CHAPTER XVI
AT first, when she set out on the trail for Marble Peak, Ginger hurried a little. She had a guilty fear that the doctor might have read her mutinous purpose in her face and ridden after her to make sure, but when ten minutes had passed she knew she was not being followed, and she ceased to urge her mount. The fire fighters had exhausted the camp’s supply of good horses and this was an old and spiritless beast, hardly more than adequate for the daily trip with supplies.
“Easy, now, Pedro,” she patted the lean neck. “We’ll take it easy, old boy.” She saw she would have to nurse him along very carefully to make the ride, but once they came up with Dean he could rest, and she felt rather ruthless. Her only real concern was getting to Dean, and she felt as she had felt that day in Boston, waiting in the hushed little hotel for an answer to her note. Yet there was a great and shining difference.That had been undertaken as a duty of decent reparation; beyond the fact that she was going to ask his pardon or at least to state her regret for her crude and callous behavior at Dos Pozos, she had not mentally set the stage.
This was no penitential pilgrimage but a glad and glorious journey, ending, as journeys should, in lovers’ meeting, and this time she had indeed set the stage; she had been doing it ever since she had felt the sudden tightening of his arms about her as they danced in the Lodge to the wheedling, coaxing music of the old slave tune. “Come out!” he had said, imperatively. “Come down to the creek; I must talk to you. Will you come, Ginger? Youmustcome!” She remembered every commonplace syllable and invested it with poesy and ardor, and she planned rosily for the scene of their reunion and reconciliation. She wished a little that she might have worn her riding suit of deep cream linen with the scarlet tie and hat band instead of her seasoned corduroy, but corduroy was the only wear for work of this sort, and Dean Wolcott himself, the new Dean Wolcott, wore corduroy now; he had put on the official uniform of the outdoor working west.And besides, she told herself contentedly, she was bringing him other adornments; she took stock, with a proud humility which was new and strange to Ginger McVeagh, of her more careful speech, her gentler judgments, the clever choosing of her clothes, her honest appreciation of the things of his world. Her heart warmed at the memory of Dean Wolcott’s sympathy with Elmer Bunty’s great moment, the other night, riding madly up on the lady horse to bring the news of the forest fire, of the way in which he had kept his Scout in the limelight for an instant. Dr. Mayfield had told her that the child would never live to grow up; he gave him, in fact, hardly more than a year, but Ginger, riding the high wave of happiness, told herself that she would prove her friend wrong for once in his wise life. Elmer Bunty should go to Dos Pozos to be cuddled by old Manuela and fed by Ling, to drink golden milk and sleep out in the tonic air all through the calendar; death on a pale horse riding should be routed—she felt strong and victorious as she thought of it. Great surges of joy went over her as they had done when she sat in her perch at Carnegie Hall, hearing her first symphonies.
But no surges of joy of any size whatever were going over Pedro; the wretched animal was plodding miserably, his head hanging, and the girl drew rein, dismounted, and pulled off the saddle with guilty haste. She would give him a half hour of rest while she ate her supper, and then go on at a very moderate pace, walking where the grade was steepest.
The horse managed a precarious roll where the trail widened a trifle and stayed level for a brief space, and then he cropped without enthusiasm at the sere grass. Ginger ate her substantial sandwich with hearty young hunger and regarded the rest of her supply somewhat wistfully: she could have finished it, to the last crumb, but she was sure Dean Wolcott would need extra rations. It was an amazing thing: at Dos Pozos, when he had been weak and wasted, she had been hard; now that he was as fit as she was herself, she yearned over him. She had met his weakness with scornful strength, and now she met his strength with a rich and mothering tenderness.
Dusk was creeping up the cañon when she flung the saddle on Pedro again. “We’ll do it in two hours,” she told herself, “taking it slowly.” Itwas hard to be hobbled by a stumbling, tired, old horse when she wanted a Pegasus, a steed who could—
She halted sharply, the bridle in her hand. A horse was coming down the trail, running, plunging, the stones scattering before his flying feet, and it sounded like disaster of some sort. People did not ride down the Marble Peak trail at a pace like that. An instant later Snort came into view and with him came reassurance, for he was without saddle and bridle and a long grazing rope swung behind him. One never tied Snort securely, the girl remembered, because of his dangerous habit of pulling back, and he had evidently become terrorized at the approach of the fire, discovered that his rope was merely wound in and out of a stout bush, and taken to his heels.
He halted now, at sight of her, trumpeting as wildly as ever in the days of ’Rome Ojeda, clearly considered the inadvisability of trying to pass her and her mount, wheeled, started up the trail again in the direction from which he had come, remembered the thing that had frightened him, turned again and plunged down the steep incline whichled to the cañon’s floor. She could hear him crashing, fighting his way through the tangle of brush and low-growing shrubs and tripping vines, snorting as he went.
He was down at last, but hysterical with nerves; he could be heard dashing forward, dashing back, stumbling, plunging into traps and fighting his way out again; shrilly sounding his fear.
Ginger nodded with satisfaction. Here was a task; here was a thing to do for Dean. There would be a tremendous satisfaction in bringing Snort back to him.... The stage for their meeting was hastily reset. Not on the tired and stumbling Pedro, after all, but mounted on the historic steed who had parted them and was to bring them together again.
“I’ve brought Snort back to you!”
It made good imagining, the look on his face when he should see the two of them.
She tied the uninterested Pedro securely and hung her saddle with the canteens and sacks and the packet of sandwiches over a limb, took her little hatchet in hand and climbed carefully down into the cañon. It was too dimly lighted to make out the animal at the bottom, but he was clearlyto be heard, and she called to him, soothingly, coaxingly, cajolingly, and he stopped plunging to listen for an instant.
“Good old boy, Snort ... good ... old ... boy!” The velvet voice steadied him. She could hear his great gasping breaths but he was not trumpeting; it was going to be easy, after all, and she was conscious, tolerantly amused at herself, of a little regret. The longer the chase, the harder the struggle, the more she was doing; the handsomer her service, the more dramatic her entrance. Dusk was coming rapidly up above and the green depths were in dark shadow; she should have brought her flash light. If the pixie steed refused to be taken in hand at once, if there ensued even a slight delay, they would be in darkness. With a sigh of impatience at her heedlessness, Ginger turned and scrambled up the steep incline again, slipping, pulling herself up by vines and roots, reached the trail, dug out the flash, and started down again.
This time, a little breathless, hurrying, careless of the failing light, she did not watch her footholds and a large and permanent looking stoneturned under her, almost tripping her, and went hurtling down.
“It won’t—it won’t—itwon’thit him!” she told herself vehemently, in prayerful assertion, but, if it did not, it grazed him closely enough to have the same result, for she could hear him rearing and crashing in a way that made his former panic seem like composure by comparison. Presently, the sounds warned her, he had headed back toward Marble Peak and the conflagration.
And now the episode left off being an amusing little adventure and assumed the outlines of a grim task. Ginger shook off her temper and her disgust at her own carelessness, and looked intently about her. It would be half an hour, and perhaps more, before she brought Snort up, and she must make sure of finding her station on the trail, and Pedro. She mentally catalogued an oddly square rock, a grotesquely twisted root, took off her scarlet bandanna and tied it to a low limb, before she made her cautious descent.
Two hours, dark and difficult ones, were to pass before she found her landmarks again. Her little wish to do her lover a service had come largelytrue: she had toiled in his cause as she had never toiled before in all her vigorous young life.
Snort had reverted swiftly to type; he was ’Rome Ojeda’s horse, and not Dean Wolcott’s. Memories of remorseless punishments for misdemeanors like this came back to him; clearly he weighed in his mind the relative tragedies of proceeding into the heart of the burning district and of permitting himself to be caught. He would turn, snorting with fear as a gust of wind brought hot smoke and stinging sparks, and start backward, yet when Ginger, edging and inching craftily closer, the velvet of her voice roughening with huskiness—“Steady, boy, Snort ... good ... old ... boy ...”—put out her hand to take his rope he would wheel again, choosing the red danger ahead.
Ginger’s hat went in the first quarter of an hour and her hair was dragged down and filled with leaves and bits of broken vines and there was a red scratch on her cheek; she was hot, breathless, dripping. The easy and comfortable thing which she would have called her religion was a quaint quilting of Alexander McVeagh’s rugged Scotch Presbyterianism and old Manuela’s handy andavailablesantos, Aleck’s sane and hearty creed of playing the game, and her own childishly cherished habit of wishing on white horses and red-headed girls, on loads of hay and shooting stars, and she brought it out now and aired it and shook it into service and kept up her courage, for there was a brief period when it seemed that she would not only fail in bringing the wild horse to her lover but would inevitably lose herself.
“Steady, Snort, old boy ... good ... old ... boy!” she would croon, adding, between tight shut teeth—“Devil—demon—fiend!Oh, if I only knew what it was that Balaam did to the horse inThe VirginianI’d do it to you—when I catch you—onlyharder!—No, I wouldn’t, Snort, poor old boy, dear old boy.... Good ... old ... boy....”
The climax came suddenly, after all. Snort twisted his rope round a tree, went three times round himself, and was prisoned, pulling back, snorting shrilly, throwing himself twice, but standing still at last, showing the whites of his eyes in the moonlight which now poured down into the cañon in a silver flood, his heaving sides lathered with sweat.
Ginger sat limply down close by and leaned her head back against a cool rock. “I tried just as hard as that, to get away from him—and stay away from him—” she said, grimly. “But I’m going back, and you’re going with me.” She sighed, utterly tired and utterly content. “It sure does look,” she spoke as ’Rome Ojeda would have spoken, “it sure does look like he’s gentled us both!”
Presently, when girl and beast were breathing normally again, she led him back to the point where she had left the trail, and Pedro made his one valuable contribution to the expedition by whinnying loudly and guiding them up.
Ginger flung the saddle blanket over Snort’s steaming back, turned up her collar, and sat down, the runaway’s rope in her hand, to wait for the first graying of the dawn.
“I have brought Snort back to you.”
After all, she was going to be able to say it. She folded her arms across her knees and laid her throbbing head on them, and slept a little in snatches, dreaming high-colored, stirring dreams.