CHAPTER XVIII
GINGER came to him in the morning, riding over the crest of the hill with the sunrise. It was as if she had found the new day, somewhere in the black misery of the night, and given it to him.
He was saddling Mabel and he stopped and stared at her, bewildered, unbelieving.
“I have brought Snort back to you,” she said, just as she had planned to say. Her hair was twisted into a knot but there were still leaves and bits of vines clinging to it, and the bramble scratch was red on her brown cheek. “I was coming to help you, when I found him. The doctor wouldn’t let me come, but I came. I was hours catching Snort, but I was coming to you all the time. I’ve been coming to you all night—all year!” She rode close to him and slipped into his arms, and they clung to each other wordlessly. It was their peak in Darien, and they were silent upon it. Silence flowed over them, clarifying, healing, andwhen it passed it took away with it forever their stubborn pride, the bitterness and the bleak misunderstanding.
“I did try to find you,” said Ginger, lifting her face and looking gravely into his eyes. “In the east, I mean. I went to Boston to find you and tell you—and ask you—I sent a note to you at your house, and I waited in a little hotel. I waited twenty-seven minutes; I know how long it was because I was watching the clock. Then the messenger came back and told me your home was closed and all your family gone to Florida.”
“You came to find me! You did come!” He bent his head again; it was beyond language; there was nothing he could say about it in words. “But I wasn’t in Florida. I was at the School of Forestry, trying to make myself—fit for you. And I was coming to Dos Pozos before I went back. I was coming to you. You believe that, don’t you? You knew it.”
“Yes, I knew it,” said Ginger, contentedly. “I tried to pretend that I didn’t, but I knew it, all the time.” She dropped her head to his shoulder and stood leaning against him so closely that she seemed to be part of him, to belong to him. Neverin the bright days of last summer, in the days of the house built upon the golden sands, had she given herself to him like this.
The morning which she had brought with her grew warm about them and it was very still. He wondered a little at the perfect stillness of the young day: then he realized that it was because the lone lion had stopped calling.
Then Ginger remembered, and looked about her, startled. “Where is your Scout? Oh—I see! He is asleep.” She could see the quiet figure on the bed of great ferns with the shabby little dog charging rigidly beside it.
“Yes,” he said, unsteadily, grief and remembrance rushing over him again. “He is—asleep. My good Scout is—asleep.” Then he told her, not in careful phrasing, like a Wolcott, but brokenly, raggedly, his red-rimmed eyes stinging, his smoke-grimed face working, and they walked across the crisp grass and over the bending brakes and stood beside him, looking down.
Ginger was a little above Dean on the hillside; she looked at him pitifully and then down at Elmer Bunty and back again at her lover. Then she put her arms about him. “I wish you couldcry,” she said. She pulled his head with its fine fair hair down upon her breast. “I wish you could cry—here.”
Mateo Golinda shouted to them presently and rode over the crest. He had come up at daybreak, as he had promised, and he had seen, understandingly, all that had happened with the latest fire, and he had grave words of praise for the Ranger. Then he rode swiftly on ahead of them; he would ask his wife to have ready a stirrup cup as they passed, and he would go on to the doctor’s camp, and tell them there. He would find Pedro on the trail and take him home.
It was just as the Scout would have wished it to be; just as he had envisaged it. “Tied on his faithful horse”; not Pontiac, Chief of the Ottawas, could have come with greater dignity back to sorrowing followers. Mabel, the lady horse, submitted docilely to the strange burden, seeming to understand and to have a solemn pride in the undertaking; there was a statelier carriage of the homely old head. Rusty, the Airedale, heeled steadily; sometimes he lifted his nose and gavea thin and mournful howl, but in the main he padded down the long trail in silence.
Margaret Golinda was waiting for them with hot coffee and with serene and steady cheer; she was as sure, as strong as the hills.
Her bright and friendly eyes grew dim when she looked at the burden the lady horse was carrying. “But it was a glorious way for him to go,” she said. “The doctor told me what was coming; if he had lived.”
“I wouldn’t believe it,” said Dean Wolcott. “I wouldn’t have let it come! I would have fought it!”
She smiled. “This was a better fight. And you must remember this: you gave him all the life he ever had.” Then she turned to Ginger and held out her hands to her. “And you are—the girl?”
“Yes,” said Ginger, gladly, meeting the brown hard grip.
“I knew you were—somewhere. I’m glad he has you,now.” She stood in the doorway of her wise, little gray house and watched them riding away, the small solemn cavalcade.
They talked but little, Ginger and her lover.There was too much grief in the air—and too much quiet and believing joy, but she told him about Mary Wiley.
“And this winter,” she said, “I will be with Mary Wiley again.”
“This winter,” he said quietly, “you will be with me.”
There was something in the brief sentence that made her heart turn over; it was the authority, the conviction; it was all that the small group of words meant, all that it stood for. This winter she would be with him. East or west, going to symphonies and settlements and seeing new plays, or riding the range and bringing in the cattle; it didn’t in the least matter where they would be or what they would be doing: this winter—and all the winters in the world and all the summers—she would be with him.
So they came at length to the doctor’s camp, riding in single file, the Ranger, and the girl, and the Scout, “tied on his faithful horse,” and the shabby, tired, little dog trotting behind, and the gay, kindly people came out to meet them with sober faces and with tears.... “Betcher all the squaws cried likeanything”—he had said, dramatizingthe last hour of his life, and it was indeed “much more exciting than just hearses and hacks.”
At last he was filling the stage, Elmer Bunty, of whom the Scout Master had said that a really determined daddy longlegs could put him to flight—Elmer Bunty, the ’Fraid-Cat; Elmer Bunty, who had fought the good fight; thegood scout. All the prosperous, poised people stood about him sorry and grave, to do him homage.
Ginger forgot her grief and her gladness for an instant when she saw her Aunt Fan coming toward her. She was limping painfully still and her short chugging steps were unsteady, and there was no sea-shell tint on her round face, and her eyes were red with weeping. “Oh, Aunt Fan,” she said remorsefully, “I’m sorry you worried so! I thoughtyou’dknow I was going to find Dean, and that you wouldn’t——”
“I haven’t been crying about you,” said Mrs. Featherstone, with asperity. “I worried, of course, but I knew you could take care of yourself, and I had other things to think about. It’s—” she gulped back a sob—“it’s Jim!”
“Aunt Fan—I’msorry! What is it? What has happened?”
“It hasn’t happened yet; it’s going to happen, just as soon as I get there.” She pulled out one of her flippant, little sport handkerchiefs of pink linen embroidered in blue and dabbed at her eyes. “I had a telegram, a night letter, telephoned down to Pfeiffer’s. He’s sick—terribly sick, and the doctor wants to operate, and there’s a chance—a big chance—that he won’t—come through.” Her chin quivered uncontrollably. “His heart—his heart—” She had to stop.
They stood looking at her and listening to her in deep-eyed sympathy, the Ranger and the girl. Ginger took one of her hands and kept patting it softly.
“Hethinks he won’t come through it,” Mrs. Featherstone went on, after an instant. “And he wants me to come—as quick as the Limited’ll bring me, for he won’t let them operate till I get there. And he wants me to marry him again. He says if he doesn’t come through—” she choked on it—“he wants to go knowing I’m his wife; he wants me to have—what he’s got.” She gave a sudden decisive sniff and threw up herhead. “And I guess it might just as well come to me as to those two sisters of his that are rolling—simplyrolling—already, and always treated me like the dirt under their feet!” She came out of her personal preoccupation for a moment and considered her niece and her lover. “Well!—So you’ve made it up, have you? You’ve come to your senses?”
They told her, without resentment, that they had come to their senses.
“Well, I’m sureI’vedone what I could. I certainly haven’t left a stone unturned— Look here—” she addressed herself exclusively to the young man—“you’ll transplant her from that ranch, the very first thing you do, won’t you? You’ll take her east, won’t you? I won’t have to—”
“I’ll take her east, yes,” said Dean Wolcott. “I’ll take her east with me as soon as I’ve finished here, but I’ll bring her west again whenever she says the word.”
“Oh,Lord!” said Ginger’s Aunt Fan in exasperation. “If you’re going to be as soft as that she’d better have married ’Rome Ojeda. Well,if ever you want to seeme, you can stop off in San Francisco!”
Then she grew tender and her very blue eyes looked as they did when she was thinking about food and making mental menus for herself, and she laid hold of them both with her plump, pretty hands. “My dears, I’m glad for you; Iamglad. I think you’ve got something to hold to, and see that you hold on to it! Henry and I had it, once, and Jim and I thought”—her face contracted swiftly. “I must fly and pack. The doctor’s driving me in to Monterey to catch the train so I can start east in the morning. I don’t know what I’m going to do; I won’t know till I get there.” She shook her head. “The minute I get into New York I’ll have a good, straight talk with that surgeon and see if things are really as desperate— Of course, the idea of marrying Jim again never entered my head. But if I don’t, and he does die, I suppose I’ll never forgive myself. And if Ido—and hedoesn’t”—her eyes snapped blue fire—“I’ll never forgive him!”
Elmer Bunty, the Scout, lay in state in a vacant cabin and the Airedale charged outside the door.The very blond girl went in with an armful of wild flowers and tall ferns, and when she came out again her eyes were red-rimmed. She saw Dean and Ginger and nodded to them, smiling mistily, and when the young man was not looking she held up two fingers to Ginger’s gaze, uncrossed.
Dean Wolcott had to go back to his headquarters at Post’s; there were reports to be made, telephones to the Chief Ranger at King City, to the Scout Master in San Francisco. He would come to her again in the evening.
The doctor was unsaddling Mabel, the lady horse, and he had warm words for his Ranger; Mateo Golinda had told him things which would make an eastern name long remembered in that wild county of the west. He had warm and hearty words for the two of them, his tired eyes kindling. He remembered Rosalía Valdés McVeagh and her tearful old song, but he believed that “the coming of wintry weather” would find them ready and strong. He went away from them smiling to himself, and not looking back.
They were alone, then, save for the grave and tolerant horses, and Ginger went swiftly into hisarms. “I don’t want to say good-by even for three hours,” she said, rebelliously. “But you’ll be coming back; always you’ll be coming back, and always it will be as it was on Aleck’s bridge.”
Snort came nearer and nosed jealously at Dean Wolcott’s shoulder, and he spared a hand for him. Then he looked down and kissed the red scratch on Ginger’s cheek where it rested against his dull sleeve. It was dust-colored, dust-covered. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed aloud, gladly, triumphantly. Accolade of victory; sign and symbol of battles and beatitudes. “Corduroy,” he said, touching the fabric of his coat and of hers, “corde du roi!”
“Of course,” Ginger said, wondering a little, but too deeply content to wonder very much, “corduroy.”
THE END