I knew she was musical. I didn't know she had a voice like that."
"Ten years ago New York was wild over it."
"But why--"
"Hush! She's beginning again."
Once more the sweep of the chords was followed by the superb voice while
the two wayfarers and all the world around them waited, breathless and
enchained. At the end, Banneker said dreamily:
"I've never heard anything like that before. It says everything that
can't be said in words alone, doesn't it? It makes me think of
something--What is it?" He groped for a moment, then repeated:
"'A passionate ballad, gallant and gay, Singing afar in the springtime
of life, Singing of youth and of love And of honor that cannot die.'"
Io drew a deep, tremulous breath. "Yes; it's like that. What a voice!
And what an art to be buried out here! It's one of her own songs, I
think. Probably an unpublished one."
"Her own? Does she write music?"
"She is Royce Melvin, the composer. Does that mean anything to you?"
He shook his head.
"Some day it will. They say that he--every one thinks it's a he--will
take Massenet's place as a lyrical composer. I found her out by
accidentally coming on the manuscript of a Melvin song that I knew.
That's her secret that I spoke of. Do you mind my having told you?"
"Why, no. It'll never go any further. I wonder why she never told me.
And why she keeps so shut off from the world here."
"Ah; that's another secret, and one that I shan't tell you," returned Io
gravely. "There's the piano again."
A few indeterminate chords came to their ears. There followed a jangling
disharmony. They waited, but there was nothing more. They rode on.
At the lodge Banneker took the horses around while Io went in.
Immediately her voice, with a note of alarm in it, summoned him. He
found her bending over Miss Van Arsdale, who lay across the divan in the
living-room with eyes closed, breathing jerkily. Her lips were blue and
her hands looked shockingly lifeless.
"Carry her into her room," directed Io.
Banneker picked up the tall, strong-built form without effort and
deposited it on the bed in the inner room.
"Open all the windows," commanded the girl. "See if you can find me some
ammonia or camphor. Quick! She looks as if she were dying."
One after another Banneker tried the bottles on the dresser. "Here it
is. Ammonia," he said.
In his eagerness he knocked a silver-mounted photograph to the floor. He
thrust the drug into the girl's hand and watched her helplessly as she
worked over the limp figure on the bed. Mechanically he picked up the
fallen picture to replace it. There looked out at him the face of a man
of early middle age, a face of manifest intellectual power, high-boned,
long-lined, and of the austere, almost ascetic beauty which the
Florentine coins have preserved for us in clear fidelity. Across the
bottom was written in a peculiarly rhythmic script, the legend:
"Toujours ; toi. W."
"She's coming back," said Io's voice. "No. Don't come nearer. You'll
shut off the air. Find me a fan."
He ran to the outer room and came back with a palm-leaf.
"She wants something," said Io in an agonized half-voice. "She wants it
so badly. What is it? Help me, Ban! She can't speak. Look at her
eyes--so imploring. Is it medicine?... No! Ban, can't you help?"
Banneker took the silver-framed portrait and placed it in the flaccid
hand. The fingers closed over it. The filmiest wraith of a smile played
about the blue lips.
An hour later, Io came out to Banneker waiting fearfully in the big
room.
"She won't have a doctor. I've given her the strychnia and she insists
she'll be all right."
"Don't you think I ought to go for the doctor, anyway?"
"She wouldn't see him. She's very strong-willed.... That's a wonderful
woman, Ban." Io's voice shook a little.
"Yes."
"How did you know about the picture?"
"I saw it on the dresser. And when I saw her eyes, I guessed."
"Yes; there's only one thing a woman wants like _that_, when she's
dying. You're rather a wonderful person, yourself, to have known. That's
her other secret, Ban. The one I said I couldn't tell you."
"I've forgotten it," replied Banneker gravely.
CHAPTER XII
Attendance upon the sick-room occupied Io's time for several days
thereafter. Morning and afternoon Banneker rode over from the station to
make anxious inquiry. The self-appointed nurse reported progress as
rapid as could be expected, but was constantly kept on the alert because
of the patient's rebellion against enforced idleness. Seizures of the
same sort she had suffered before, it appeared, but none hitherto so
severe. Nothing could be done, she told Io, beyond the administration of
the medicine, for which she had full directions. One day an attack would
finish it all; meantime, in spite of her power of self-repression, she
chafed at the monotony of her imprisonment.
In the late afternoon of the day after the collapse, while Io was
heating water at the fireplace, she heard a drawer open in the sick-room
and hurried back to find Miss Van Arsdale hanging to the dresser, her
face gray-splotched and her fingers convulsively crushing a letter which
she had taken from under lock. Alarmed and angry, the amateur nurse got
her back to bed only half conscious, but still cherishing her trove.
When, an hour later, she dared leave her charge, she heard the rustle of
smoothed-out paper and remained outside long enough to allow for the
reading. On her return there was no sign of the letter. Miss Van
Arsdale, a faint and hopeful color in her cheeks, was asleep.
For Banneker these were days of trial and tribulation. Added to the
anxiety that he felt for his best friend was the uncertainty as to what
he ought to do about the developments affecting her guest. For he had
heard once more from Gardner.
"It's on the cards," wrote the reporter, "that I may be up to see you
again. I'm still working, on and off, on the tip that took me on that
wild-goose chase. If I come again I won't quit without some of the wild
goose's tail feathers, at least. There's a new tip locally; it leaked
out from Paradise. ["The Babbling Babson," interjected the reader
mentally.] It looks as though the bird were still out your way. Though
how she could be, and you not know it, gets me. It's even a bigger game
than Stella Wrightington, if my information is O.K. Have you heard or
seen anything lately of a Beautiful Stranger or anything like that
around Manzanita?... I enclose clipping of your story. What do you think
of yourself in print?"
Banneker thought quite highly of himself in print as he read the
article, which he immediately did. The other matter could wait; not that
it was less important; quite the contrary; but he proposed to mull it
over carefully and with a quiet mind, if he could ever get his mind back
to its peaceful current again: meantime it was good for him to think of
something quite dissociated from the main problem.
What writer has not felt the conscious red tingle in his cheeks at first
sight of himself in the magnified personification of type? Here is
something, once himself, now expanded far beyond individual limits, into
the proportions of publicity, for all the world to measure and estimate
and criticize. Ought it to have been done in just that way? Is there not
too much "I" in the presentation? Would not the effect have been greater
had the method been less personal? It seemed to Banneker that he himself
stood forth in a stark nakedness of soul and thought, through those
blatantly assertive words, shameless, challenging to public opinion, yet
delightful to his own appreciation. On the whole it was good; better
than he would have thought he could do.
What he had felt, in the writing of it, to be jerks and bumps were
magically smoothed out in the finished product. At one point where the
copy-reader's blue pencil had elided an adjective which the writer had
deemed specially telling, he felt a sharp pang of disappointed
resentment. Without that characterization the sentence seemed lifeless.
Again, in another passage he wished that he had edited himself with more
heed to the just word. Why had he designated the train as "rumbling"
along the cut? Trains do not rumble between rock walls, he remembered;
they move with a sustained and composite roar. And the finger-wringing
malcontent who had vowed to "soom"; the editorial pencil had altered
that to "sue 'em," thereby robbing it of its special flavor. Perhaps
this was in accordance with some occult rule of the trade. But it
spoiled the paragraph for Banneker. Nevertheless he was thrilled and
elate.... He wanted to show the article to Io. What would she think of
it? She had read him accurately: it _was_ in him to write. And she could
help him, if only by--well, if only by being at hand.... But Gardner's
letter! That meant that the pursuit was on again, more formidably this
time. Gardner, the gadfly, stinging this modern Io out of her refuge of
peace and safety!
He wrote and dispatched a message to the reporter in care of the
Angelica City Herald:
Glad to see you, but you are wasting your time. No such person could be
here without my knowing it. Thanks for article.
That was as near an untruth as Banneker cared to go. In his own mind he
defended it on the ground that the projected visit would, in fact, be
time wasted for the journalist since he, Banneker, intended fully that
Gardner should not see Io. Deep would have been his disgust and
self-derision could he have observed the effect of the message upon the
cynical and informed journalist who, however, did not receive it until
the second day after its transmission, as he had been away on another
assignment.
"The poor fish!" was Gardner's comment. "He doesn't even say that she
isn't there. He's got to lie better than that if he goes into the
newspaper game."
Further, the reporter had received a note from the cowman whom Ban and
Io had encountered in the woods, modestly requesting five dollars in
return for the warranted fact that a "swell young lady" had been seen in
Banneker's company. Other journalistic matters were pressing, however;
he concluded that the "Manzanita Mystery," as he built it up
headline-wise in his ready mind, could wait a day or two longer.
Banneker, through the mechanical course of his office, debated the
situation. Should he tell Io of the message? To do so would only add to
her anxieties, probably to no good purpose, for he did not believe that
she would desert Miss Van Arsdale, ill and helpless, on any selfish
consideration. Fidelity was one of the virtues with which he had
unconsciously garlanded Io. Then, too, Gardner might not come anyway. If
he did Banneker was innocently confident of his own ability to outwit
the trained reporter and prevent his finding the object of his quest. A
prospective and possible ally was forecast in the weather. Warning of
another rainfall impending had come over the wire. As yet there was no
sign visible from his far-horizoned home, except a filmy and changeful
wreath of palest cloud with which Mount Carstairs was bedecked. Banneker
decided for silence.
Miss Van Arsdale was much better when he rode over in the morning, but
Io looked piteously worn and tired.
"You've had no rest," he accused her, away from the sick woman's
hearing.
"Rest enough of its kind, but not much sleep," said Io.
"But you've got to have sleep," he insisted. "Let me stay and look after
her to-night."
"It wouldn't be of any use."
"Why not?"
"I shouldn't sleep anyway. This house is haunted by spirits of unrest,"
said the girl fretfully. "I think I'll take a blanket and go out on the
desert."
"And wake up to find a sidewinder crawling over you, and a tarantula
nestling in your ear. Don't think of it."
"Ban," called the voice of Camilla Van Arsdale from the inner room,
clear and firm as he had ever heard it.
He went in. She stretched out a hand to him. "It's good to see you, Ban.
Have I worried you? I shall be up and about again to-morrow."
"Now, Miss Camilla," protested Banneker, "you mustn't--"
"I'm going to get up to-morrow," repeated the other immutably. "Don't be
absurd about it. I'm not ill. It was only the sort of knock-down that I
must expect from time to time. Within a day or two you'll see me riding
over.... Ban, stand over there in that light.... What's that you've got
on?"
"What, Miss Camilla?"
"That necktie. It isn't in your usual style. Where did you get it?"
"Sent to Angelica City for it. Don't you like it?" he returned, trying
for the nonchalant air, but not too successfully.
"Not as well as your spotty butterflies," answered the woman jealously.
"That's nonsense, though. Don't mind me, Ban," she added with a wry
smile. "Plain colors are right for you. Browns, or blues, or reds, if
they're not too bright. And you've tied it very well. Did it take you
long to do it?"
Reddening and laughing, he admitted a prolonged and painful session
before his glass. Miss Van Arsdale sighed. It was such a faint,
abandoning breath of regret as might come from the breast of a mother
when she sees her little son in his first pride of trousers.
"Go out and say good-night to Miss Welland," she ordered, "and tell her
to go to bed. I've taken a sleeping powder."
Banneker obeyed. He rode home slowly and thoughtfully. His sleep was
sound enough that night.
Breakfast-getting processes did not appeal to him when he awoke in the
morning. He walked over, through the earliest light, to the hotel, where
he made a meal of musty eggs, chemical-looking biscuits, and coffee of a
rank hue and flavor, in an atmosphere of stale odors and flies,
sickeningly different from the dainty ceremonials of Io's preparation.
Rebuking himself for squeamishness, the station-agent returned to his
office, caught an O.S. from the wire, took some general instructions,
and went out to look at the weather. His glance never reached the
horizon.
In the foreground where he had swung the hammock under the alamo it
checked and was held, absorbed. A blanketed figure lay motionless in the
curve of the meshwork. One arm was thrown across the eyes, warding a
strong beam which had forced its way through the lower foliage. He
tiptoed forward.
Io's breast was rising and falling gently in the hardly perceptible
rhythm of her breathing. From the pale yellow surface of her dress,
below the neck, protruded a strange, edged something, dun-colored,
sharply defined and alien, which the man's surprised eyes failed to
identify. Slowly the edge parted and flattened out, broadwise,
displaying the marbled brilliance of the butterfly's inner wings,
illumining the pale chastity of the sleeping figure as if with a
quivering and evanescent jewel. Banneker, shaken and thrilled, closed
his eyes. He felt as if a soul had opened its secret glories to him.
When, commanding himself, he looked again, the living gem was gone. The
girl slept evenly.
Conning the position of the sun and the contour of the sheltering tree,
Banneker estimated that in a half-hour or less a flood of sunlight would
pour in upon the slumberer's face to awaken her. Cautiously withdrawing,
he let himself into the shack, lighted his oil stove, put on water to
boil, set out the coffee and the stand. He felt different about
breakfast-getting now. Having prepared the arrangements for his
prospective guest, he returned and leaned against the alamo, filling his
eyes with still delight of the sleeper.
Youthful, untouched, fresh though the face was, in the revealing
stillness of slumber, it suggested rather than embodied something
indefinably ancient, a look as of far and dim inheritances, subtle,
ironic, comprehending, and aloof; as if that delicate and strong beauty
of hers derived intimately from the wellsprings of the race; as if
womanhood, eternal triumphant, and elusive were visibly patterned there.
Banneker, leaning against the slender tree-trunk, dreamed over her,
happily and aimlessly.
Io opened her eyes to meet his. She stirred softly and smiled at him.
"So you discovered me," she said.
"How long have you been here?"
She studied the sun a moment before replying. "Several hours."
"Did you walk over in the night?"
"No. You told me not to, you know. I waited till the dawn. Don't scold
me, Ban. I was dead for want of sleep and I couldn't get it in the
lodge. It's haunted, I tell you, with unpeaceful spirits. So I
remembered this hammock."
"I'm not going to scold you. I'm going to feed you. The coffee's on."
"How good!" she cried, getting to her feet. "Am I a sight? I feel
frowsy."
"There's a couple of buckets of water up in my room. Help yourself while
I set out the breakfast."
In fifteen minutes she was down, freshened and joyous.
"I'll just take a bite and then run back to my patient," she said. "You
can bring the blanket when you come. It's heavy for a three-mile
tramp.... What are you looking thoughtful and sober about, Ban? Do you
disapprove of my escapade?"
"That's a foolish question."
"It's meant to be. And it's meant to make you smile. Why don't you? You
_are_ worried. 'Fess up. What's happened?"
"I've had a letter from the reporter in Angelica City."
"Oh! Did he send your article?"
"He did. But that isn't the point. He says he's coming up here again."
"What for?"
"You."
"Does he know I'm here? Did he mention my name?"
"No. But he's had some information that probably points to you."
"What did you answer?"
Ban told her. "I think that will hold him off," he said hopefully.
"Then he's a very queer sort of reporter," returned Io scornfully out of
her wider experience. "No; he'll come. And if he's any good, he'll find
me."
"You can refuse to see him."
"Yes; but it's the mere fact of my being here that will probably give
him enough to go on and build up a loathsome article. How I hate
newspapers!... Ban," she appealed wistfully, "can't you stop him from
coming? Must I go?"
"You must be ready to go."
"Not until Miss Camilla is well again," she declared obstinately. "But
that will be in a day or two. Oh, well! What does it all matter! I've
not much to pack up, anyway. How are you going to get me out?"
"That depends on whether Gardner comes, and how he comes."
He pointed to a darkening line above the southwestern horizon. "If that
is what it looks like, we may be in for another flood, though I've never
known two bad ones in a season."
Io beckoned quaintly to the far clouds. "Hurry! Hurry!" she summoned.
"You wrecked me once. Now save me from the Vandal. Good-bye, Ban. And
thank you for the lodging and the breakfast."
Emergency demands held the agent at his station all that day and
evening. Trainmen brought news of heavy rains beyond the mountains. In
the morning he awoke to find his little world hushed in a murky light
and with a tingling apprehension of suspense in the atmosphere. High,
gray cloud shapes hurried across the zenith to a conference of the storm
powers, gathering at the horizon. Weather-wise from long observation,
Banneker guessed that the outbreak would come before evening, and that,
unless the sullen threat of the sky was deceptive, Manzanita would be
shut off from rail communication within twelve hours thereafter. Having
two hours' release at noon, he rode over to the lodge in the forest to
return Io's blanket. He found the girl pensive, and Miss Van Arsdale
apparently recovered to the status of her own normal and vigorous self.
"I've been telling Io," said the older woman, "that, since the rumor is
out of her being here, she will almost certainly be found by the
reporter. Too many people in the village know that I have a guest."
"How?" asked Banneker.
"From my marketing. Probably from Pedro."
"Very likely from the patron of the Sick Coyote that you and I met on
our walk," added the girl.
"So the wise thing is for her to go," concluded Miss Van Arsdale.
"Unless she is willing to risk the publicity."
"Yes," assented Io. "The wise thing is for me to go." She spoke in a
curious tone, not looking at Banneker, not looking at anything outward
and visible; her vision seemed somberly introverted.
"Not now, though," said Banneker.
"Why not?" asked both women. He answered Io.
"You called for a storm. You're going to get it. A big one. I could send
you out on Number Eight, but that's a way-train and there's no telling
where it would land you or when you'd get through. Besides, I don't
believe Gardner is coming. I'd have heard from him by now. Listen!"
The slow pat-pat-pat of great raindrops ticked like a started clock on
the roof. It ceased, and far overhead the great, quiet voice of the wind
said, "Hush--sh--sh--sh--sh!", bidding the world lie still and wait.
"What if he does come?" asked Miss Van Arsdale
"I'll get word to you and get her out some way."
The storm burst on Banneker, homebound, just as he emerged from the
woodland, in a wild, thrashing wind from the southwest and a downpour
the most fiercely, relentlessly insistent that he had ever known. A
cactus desert in the rare orgy of a rainstorm is a place of wonder. The
monstrous, spiky forms trembled and writhed in ecstasy, heat-damned
souls in their hour of respite, stretching out exultant arms to the
bounteous sky. Tiny rivulets poured over the sand, which sucked them
down with a thirsting, crisping whisper. A pair of wild doves, surprised
and terrified, bolted close past the lone rider, so near that his mount
shied and headed for the shelter of the trees again. A small snake,
curving indecisively and with obvious bewilderment amidst the growth,
paused to rattle a faint warning, half coiled in case the horse's step
meant a new threat, then went on with a rather piteous air of not
knowing where to find refuge against this cataclysm of the elements.
Lashing in the wind, a long tentacle of the giant ocatilla drew its
cimeter-set thong across Ban's horse which incontinently bolted. The
rider lifted up his voice and yelled in sheer, wild, defiant joy of the
tumult. A lesser ocatilla thorn gashed his ear so that the blood mingled
with the rain that poured down his face. A pod of the fishhook-barbed
cholla drove its points through his trousers into the flesh of his knee
and, detaching itself from the stem, as is the detestable habit of this
vegetable blood-seeker, clung there like a live thing of prey, from
barbs which must later be removed delicately and separately with the
cold steel. Blindly homing, a jack-rabbit ran almost beneath the horse's
hooves, causing him to shy again, this time into a bulky vizcaya, as big
as a full-grown man, and inflicting upon Ban a new species of
scarification. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. He rode on, knees
tight, lines loose, elate, shouting, singing, acclaiming the storm which
was setting its irrefragable limits to the world wherein he and Io would
still live close, a few golden days longer.
What he picked from the wire when he reached it confirmed his hopes. The
track was threatened in a dozen places. Repair crews were gathering.
Already the trains were staggering along, far behind their schedule.
They would, of course, operate as far as possible, but no reliance was
to be placed upon their movements until further notice. Through the
night traffic continued, but with the coming of the morning and the
settling down of a soft, seeping, unintermittent pour of gray rain, the
situation had clarified. Nothing came through. Complete stoppage, east
and west. Between Manzanita and Stanwood the track was out, and in the
other direction Dry Bed Arroyo was threatening. Banneker reported
progress to the lodge and got back, soaked and happy. Io was thoughtful
and content.
Late that afternoon the station-agent had a shock which jarred him quite
out of his complacent security. Denny, the operator at Stanwood, wired,
saying:
Party here anxious to get through to Manzanita quick. Could auto make
upper desert?
No (clicked Banneker in response). Describe party.
The answer came back confirming his suspicion:
Thin, nice-spoken, wears goggles, smokes cork-tips. Arrived Five from
Angelica held here.
Tell impossible by any route (instructed Banneker). Wire result.
An hour later came the reply:
Won't try to-night. Probably horse to-morrow.
Here was a problem, indeed, fit to chill the untimely
self-congratulations of Banneker. Should the reporter come in--and come
he would if it were humanly possible, by Banneker's estimate of him--it
would be by the only route which gave exit to the west. On the other
side the flooded arroyo cut off escape. To try to take Io out through
the forest, practically trackless, in that weather, or across the
channeled desert, would be too grave a risk. To all intents and purposes
they were marooned on an island with no reasonable chance of
exit--except! To Banneker's feverishly searching mind reverted a local
legend. Taking a chance on missing some emergency call, he hurried over
to the village and interviewed, through the persuasive interpretation of
sundry drinks, an aged and bearded wreck whose languid and chipped
accents spoke of a life originally far alien to the habitudes of the
Sick Coyote where he was fatalistically awaiting his final attack of
delirium tremens.
Banneker returned from that interview with a map upon which had been
scrawled a few words in shaky, scholarly writing.
"But one doesn't say it's safe, mind you," had warned the shell of
Lionel Streatham in his husky pipe. "It's only as a sporting offer that
one would touch it. And the courses may have changed in seven years."
Denny wired in the morning that the inquiring traveler had set out from
Manzanita, unescorted, on horseback, adding the prediction that he would
have a hell of a trip, even if he got through at all. Late that
afternoon Gardner arrived at the station, soaked, hollow-eyed, stiff,
exhausted, and cheerful. He shook hands with the agent.
"How do you like yourself in print?" he inquired.
"Pretty well," answered Banneker. "It read better than I expected."
"It always does, until you get old in the business. How would you like a
New York job on the strength of it?"
Banneker stared. "You mean that I could get on a paper just by writing
that?"
"I didn't say so. Though I've known poorer stuff land more experienced
men."
"More experienced; that's the point, isn't it? I've had none at all."
"So much the better. A metropolitan paper prefers to take a man fresh
and train him to its own ways. There's your advantage if you can show
natural ability. And you can."
"I see," muttered Banneker thoughtfully.
"Where does Miss Van Arsdale live?" asked the reporter without the
smallest change of tone.
"What do you want to see Miss Van Arsdale for?" returned the other, his
instantly defensive manner betraying him to the newspaper man.
"You know as well as I do," smiled Gardner.
"Miss Van Arsdale has been ill. She's a good deal of a recluse. She
doesn't like to see people."
"Does her visitor share that eccentricity?"
Banneker made no reply.
"See here, Banneker," said the reporter earnestly; "I'd like to know why
you're against me in this thing."
"What thing?" fenced the agent.
"My search for Io Welland."
"Who is Io Welland, and what are you after her for?" asked Banneker
steadily.
"Apart from being the young lady that you've been escorting around the
local scenery," returned the imperturbable journalist, "she's the most
brilliant and interesting figure in the younger set of the Four Hundred.
She's a newspaper beauty. She's copy. She's news. And when she gets into
a railroad wreck and disappears from the world for weeks, and her
supposed fianc;, the heir to a dukedom, makes an infernal ass of himself
over it all and practically gives himself away to the papers, she's big
news."
"And if she hasn't done any of these things," retorted Banneker, drawing
upon some of Camilla Van Arsdale's wisdom, brought to bear on the case,
"she's libel, isn't she?"
"Hardly libel. But she isn't safe news until she's identified. You see,
I'm playing an open game with you. I'm here to identify her, with half a
dozen newspaper photos. Want to see 'em?"
"No, thank you."
"Not interested? Are you going to take me over to Miss Van Arsdale's?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Why should I? It's no part of my business as an employee of the road."
"As to that, I've got a letter from the Division Superintendent asking
you to further my inquiry in any possible way. Here it is."
Banneker took and read the letter. While not explicit, it was
sufficiently direct.
"That's official, isn't it?" said Gardner mildly.
"Yes."
"Well?"
"And this is official," added Banneker calmly. "The company can go to
hell. Tell that to the D.S. with my compliments, will you?"
"Certainly not. I don't want to get you into trouble. I like you. But
I've got to land this story. If you won't take me to the place, I'll
find some one in the village that will. You can't prevent my going
there, you know."
"Can't I?" Banneker's voice had grown low and cold. A curious light
shone in his eyes. There was an ugly flicker of smile on his set mouth.
The reporter rose from the chair into which he had wetly slumped. He
walked over to face his opponent who was standing at his desk. Banneker,
lithe, powerful, tense, was half again as large as the other; obviously
more muscular, better-conditioned, more formidable in every way. But
there is about a man, singly and selflessly intent upon his job in hand,
an inner potency impossible to obstruct. Banneker recognized it;
inwardly admitted, too, the unsoundness of the swift, protective rage
rising within, himself.
"I don't propose to make trouble for you or to have trouble with you,"
said the reporter evenly. "But I'm going to Miss Van Arsdale's unless
I'm shot on the way there."
"That's all right," returned the agent, mastering himself. "I beg your
pardon for threatening you. But you'll have to find your own way. Will
you put up here for the night, again?"
"Thanks. Glad to, if it won't trouble you. See you later."
"Perhaps not. I'm turning in early. I'll leave the shack unlocked for
you."
Gardner opened the outer door and was blown back into the station by an
explosive gust of soaking wind.
"On second thought," said he, "I don't think I'll try to go out there
this evening. The young lady can't very well get away to-night, unless
she has wings, and it's pretty damp for flying. Can I get dinner over at
the village?"
"Such as it is. I'll go over with you."
At the entrance to the unclean little hotel they parted, Banneker going
further to find Mindle the "teamer," whom he could trust and with whom
he held conference, brief and very private. They returned to the station
together in the gathering darkness, got a hand car onto the track, and
loaded it with a strange burden, after which Mindle disappeared into the
storm with the car while Banneker wired to Stanwood an imperative call
for a relief for next day even though the substitute should have to walk
the twenty-odd miles. Thereafter he made, from the shack, a careful
selection of food with special reference to economy of bulk, fastened it
deftly beneath his poncho, saddled his horse, and set out for the Van
Arsdale lodge. The night was pitch-black when he entered the area of the
pines, now sonorous with the rush of the upper winds.
Io saw the gleam of his flashlight and ran to the door to meet him.
"Are you ready?" he asked briefly.
"I can be in fifteen minutes." She turned away, asking no questions.
"Dress warmly," he said. "It's an all-night trip. By the way, can you
swim?"
"For hours at a time."
Camilla Van Arsdale entered the room. "Are you taking her away, Ban?
Where?"
"To Miradero, on the Southwestern and Sierra."
"But that's insanity," protested the other. "Sixty miles, isn't it? And
over trailless desert."
"All of that. But we're not going across country. We're going by water."
"By water? Ban, you _are_ out of your mind. Where is there any
waterway?"
"Dry Bed Arroyo. It's running bank-full. My boat is waiting there."
"But it will be dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Io, you mustn't."
"I'll go," said the girl quietly, "if Ban says so."
"There's no other way out. And it isn't so dangerous if you're used to a
boat. Old Streatham made it seven years ago in the big flood. Did it in
a bark canoe on a hundred-dollar bet. The Arroyo takes you out to the
Little Bowleg and that empties into the Rio Solano, and there you are!
I've got his map."
"Map?" cried Miss Van Arsdale. "What use is a map when you can't see
your hand before your face?"
"Give this wind a chance," answered Banneker. "Within two hours the
clouds will have broken and we'll have moonlight to go by.... The
Angelica Herald man is over at the hotel now," he added.
"May I take a suitcase?" asked Io.
"Of course. I'll strap it to your pony if you'll get it ready. Miss
Camilla, what shall we do with the pony? Hitch him under the bridge?"
"If you're determined to take her, I'll ride over with you and bring him
back. Io, think! Is it worth the risk? Let the reporter come. I can keep
him away from you."
A brooding expression was in the girl's deep eyes as she turned them,
not to the speaker, but to Banneker. "No," she said. "I've got to get
away sooner or later. I'd rather go this way. It's more--it's more of a
pattern with all the rest; better than stupidly waving good-bye from the
rear of a train."
"But the danger."
"_Che sar;, sar;_," returned Io lightly. "I'll trust him to take care of
me."
While Ban went out to prepare the horses with the aid of Pedro, strictly
enjoined to secrecy, the two women got Io's few things together.
"I can't thank you," said the girl, looking up as she snapped the lock
of her case. "It simply isn't a case for thanking. You've done too much
for me."
The older woman disregarded it. "How much are you hurting Ban?" she
said, with musing eyes fixed on the dim and pure outline of the girlish
face.
"I? Hurt him?"
"Of course he won't realize it until you've gone. Then I'm afraid to
think what is coming to him."
"And I'm afraid to think what is coming to me," replied the girl, very
low.
"Ah, you!" retorted her hostess, dismissing that consideration with
contemptuous lightness. "You have plenty of compensations, plenty of
resources."
"Hasn't he?"
"Perhaps. Up to now. What will he do when he wakes up to an empty
world?"
"Write, won't he? And then the world won't be empty."
"He'll think it so. That is why I'm sorry for him."
"Won't you be sorry a little for me?" pleaded the girl. "Anyway, for the
part of me that I'm leaving here? Perhaps it's the very best of me."
Miss Van Arsdale shook her head. "Oh, no! A pleasantly vivid dream of
changed and restful things. That's all. Your waking will be only a
sentimental and perfumed regret--a sachet-powder sorrow."
"You're bitter."
"I don't want him hurt," protested the other. "Why did you come here?
What should a girl like you, feverish and sensation-loving and
artificial, see in a boy like Ban to charm you?"
"Ah, don't you understand? It's just because my world has been too
dressed up and painted and powdered that I feel the charm of--of--well,
of ease of existence. He's as easy as an animal. There's something about
him--you must have felt it--sort of impassioned sense of the gladness of
life; when he has those accesses he's like a young god, or a faun. But
he doesn't know his own power. At those times he might do anything."
She shivered a little and her lids drooped over the luster of her
dreaming eyes.
"And you want to tempt him out of this to a world where he would be a
wretched misfit," accused the older woman.
"Do I? No; I think I don't. I think I'd rather hold him in my mind as he
is here: a happy eremite; no, a restrained pagan. Oh, it's foolish to
seek definitions for him. He isn't definable. He's Ban...."
"And when you get back into the world, what will you do, I wonder?"
"I won't send for him, if that's what you mean."
"But what _will_ you do, I wonder?"
"I wonder," repeated Io somberly.
CHAPTER XIII
Silently they rode through the stir and thresh of the night, the two
women and the man. For guidance along the woods trail they must trust to
the finer sense of their horses whose heads they could not see in the
closed-in murk. A desultory spray fell upon them as the wind wrenched at
the boughs overhead, but the rain had ceased. Infinitely high,
infinitely potent sounded the imminent tumult of the invisible Powers of
the night, on whose sufferance they moved, tiny, obscure, and unharmed.
It filled all the distances.
Debouching upon the open desert, they found their range of vision
slightly expanded. They could dimly perceive each other. The horses drew
closer together. With his flash covered by his poncho, Banneker
consulted a compass and altered their course, for he wished to give the
station, to which Gardner might have returned, a wide berth. Io moved up
abreast of him as he stood, studying the needle. Had he turned the light
upward he would have seen that she was smiling. Whether he would have
interpreted that smile, whether, indeed, she could have interpreted it
herself, is doubtful.
Presently they picked up the line of telegraph poles, well beyond the
station, just the faintest suggestion of gaunt rigor against the
troubled sky, and skirted them, moving more rapidly in the confidence of
assured direction. A very gradual, diffused alleviation of the darkness
began to be felt. The clouds were thinning. Something ahead of them
hissed in a soft, full, insistent monosonance. Banneker threw up a
shadowy arm. They dismounted on the crest of a tiny desert clifflet, now
become the bank of a black current which nuzzled and nibbled into its
flanks.
Io gazed intently at the flood which was to deliver her out of the hands
of the Philistine. How far away the other bank of the newborn stream
might be, she could only guess from the vague rush in her ears. The
arroyo's water slipped ceaselessly, objectlessly away from beneath her
strained vision, smooth, suave, even, effortless, like the process of
some unhurried and mighty mechanism. Now and again a desert plant,
uprooted from its arid home, eddied joyously past her, satiated for once
of its lifelong thirst; and farther out she thought to have a glimpse of
some dead and whitish animal. But these were minor blemishes on a great,
lustrous ribbon of silken black, unrolled and re-rolled from darkness
into darkness.
"It's beckoning us," said Io, leaning to Banneker, her hand on his
shoulder.
"We must wait for more light," he answered.
"Will you trust yourself to _that_?" asked Camilla Van Arsdale, with a
gesture of fear and repulsion toward the torrent.
"Anywhere!" returned Io. There was exaltation in her voice.
"I can't understand it," cried the older woman. "How do you know what
may lie before you?"
"That is the thrill of it."
"There may be death around the first curve. It's so unknown; so secret
and lawless."
"Ah, and I'm lawless!" cried Io. "I could defy the gods on a night like
this!"
She flung her arms aloft, in a movement of sweet, wild abandon, and, as
if in response to an incantation, the sky was reft asunder and the moon
rushed forth, free for the moment of the clutching clouds, fugitive,
headlong, a shining Maenad of the heavens, surrounded by the rush and
whirl that had whelmed earth and its waters and was hurrying them to an
unknown, mad destiny.
"Now we can see our way," said Banneker, the practical.
He studied the few rods of sleek, foamless water between him and the
farther bank, and, going to the steel boat which Mindle had brought to
the place on the hand car, took brief inventory of its small cargo.
Satisfied, he turned to load in Io's few belongings. He shipped the
oars.
"I'll let her go stem-first," he explained; "so that I can see what
we're coming to and hold her if there's trouble."
"But can you see?" objected Miss Van Arsdale, directing a troubled look
at the breaking sky.
"If we can't, we'll run her ashore until we can."
He handed Io the flashlight and the map.
"You'll want me in the bow seat if we're traveling reversed," said she.
He assented. "Good sailorwoman!"
"I don't like it," protested Miss Van Arsdale. "It's a mad business.
Ban, you oughtn't to take her."
"It's too late to talk of that," said Io.
"Ready?" questioned Banneker.
"Yes."
He pushed the stern of the boat into the stream, and the current laid it
neatly and powerfully flat to the sheer bank. Io kissed Camilla Van
Arsdale quickly and got in.
"We'll wire you from Miradero," she promised. "You'll find the message
in the morning."
The woman, mastering herself with a difficult effort, held out her hand
to Banneker.
"If you won't be persuaded," she said, "then good--"
"No," he broke in quickly. "That's bad luck. We shall be all right."
"Good luck, then," returned his friend, and turned away into the night.
Banneker, with one foot in the boat, gave a little shove and caught up
his oars. An unseen hand of indeterminable might grasped the keel and
moved them quietly, evenly, outward and forward, puppets given into the
custody of the unregarding powers. Oars poised and ready, Ban sat with
his back toward his passenger, facing watchfully downstream.
Leaning back into the curve of the bow, Io gave herself up to the
pulsing sweep of the night. Far, far above her stirred a cosmic tumult.
The air might have been filled with vast wings, invisible and incessant
in the night of wonders. The moon plunged headlong through the clouds,
now submerged, now free, like a strong swimmer amidst surf. She moved to
the music of a tremendous, trumpeting note, the voice of the unleashed
Spring, male and mighty, exulting in his power, while beneath, the
responsive, desirous earth thrilled and trembled and was glad.
The boat, a tiny speck on the surface of chaos, darted and checked and
swerved lightly at the imperious bidding of unguessed forces, reaching
up from the depths to pluck at it in elfish sportiveness. Only when Ban
thrust down the oar-blades, as he did now and again to direct their
course or avoid some obstacle, was Io made sensible, through the jar and
tremor of the whole structure, how swiftly they moved. She felt the
spirit of the great motion, of which they were a minutely inconsiderable
part, enter into her soul. She was inspired of it, freed, elated,
glorified. She lifted up her voice and sang. Ban, turning, gave her one
quick look of comprehension, then once more was intent and watchful of
their master and servitor, the flood.
"Ban," she called.
He tossed an oar to indicate that he had heard.
"Come back and sit by me."
He seemed to hesitate.
"Let the boat go where it wants to! The river will take care of us. It's
a good river, and so strong! I think it loves to have us here."
Ban shook his head.
"'Let the great river bear us to the sea,'" sang Io in her fresh and
thrilling voice, stirring the uttermost fibers of his being with
delight. "Ban, can't you trust the river and the night and--and the mad
gods? I can."
Again he shook his head. In his attitude she sensed a new concentration
upon something ahead. She became aware of a strange stir that was not of
the air nor the water.
"Hush--sh--sh--sh--sh!" said something unseen, with an immense effect of
restraint and enforced quiet.
The boat slewed sharply as Banneker checked their progress with a
downthrust of oars. He edged in toward the farther bank which was quite
flat, studying it with an eye to the most favoring spot, having selected
which, he ran the stern up with several hard shoves, leapt out, hauled
the body of the craft free from the balked and snatching current, and
held out a hand to his passenger.
"What is it?" she asked as she joined him.
"I don't know. I'm trying to think where I've heard that noise before."
He pondered. "Ah, I've got it! It was when I was out on the coast in the
big rains, and a few million tons of river-bank let go all holds and
smushed down into the stream.... What's on your map?"
He bent over it, conning its detail by the light of the flash which she
turned on.
"We should be about here," he indicated, touching the paper, "I'll go
ahead and take a look."
"Shan't I go with you?"
"Better stay quiet and get all the rest you can."
He was gone some twenty minutes. "There's a big, fresh-looking split-off
in the opposite bank," he reported; "and the water looks fizzy and
whirly around there. I think we'll give her a little time to settle. A
sudden shift underneath might suck us down. The water's rising every
minute, which makes it worth while waiting. Besides, it's dark just
now."
"Do you believe in fate?" asked the girl abruptly, as he seated himself
on the sand beside her. "That's a silly, schoolgirl thing to say, isn't
it?" she added. "But I was thinking of this boat being there in the
middle of the dry desert, just when we needed it most."
"It had been there some time," pointed out Banneker. "And if we couldn't
have come this way, I'd have found some other."
"I believe you would," crowed Io softly.
"So, I don't believe in fate; not the ready-made kind. Things aren't
that easy. If I did--"
"If you did?" she prompted as he paused.
"I'd get back into the boat with you and throw away the oars."
"I dare you!" she cried recklessly.
"We'd go whirling and spinning along," he continued with dreams in his
voice, "until dawn came, and then we'd go ashore and camp."
"Where?"
"How should I know? In the Enchanted Canyon where it enters the
Mountains of Fulfillment.... They're not on this map."
"They're not on any map. More's the pity. And then?"
"Then we'd rest. And after that we'd climb to the Plateau Beyond the
Clouds where the Fadeless Gardens are, and there..."
"And there?"
"There we'd hear the Undying Voices singing."
"Should we sing, too?"
"Of course. 'For they who attain these heights, through pain of upward
toil and the rigors of abstention, are as the demigods, secure above
evil and the fear thereof.'"
"I don't know what that is, but I hate the 'upward toil' part of it, and
the 'abstention' even more. We ought to be able to become demigods
without all that, just because we wish it. In a fairy-tale, anyway. I
don't think you're a really competent fairy-tale-monger, Ban."
"You haven't let me go on to the 'live happy ever after' part," he
complained.
"Ah, that's the serpent, the lying, poisoning little serpent, always
concealed in the gardens of dreams. They don't, Ban; people don't live
happy ever after. I could believe in fairy-tales up to that point. Just
there ugly old Experience holds up her bony finger--she's a horrid hag,
Ban, but we'd all be dead or mad without her--and points to the
wriggling little snake."
"In my garden," said he, "she'd have shining wings and eyes that could
look to the future as well as to the past, and immortal Hope for a
lover. It would be worth all the toil and the privation."
"Nobody ever made up a Paradise," said the girl fretfully, "but what the
Puritan in him set the road with sharp stones and bordered it with
thorns and stings.... Look, Ban! Here's the moon come back to us.... And
see what's laughing at us and our dreams."
On the crest of a sand-billow sprawled a huge organ-cactus, brandishing
its arms in gnomish derision of their presence.
"How can one help but believe in foul spirits with that thing to prove
their existence?" she said. "And, look! There's the good spirit in front
of that shining cloud."
She pointed to a yucca in full, creamy flower; a creature of unearthly
purity in the glow of the moon, a dream-maiden beckoning at the gates of
darkness to a world of hidden and ineffable beauty.
"When I saw my first yucca in blossom," said Banneker, "it was just
before sunrise after I had been riding all night, and I came on it
around a dip in the hills, standing alone against a sky of pearl and
silver. It made me think of a ghost, the ghost of a girl who had died
too young to know womanhood, died while she was asleep and dreaming
pale, soft dreams, never to be fulfilled."
"That's the injustice of death," she answered. "To take one before one
knows and has felt and been all that there is to know and feel and be."
"Yet"--he turned a slow smile to her--"you were just now calling
Experience bad names; a horrid hag, wasn't it?"
"At least, she's life," retorted the girl.
"Yes. She's life."
"Ban, I want to go on. The whole universe is in motion. Why must we
stand still?"
They re;mbarked. The grip of the hurrying depths took them past crinkly
water, lustrously bronze in the moonlight where the bank had given way,
and presently delivered them, around the shoulder of a low,
brush-crowned bluff, into the keeping of a swollen creek. Here the going
was more tricky. There were shoals and whirls at the bends, and plunging
flotsam to be avoided. Banneker handled the boat with masterly address,
easing her through the swift passages, keeping her, with a touch here
and a dip there, to the deepest flow, swerving adroitly to dodge the
trees and brush which might have punctured the thin metal. Once he cried
out and lunged at some object with an unshipped oar. It rolled and sank,
but not before Io had caught the contour of a pasty face. She was
startled rather than horrified at this apparition of death. It seemed an
accessory proper to the pattern of the bewitched night.
Through a little, silvered surf of cross-waves, they were shot, after an
hour of this uneasy going, into the broad, clean sweep of the Little
Bowleg River. After the troubled progress of the lesser current it
seemed very quiet and secure; almost placid. But the banks slipped by in
an endless chain. Presently they came abreast of three horsemen riding
the river trail, who urged their horses into a gallop, keeping up with
them for a mile or more. As they fell away, Io waved a handkerchief at
them, to which they made response by firing a salvo from their revolvers
into the air.
"We're making better than ten miles an hour," Banneker called over his
shoulder to his passenger.
They shot between the split halves of a little, scraggly, ramshackle
town, danced in white water where the ford had been, and darted onward.
Now Banneker began to hold against the current, scanning the shores
until, with a quick wrench, he brought the stern around and ran it up on
a muddy bit of strand.
"Grub!" he announced gayly.
Languor had taken possession of Io, the languor of one who yields to
unknown and fateful forces. Passive and at peace, she wanted nothing but
to be wafted by the current to whatever far bourne might await her. That
there should be such things as railway trains and man-made schedules in
this world of winds and mystery and the voice of great waters, was hard
to believe; hardly worth believing in any case. Better not to think of
it: better to muse on her companion, building fire as the first man had
built for the first woman, to feed and comfort her in an environment of
imminent fears.
Coffee, when her man brought it, seemed too artificial for the time and
place. She shook her head. She was not hungry.
"You must," insisted Ban. He pointed downstream where the murk lay
heavy. "We shall run into more rain. You will need the warmth and
support of food."
So, because there were only they two on the face of the known earth,
woman and man, the woman obeyed the man. To her surprise, she found that
she was hungry, ardently hungry. Both ate heartily. It was a silent
meal; little spoken except about the chances and developments of the
journey, until she got to her feet. Then she said:
"I shall never, as long as I live, wherever I go, whatever I do, know
anything like this again. I shall not want to. I want it to stand
alone."
"It will stand alone," he answered.
They met the rain within half an hour, a wall-like mass of it. It
blotted out everything around them. The roar of it cut off sound, as the
mass of it cut off sight. Fortunately the boat was now going evenly as
in an oiled groove. By feeling, Io knew that her guide was moving from
his seat, and guessed that he was bailing. The spare poncho, put in by
Miss Van Arsdale, protected her. She was jubilant with the thresh of the
rain in her face, the sweet, smooth motion of the boat beneath her, the
wild abandon of the night, which, entering into her blood, had
transmuted it into soft fire.
How long she crouched, exultant and exalted, under the beat of the
storm, she could not guess. She half emerged from her possession with a
strange feeling that the little craft was being irresistibly drawn
forward and downward in what was now a suction rather than a current. At
the same time she felt the spring and thrust of Banneker's muscles,
straining at the oars. She dipped a hand into the water. It ridged high
around her wrists with a startling pressure. What was happening?
Through the uproar she could dimly hear Ban's voice. He seemed to be
swearing insanely. Dropping to her hands and knees, for the craft was
now swerving and rocking, she crept to him.
"The dam! The dam! The dam!" he shouted. "I'd forgotten about it. Go
back. Turn on the flash. Look for shore."
Against rather than into that impenetrable enmeshment of rain, the glow
dispersed itself ineffectually. Io sat, not frightened so much as
wondering. Her body ached in sympathy with the panting, racking toil of
the man at the oars, the labor of an indomitable pigmy, striving to
thwart a giant's will. Suddenly he shouted. The boat spun. Something low
and a shade blacker than the dull murk about them, with a white,
whispering ripple at its edge, loomed. The boat's prow drove into soft
mud as Banneker, all but knocking her overboard in his dash, plunged to
the land and with one powerful lift, brought boat and cargo to safety.
For a moment he leaned, gasping, against a stump. When he spoke, it was
to reproach himself bitterly.
"We must have come through the town. There's a dam below it. I'd
forgotten it. My God! If we hadn't had the luck to strike shore."
"Is it a high dam?" she asked.
"In this flood we'd be pounded to death the moment we were over. Listen!
You can hear it."
The rain had diminished a little. Above its insistence sounded a deeper,
more formidable beat and thrill.
"We must be quite close to it," she said.
"A few rods, probably. Let me have the light. I want to explore before
we start out."
Much sooner than she had expected, he was back. He groped for and took
her hand. His own was steady, but his voice shook as he said:
"Io."
"It's the first time you've called me that. Well, Ban?"
"Can you stand it to--to have me tell you something?"
"Yes."
"We're not on the shore."
"Where, then? An island?"
"There aren't any islands here. It must be a bit of the mainland cut off
by the flood."
"I'm not afraid, if that's what you mean. We can stand it until dawn."
A wavelet lapped quietly across her foot. She withdrew it and with that
involuntary act came understanding. Her hand, turning in his, pressed
close, palm cleaving to palm.
"How much longer?" she asked in a whisper.
"Not long. It's just a tiny patch. And the river is rising every
minute."
"How long?" she persisted.
"Perhaps two hours. Perhaps less. My good God! If there's any special
hell for criminal fools, I ought to go to it for bringing you to this,"
he burst out in agony.
"I brought you. Whatever there is, we'll go to it together."
"You're wonderful beyond all wonders. Aren't you afraid?"
"I don't know. It isn't so much fear, though I dread to think of that
hammering-down weight of water."
"Don't!" he cried brokenly. "I can't bear to think of you--" He lifted
his head sharply. "Isn't it lightening up? Look! Can you see shore? We
might be quite near."
She peered out, leaning forward. "No; there's nothing." Her hand turned
within his, released itself gently. "I'm not afraid," she said, speaking
clear and swift. "It isn't that. But I'm--rebellious. I hate the idea of
it, of ending everything; the unfairness of it. To have to die without
knowing the--the realness of life. Unfulfilled. It isn't fair," she
accused breathlessly. "Ban, it's what we were saying. Back there on the
river-bank where the yucca stands. I don't want to go--I can't bear to
go--before I've known ... before...."
Her arms crept to enfold him. Her lips sought his, tremulous,
surrendering, demanding in surrender. With all the passion and longing
that he had held in control, refusing to acknowledge even their
existence, as if the mere recognition of them would have blemished her,
he caught her to him. He heard her, felt her sob once. The roar of the
cataract was louder, more insistent in his ears ... or was it the rush
of the blood in his veins?... Io cried out, a desolate and hungry cry,
for he had wrenched his mouth from hers. She could feel the inner man
abruptly withdrawn, concentrated elsewhere. She opened her eyes upon an
appalling radiance wherein his face stood out clear, incredulous, then
suddenly eager and resolute.
"It's a headlight!" he cried. "A train! Look, Io! The mainland. It's
only a couple of rods away."
He slipped from her arms, ran to the boat.
"What are you going to do?" she called weakly. "Ban! You can never make
it."
"I've got to. It's our only chance."
As he spoke, he was fumbling under the seat. He brought out a coil of
rope. Throwing off poncho, coat, and waistcoat, he coiled the lengths
around his body.
"Let me swim with you," she begged.
"You're not strong enough."
"I don't care. We'd go together ... I--I can't face it alone, Ban."
"You'll have to. Or give up our only chance of life. You must, Io. If I
shouldn't get across, you may try it; the chances of the current might
help you. But not until after you're sure I haven't made it. You must
wait."
"Yes," she said submissively.
"As soon as I get to shore, I'll throw the rope across to you. Listen
for it. I'll keep throwing until it strikes where you can get it."
"I'll give you the light."
"That may help. Then you make fast under the forward seat of the boat.
Be sure it's tight."
"Yes, Ban."
"Twitch three times on the rope to let me know when you're ready and
shove out and upstream as strongly as you can."
"Can you hold it against the current?"
"I must. If I do, you'll drift around against the bank. If I don't--I'll
follow you."
"No, Ban," she implored. "Not you, too. There's no need--"
"I'll follow you," said he. "Now, Io."
He kissed her gently, stepped back, took a run and flung himself upward
and outward into the ravening current.
She saw a foaming thresh that melted into darkness....
Time seemed to have stopped for her. She waited, waited, waited in a
world wherein only Death waited with her.... Ban was now limp and
lifeless somewhere far downstream, asprawl in the swiftness, rolling a
pasty face to the sky like that grisly wayfarer who had hailed them
silently in the upper reach of the river, a messenger and prophet of
their fate. The rising waters eddied about her feet. The boat stirred
uneasily. Mechanically she drew it back from the claim of the flood. A
light blow fell upon her cheek and neck.
It was the rope.
Instantly and intensely alive, Io tautened it and felt the jerk of Ban's
signal. With expert hands she made it fast, shipped the oars, twitched
the cord thrice, and, venturing as far as she dared into the deluge,
pushed with all her force and threw herself over the stern.
The rope twanged and hummed like a gigantic bass-string. Io crawled to
the oars, felt the gunwale dip and right again, and, before she could
take a stroke, was pressed against the far bank. She clambered out and
went to Banneker, guiding herself by the light. His face, in the feeble
glow, shone, twisted in agony. He was shaking from head to foot. The
other end of the rope which had brought her to safety was knotted fast
around his waist.... So he would have followed, as he said!
Through Io's queer, inconsequent brain flitted a grotesque conjecture:
what would the newspapers make of it if she had been found, washed up on
the river-bank, and the Manzanita agent of the Atkinson and St. Philip
Railroad Company drowned and haltered by a long tether to his boat, near
by? A sensational story!...
She went to Banneker, still helplessly shaking, and put her firm, slight
hands on his shoulders.
"It's all right, Ban," she said soothingly. "We're out of it."
CHAPTER XIV
Успех, глава 10 -14
© Copyright: Вячеслав Толстов, 2023
Свидетельство о публикации №223081501351
Свидетельство о публикации №223081501351
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