CHAPTER XIV
THEY had expected the riding party back for luncheon on Saturday, but they did not come, and Ginger was unhappily sure that it was her Aunt Fan who was retarding the procession. Some one raised a shout at six o’clock that they were on the trail above the camp; ordinarily, they would arrive in ten minutes, but it was half an hour before they wound down beside the creek and through the rustic gate. The doctor rode first.
“A fine trip,” he said stoutly. “Yes, it was a remarkably fine trip, but Miss Fanny is pretty tired; it was just a little too much of an undertaking for her, I’m afraid.”
“Just a little,” said Mrs. Featherstone, bitterly. She was bracing herself in the saddle with both hands on the pommel, and her feet were out of the stirrups, dangling. Her hat was pulled far forward and wisps of damp hair adhered pastily to her face, and she was grimed with dust.
“I’d ride right up to my cabin, if I were you,Miss Fanny,” said the doctor, his kind eyes solicitous.
“Yes,” said Ginger’s Aunt Fan through set teeth, “I shouldn’t like to miss anything.”
Ginger, running beside old Sam, thought that he looked haggard and sagged a little at the knees. One of the boys followed them, and with his help she got her aunt to the ground. Mrs. Featherstone did not speak until the boy had led the horse away to the corral, and then, leaning heavily on her niece’s shoulder and breathing hard, she hissed, “If you tell me that you ‘told me so’ I’ll kill you; I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
Ginger bent her head and bit her lips. “Let’s get into the cabin, Aunt Fan.” She was very gentle about helping her. “Now, I’ll get those puttees and shoes off, the first thing! You sit right down—”
“Sit down?” said her aunt, with bitter fury. “Sit down?I never expect to sit down again. If you can get my clothes off me standing up, all right. Otherwise, they stay on.” She braced herself against the wall and looked truculently down at the kneeling girl.
“Wait a minute,” said Ginger. “Aunt Fan, if you could walk up to the bathhouse and get a hot tub—”
“Walk?” said Mrs. Featherstone. “Walk?” She looked as if she would enjoy doing her young kinswoman an injury. “I guess you’d better leave everything on; if you can lash me to the wall, some way, I dare say I can sleep standing up; they say the men often did, in the War.”
“Oh, do let me get your things off,” Ginger pleaded. “You don’t know how much better you’ll feel!”
“No, I don’t,” said her aunt, grimly. She shut her eyes and maintained a brooding silence while her niece dragged off her puttees and shoes and stockings and got her hot and swollen feet into soft knitted slippers. “I can give you a foot bath, one foot at a time, Aunt Fan,” she said, soothingly. “Don’t you worry—I can manage nicely!” She set a basin of water to heating over an alcohol stove and ran back to divest her of her other clothing, and to cold cream the dust from her burning face; sometimes she had to rush into the tiny dressing room and fight down a positive hysteria of mirth, but at last she hadthe large lady cleansed and in her nightdress and kimono. “And now, if you’ll get into bed, Aunt Fan, I’ll bring your supper!” she said, cheerfully.
“I sha’n’t move,” said the sufferer, firmly. “You can bring me food—”
“Yes—a little soup, and some hot tea—” said Ginger.
“Food,” said her aunt, with sudden vigor. “Addedto everything else, I’m half starved. Bring—everything you find.”
She was still standing, braced against the wall, when the girl came back with a laden tray, and Ginger put it on the waist-high shelf which served for a dressing table and she was able to manage very nicely. Nourishment seemed to unseal Aunt Fan’s lips. “I’ve made up my mind about the doctor,” she said, darkly. “MyLord—that man isn’t a suitor; he’s a mule driver! It wasn’t so bad the first hour, and even the second hour I could stand it by thinking about other things, but we rode until one before we stopped for lunch, and then I had to get off ... and to get on again ... and then we rode until six, and had supper and went to bed—tobed!” She groaned aloud, pausing with a bit of buttered biscuit half-wayto her mouth. “He picked out the steepest hillside in the entire Santa Lucia Range, and the one with the most rocks on it ... all those rocks couldn’t have been born on it; he must have lugged some of them there! Then he blew up that sleeping bag;sleepingbag! I’d like to know the village wag that invented it. It was like trying to rest on a school of hot-water bags; first I rolled off one side of it and then off the other, and then it slid down the grade—it was as slippery as if it had been buttered! It slid down five times and I guess I’d have gone straight down to the ocean and I wouldn’t have cared much, either, if the doctor hadn’t caught me as I went past, every time; he was ’way below that girl and me. Finally, he tied it to a tree.... I never closed my eyes all night, and that Dr. Rawdon never closed his mouth all night. I give you my word it sounded as if he was doing it on purpose; I should think his wife would poison him. And when I dozed off at four o’clock—I was so weak and exhausted I just lost myself for a moment—the doctor began calling people to get up! Ginger, I swear to you, if I’d had a weapon within reach I’d have murdered him.That’s all he’s done on this trip—call people to get up—up in the morning, up from a nap, up on the horses again. If he ever gets to Heaven they’ll retire Gabriel on pension and give him the trump!” She stopped, gasping a little, and ate earnestly for a moment. “Can you imagine me, making my toilet at quarter after four in the morning on a glassy hillside, Ginger McVeagh? I’d lost most of my hairpins and my lip stick and my powder in those slides, and I had to borrow from that canary-headed paper doll that’s vamping Dean Wolcott till he doesn’t know whether he’s afoot or horseback. The doctor started us off again before it was light, and we rode and we rode and werode—”
“I know, Aunt Fan. I know,” said Ginger, soothingly. “Now if you’ll just get to bed—”
“Will you wait till I finish my supper? I tell you I’m weak for the want of food. And when we got to Slate’s, late yesterday afternoon, the doctor said I must take the hot sulphur bath or whatever it is, and I thought I would; I might be finished with him as a friend, but I could still take his advice as a physician. Well....”
“I know what it’s like, Aunt Fan; I’ve beenthere, you know,” said Ginger, turning back the covers of the bed.
But nothing could stem the tide of her monologue. “It’s about seven miles from the house, to begin with—”
“Oh, Aunt Fan—half a mile!”
“—seven miles down a horrible trail above the ocean, and that paper doll went with me, and there was no bathhouse; there was no bathhouse but a flag; you put the flag up or down at the top of the trail and that shows whether there’s anybody bathing, and if you’ve got the signal right, perhaps nobody comes down.... There were simply two tubs right out in the landscape; it’s the most indecent thing I ever——”
“But, Aunt Fan, it’s under the side of the hill; no one could possibly see you, and the flag was——”
“What about the ocean?” her aunt wanted indignantly to know. “What about the Pacific Ocean? A steamer and a tug and two fishing boats went by; I felt like a mermaid without even the privacy of a tail. But I didn’t mind the ocean and the boats as much as I did that girl;I detested her the first minute I laid eyes on her, and now she’s my most intimate friend!”
“Aunt Fan, youmusttry to rest! Just try lying down and see if you don’t—”
“I suppose I can lie on my face,” said Mrs. Featherstone, staggering weakly to the bed. “I shall faint away and die if I don’t get off my feet; they’ve ulcerated.” She eased herself with sharp groans, to a kneeling posture upon the bed. “I wish you could have heard the way the doctor spoke to me, coming down that ghastly trail, just above camp. The way he——”
“Now, Aunt Fan,” said Ginger, loyally, “the doctor may have been a little impatient, and no doubt he was anxious about you, but——”
“That’s right,” said her aunt, heavily. “Turn against your own! It was a hideously dangerous piece of trail, and I said I was going to get off and walk—I was being shaken right up between the horse’s ears—and Iwishyou could have heard the tone in which he told me to stay on. I give you my sacred word of honor, no man has ever spoken to me in a tone like that—not even Jim Featherstone at his worst, and as for Henry—Henry would havediedbefore— Well, I’vemade up my mind, all right. Dr. Gurney Mayfield could never make a woman happy; I suppose he might make her healthy, if he got her young enough, but not”—she stopped suddenly—“where are you going?”
“I thought I’d go up to the Lodge for a few minutes, Aunt Fan, after I take this tray back,” said Ginger. “I think you’ll relax and rest if you are quiet.”
“Oh, very well,” said Mrs. Featherstone, letting herself down, inch by inch, “go on and leave me! I came here for you, and suffered and endured all of this for you, but never mind that. Go on and dance!Dance!” She writhed at the thought. “But I suppose it would be easier”—the words came muffled from the pillow—“for me to dance a dance than to—sitit out....”
Ginger put the tray down again and ran to draw the covers up over the plump shoulders. “I’ll come back very soon, Aunt Fan, and please try to sleep!”
“Sleep!” said her aunt, sniffing angrily and burrowing into the feathery depths. “I’ll probably smother, but I guess there won’t be much mourning,” and just as Ginger stepped outside she heardher murmuring—“suppose I’ll have to sleep this way for a month ... thank the Lord I didn’t waste a fortune getting my face lifted—a lot of good it’d do now! I should have had my head examined instead!”
Ginger carried the tray to the kitchen and the kind little waitress said she was glad to see the poor lady’d kept her appetite, and then she walked out into the soft dusk and stood looking about the doctor’s beloved camp. It was not quite dark, but the circling hills were closing in, somber in silhouette, and the stars were very remote and cold and bright; the tall redwoods seemed to stand guard over the little cuddling cabins, and the trim little paths showed up whitely against the darker earth surrounding them. It was a night of brisk weather and there was no camp fire; they were all gathered in the Lodge, and there were leaping flames on the hearth and a teasing tune going on the phonograph, and the sound of rhythmic feet. Ginger stood irresolute; she hadn’t thought she wanted the Lodge’s robust gayety to-night, but she didn’t want to go back to the cabin until her poor aunt had fallen asleep.While she was hesitating the doctor came to the door and called her in.
“I’m might sorry about Miss Fanny,” he said remorsefully. “There won’t be any serious consequences, of course, but I see now—as I should have seen before—that she wasn’t equal to it.” He sighed a little. “I expect my enthusiasm carries me away, sometimes.”
Ginger wondered if the doctor, too, had been making up his mind to make up his mind—and had made it up. He was looking rather pensive, and a good deal relieved.
The Lodge, save where the bridge players sat, was only dimly lighted by Chinese lanterns and it was several minutes before Ginger saw that Dean Wolcott was among the slow-moving dancers. The doctor went back to the card table and she sat down in a dusky corner and hoped no one would see her and ask her to dance. They were all very gay to-night; the whole camp seemed vibrating with the laughing, lazy tune the machine was grinding out; she decided to take her Aunt Fan back to San Francisco as soon as she could stand the trip, and to go home to Dos Pozos.She wanted work. And in December she would go on to visit Mary Wiley.
The dance was finished and another one started, and Dean Wolcott bent over her, suddenly. “Will you dance with me, Ginger?”
“I don’t think—I shall have to go back to Aunt Fan—” she began uncertainly.
“Please,” he said, very low, and she got to her feet. The music was a slow, throbbing thing, built on an old slave melody; there was longing in it, and recklessness, and a little recurrent strain of poignant pathos. They danced twice the length of the Lodge without speaking. Then, without warning, when they were near the door, his arms tightened about her. “Come out,” he said, imperatively. “Come down to the creek; I must talk to you. Will you come, Ginger? You must come.” Still dancing, her feet were guided almost over the threshold, and Dean thrust out his arm to open the screen door.
But he stood still, staring, and his other arm fell away from her, for a horseman was galloping furiously up the inviolate Main Street of the tidy camp. “It’s the Scout!”
“Fire!” shouted Elmer Bunty, loping theMabel horse to the very door of the Lodge and making a spectacular stop. “Forest fire, Ranger!”
“Where?”
Some one had turned off the phonograph and the dancers were crowding out and the card players were pushing back their chairs.
“Lost Valley, coming this way with a high wind and coming fast!” This was the moment Elmer Bunty had been living for; there were thirty people looking at him and listening to him now, and Ginger saw with a little clutch at her heart that Dean Wolcott was not unmindful of it.
“Good work, Scout!” he said roundly. “Doctor, my Scout brings big news and bad news—fire in Lost Valley, coming this way with a high wind.” It was the new Ranger’s first fire, every one knew.
“And comingfast!” said Elmer Bunty, importantly.
Gayety fell from the camp, slipping from its shoulders like a bright cape. The doctor, veteran fire fighter himself, mobilized his forces to join the regulars of the vicinity—seasoned soldiersat Pfeiffer’s, at Post’s; it was said that Mateo Golinda moved on the creeping flames like a wave rolling up from the sea. The women put away their pretty needlework and made stacks of hearty sandwiches and gallons of coffee, and the boys and Ginger rode up to the first fire line and carried them to the men.
Ginger’s Aunt Fan thought the most sensible thing for them to do was to take the stage back to Monterey—agony as the trip would be for her—but she found her niece adamant. “I can help the doctor,” she said. “I’m not going to leave, Aunt Fan.”
She knew that the doctor had a double anxiety; beside and beyond the red terror that menaced his camp and the country he loved, there was his concern for Dean Wolcott. He had stood sponsor for him to these people, persuading their own tried Ranger to go away on leave and give his friend a chance, and now they were waiting and watching to see him make good.
“Doctor,” said Ginger to him on the third day, riding up to meet him with supplies, “I wish you would let me help you! I know how—I’vefought fire at home a dozen times with Aleck and Estrada.”
“You are helping me, Ginger, bringing up our food, looking after things at camp— It’s a great comfort for me to know that you are in charge there.”
“But I’m not really needed there, doctor. In case of danger they could all walk over to Pfeiffer’s—even Aunt Fan”—she smiled a little—“and be taken in to Monterey. And I am needed here; you’re terribly short-handed.”
“I know we are, just now, Ginger, but Dean has telephoned in to King City to the Chief; he’ll be coming in to-morrow himself, with twenty men, bringing their own supplies.”
“Yes, but to-day, and to-night?”
“We’ll manage; we’ll manage.” His eyes were bloodshot and his face was lined with weariness and grimed with smoke, but he pulsed with energy. He was dedicating himself gladly to the wild land which had been, quite literally, his recreation; it had given him endless joy and content, and now he was fighting in its service.
“Please let me stay?” Ginger put a hand on his arm. “I thought you might; that’s why Icame alone to-day, without the boys, and I left word for them not to be anxious at camp if I didn’t come back—that I’d be with you.”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t think of it, Ginger. Miss Fanny would never forgive me; I expect she never will, as it is! No, you must go back to camp.”
Ginger swung into the saddle. She flushed, but her gaze was very steady. “Doctor, how is Dean doing? Are you satisfied?”
The taut lines of his face loosened and his tired eyes warmed. “Ginger, that boy’s doing splendidly—remarkably! I’m no end pleased with him. Fighting like an old campaigner, but he’s trying to swing too much alone. He’s handling all the Marble Peak slope by himself—just the youngster with him. Insisted on it, but it’s too much; he has all the theory, but he hasn’t had the practice. Still, he’s doing great work, Ginger, great work! If I had a man to spare, I’d send him over to him, but we’re short ourselves, and we’ve got a nasty stretch. Well, I must be getting back to work, and you must be getting back to camp. Tell the folks not to worry—we’re getting it under.”
“I wish you’d let me stay,” said the girl, mutinously, but she turned her horse and started down, and waved back at him just before she rounded the bend. He was a gallant figure as he stood there, swinging his old wide hat, fighting guardian of the hills and the trees he loved.
Ginger rode very slowly down the trail, and when she came to the forks she drew rein. The right-hand trail led down to camp, and the other wound back by a rising and circuitous route to the Marble Peak territory. The air was heavily sultry and there was a brooding and ominous feeling in it; flakes of ashes and bits of charred leaves and now and then a spark fell to the ground; the sky was obscured by a low-hanging curtain of smoke. There was a sense of menace and foreboding, of the relentless advance of an implacable foe.
She sat there for a long moment and she was so still that a gray squirrel, anxiously sniffing the sinister breeze, came close to her before he was aware of her presence. She took swift account of her equipment—two large canteens freshly filled with water, a compact little case of sandwiches, a sharp hatchet in its leather case, threesacks tied to the back of her saddle. Then, with her Scotch chin thrust a little forward and her Spanish mouth smiling and tender, she turned her horse and set swiftly forth on the red trail that led to Marble Peak.