CHAPTER XLVIIITHE GREAT LODESTONE

IT WAS morning of an autumn day on the old rancho of Laguna de Sol. Although flowers lacked, the leaves of the live oaks held their perennial course unchanged, the heavy pendants of the Spanish moss aiding them against the rays of a sun still ardent. The air was almost without movement, too richly languorous for any exercise—sweet, rich, mellow and golden as honey, breath of a world caring for neither past nor future.

The surface of the placid fields where grain had been now seemed as though covered by a moving carpet of gray and gold—countless field larks, come to this gentle region for their wintering. In the great lagoon beyond the live-oak groves countless wild fowl, also from north of thirty-six, had come below the edge of winter for their annual vacation. The cattle lay contented in the sun, horses stood dozing, free of care. Del Sol never had seemed more beautiful or shown more rapport with the mere facts of life.

Anastasie Lockhart, mistress of Del Sol, was in her dooryard, looking after morning-glory seed for the coming year. These and other climbing things had well-nigh taken possession of the big house during her absence north the past summer. There had been no hand to give the old place any ministrations, and in the fecund Southwest the fight of civilization against an eager Nature, claiming its own, is a continuous one. Years of poverty, which had meant also years of negligence, now obliged youth and inexperience to begin in a weak way the task of restoration. Del Sol had lacked the strong and resourceful hand of its founder.

Not that courage and resourcefulness lacked for the present owner of Del Sol—nor, indeed, that material means now lacked, after the astonishingly successful venture of the northern drive. And the steady ruin into which the place had advanced had been due more than anything else to an actual lack of material resources.

Anastasie Lockhart had been poor. But now she was not poor. The venture north had brought her in touch with the Aladdin lamp. Now she could hold up her head and look all the world in the face. Now she could pay her debts and be once more a Lockhart of the Lockharts, worthy when on her knees to look her departed father’s shade calmly in the face and to declare his faith kept with all the world.

This very morning Anastasie Lockhart had paid her men their wages for the month; indeed, but just now she had come from the cook-house door; where not so long before she had stood, haltingly confessing to them that she could not pay her laborers their hire. It was different to-day.

Not all the old Del Sol men now were at their table, for some had taken service north, perhaps never again to set foot on Texas soil, and others had not yet drifted home from seeing the world. Buck, the cook, still was there; and it appeared that both he and Milly had agreed to forget the past of Milly’s missing husband. Milly agreeing that she had “taken up with Buck,” believing him to be the moral superior of the missing Jim. The place of Del Williams was vacant, nor was Len Hersey’s light garrulity now audible. No heirs of Cal Dalhart had been found.

There were new men on Del Sol, new horses and new cows. Old Jim Nabours, when he swung into saddle that morning, had at his side only one man of the old Del Sol clan—the boy Cinquo Centavos, now resplendent in the full regalia of the range and much more the man for his adventurings in far lands. Both these had stood at Blancocito’s head to assist their mistress in mounting when she rode back to the big house.

So now Taisie Lockhart was pretty much alone as she pottered about the galleries of the old house, searching for morning-glory seeds, putting them into her cupped left hand. She was in riding habit now, her male attire discarded, and a sidesaddle fretted Blancocito; not the old saddle of low horn and double cinch, which he had yielded only after a long and bitter fight against the new substitute.

What a change since that other morning of the spring, half a year ago, when she had returned from the cook-house door! Could this unsmiling young lady, tall and dignified, well clad, be the same Taisie Lockhart of that other day? On which day had she been rich, on which day poor? A world intervened between the two. Anastasie Lockhart, a new little droop at the corner of her mouth, knew that were it possible she would give this day for that other—that day when she was poor. That was when first she saw a tall young man ride in at her gate, whom she had never seen again since their cold parting in the street of Abilene.

Some thought, some sound unrecognized, something in the air—she knew not what—caused Taisie’s cupped hand to cease accumulating morning-glory seeds, the fingers of the other to halt arrested in the air. She turned. That same rider now was entering her gate.

The face of the mistress of Del Sol went pale. She dropped her morning-glory seeds.

The rider, tall, slender, very straight, very easy in saddle, came on in directly through the gate, which a darky boy had opened for him. But he did not this morning, as upon that other morning, ride to the cook-house yard. Upon the contrary, at the same steady gentle and unbroken trot, he rode up, unfaltering, unagitated, to the gallery of Del Sol. His hat in hand, he dismounted not a dozen paces from where stood Anastasie, dumb and motionless, pale, even in the Texan sun.

He also, for the time, was dumb. He came straight up to her without speaking. She noticed certain things, intimately shrewd, her memory holding every detail of the man whom for months she had known she loved in spite of every endeavor.

He was scrupulously neat, now, as he had always been. His clothing was new and good. His collar and his cuffs were white—pure white, in good linen. Once—she vaguely remembered it now—he had not worn white; had explained to her some reason for the dull red of his linen.

And there was another change, she was sure of this—he was unarmed! The heavy weapons no longer swung at his belt, nor even showed in his saddle holsters. For the first time since she had known him she saw him weaponless.

He seemed another man, for some reason, she could not tell what. The same imperturbable calm, the same level gaze of the eye, the same inscrutable mask of countenance were his, and still he seemed to retain his habit of casting the burden of speech upon others than himself; but there was about him something different. Sometimes we feel some such indefinable change in a man who has suffered a great sickness or met with some great reverse.

“I wish you good morning, Mr. McMasters,” said Anastasie, half irritated at the length of his silence, though never had his eyes wavered from her face. He had wanted to speak, but his lifelong reticence glued his lips.

He made no immediate reply, disdainful as usual of the irrelevant, the inconsequent. At length he drew from his inner pocket a folded bit of paper.

“I have come to bring you this, Miss Lockhart,” said he, and gave it her.

She looked at it, recognized it, and colored deeply.

“It was my wish that you should have it,” said she.

“No, I cannot.”

“And why not? It is only right and fair that I should pay my debts, the same as any other person. My father paid his. I sent you the draft as I was bound to do. I wanted to pay you—especially wanted to pay you.” Her color heightened.

“Why?”

“Why? To square my obligations to you. They were enough. If I had known before I started what a load of debt you had put on me, there would never have been a Del Sol cow driven north. I’d have died, starved, rather than have been under any such obligation to you! I’d have choked if I’d known I was eating your bread!”

“And you think you have paid all your debt now with this?”

She twisted the paper of the bank draft in her fingers, unconsciously dropped it on the ground.

“No,” said she, honest always; “there are some things that one can’t pay. There are some things that can’t be paid. But I sent you the draft, guessing at the total because I could never get a statement from the men fairly covering the advances you made us without my knowledge. We did eat your bread. Without you and your supplies—your horses, your everything—without your care and help all the way over the trail, we couldn’t have started and couldn’t have got through. Ah”—bitterly—“we couldn’t even have sold so well at the end of the trail. That’s all true. It’s the cruelest truth that ever was offered me.”

“You didn’t want to be helped, not even by your neighbor?”

“Not in that way; not after all—after everything—after some things had come out as they did.”

“You mean, after your own fault had found you out, don’t you? Isn’t that the cruelest part of it?”

His words were merciless, yet his voice was kind, gentle, beyond compare with any voice she had heard in all her life.

“Yes!” she broke out. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. But you have had no mercy; you show none now. Did you come here this morning to make me say that?”

“Yes,” said Dan McMasters; “that is why I did come. I knew that sometime you’d want to tell me that. I knew that before I went away from you, you’d want to be Lockhart enough to admit to a McMasters that no McMasters ever born could be the dishonorable man you thought I was. You sent me out of your camp with a brand on me that I never would have taken if I hadn’t loved you the first minute I saw you—and if I hadn’t known that some day you’d want to tell me you were wrong.”

Anastasie Lockhart spread out her hands.

“Haven’t I? I have repented it every night and every day since then. But of what use? You are not one who can forgive. You only want to shame and humiliate me, you can’t forgive. You wouldn’t let me, wouldn’t believe me, wouldn’t forgive me. You say you can’t change.”

“Are you so sure?” His voice spoke as though in answer to some question of his own. “Which of us can be sure of anything? Who knows about these things?”

He pulled himself together, trying not to let his emotions go, to hold to safe things.

“Do you think my father or yours would let us be anything but neighbors?” he began. “Did not those two gentlemen fight all their lives together, for their principles, for their state? They were friends, even after the war, even in the war. If you had a brother, do you suppose my sister could make any payment to him for things like this? Those men were Texans.”

“You did nothing for me, then,” said Anastasie Lockhart, trying to be furious. “You did not think of me; you thought of Texas. You thought of everything but me!”

“Anastasie,” said he quietly, “that isn’t right. I have thought of nothing else but you since I met you. Love—why, you can’t measure what love will do!”

“Love, sir?”

But now his words rushed.

“Neighbor and neighbor—yes. Gonzales and Caldwell—yes. Lockhart and McMasters—yes. The big trail opening up, the whole country opening up—yes. The Indians giving way before the white men—yes. A new day coming into all this country—why yes! I can see all those things, and so can you. But why? What actuated it all? It seems to me it must have been love—love of man and woman. I know it was my love for you that drove me. There are things we can’t ever measure. I couldn’t explain what I mean—no. And, of course I know,” he added, “I’d have no right to if I could.”

Anastasie Lockhart stood looking at him, wide-eyed. Surely—she knew it now with a sudden gasp of apprehension—her instinct had been right. She had loved in him something other than the cold dominancy of his nature. Now she knew that he was not the coldest man in all the world, but a man of tempestuous heats, with storm and stress about him. For the first time she saw his fingers tremble as he half reached out a hand, withdrew it.

Neither could he now speak, except with effort. It seemed that, after all, they were come to the parting of the roads.

“So you wanted my signature to come back to you under the words ‘In full to date.’ Is it in full to date? Well, we’ll part the better friends for my having come here. And you thought I could not forgive!”

“Yes!” the girl broke out at last. “I thought you were the hardest, coldest, cruelest man in all the world. I have seen only the savage side of you.”

His face changed, grew suddenly sad; upon it came the melancholy occasionally so notable on the face of another man of like trade, whom he had met not long before in the North.

“I don’t think you can quite understand everything in the world all at once, my dear,” said he. “I was set apart from men, because I had taken on work to do. Home and the love of woman could not be for me. I was nothing more than a priest—high priest of law and justice. My hands had to be red. I knew I could never come to you feeling that it was right.”

His face was gray, he undertook to smile, bitterly.

“I was a killer!” he exclaimed. “I became that out of duty to my family and my state. I knew what it meant—knew well enough. I couldn’t offer you a hand red as mine. I thought a time surely would come when you’d have a horror come over you, thinking of what I’d done. But I had to go on with my work until it was done. I studied it. I shot away a thousand pounds of lead, I used kegs of powder, in practice. And I studied concentration. That was the only way I could be safe. Of course, I can’t make you understand that. But I was playing in a game where I did not dare lose. My life was up all the time and more than my life.”

Now he was turning away.

“You are going?” said she.

“Yes. The last of the open gang of thieves and outlaws is dead to-day. The roads are open. The state can breathe. The great conspiracy is ended. We’ve done our work. For those who are to benefit by it, what difference if we do pass unknown and forgotten? Your father’s murderer is dead. We did what we had to do. That was what I did—I did that first, before I dared to think of beginning my own life for myself. But——” And now he drew himself up.

She knew that he wanted to indicate to her something. Her eyes rested on the whiteness of his linen. He saw the look.

“Yes,” said he, looking at his hands, “I’ve turned over a leaf. I have thrown away my guns. Never while I live will I put them on again, either here or in the North. I am no longer a hired killer. From where the sun stands now I am done with that. I am McMasters, citizen, not officer.”

He had found his bridle reins, but did not go, could not go.

“You were talking about forgiveness,” said he, at length, with difficulty. “Forgive you? Why, I have never done anything but that! Of course, since I am going away, I ought to forget you; but I never shall. All you have to do about me is to forget me. There are better men.”

The girl flared out at him with some sudden impulse which got beyond her control.

“You come here to preach to me? Is that the way to do? Oh, you ride into my place and you make me tear out my heart with shame and humiliation and show it to you. And then you ride away again and say good-by and tell me to forget! Why did you come here at all? Couldn’t you have mailed back my draft?”

He hesitated. His hand dropped to his side. Suddenly he held out to her a little object which so, by accident, he had touched; something which had been in the side pocket of his coat. In appearance it was a fragment of dark red rock, broken irregularly. But Taisie’s eyes noticed that to it clung another object—a horse-shoe steel, such as the riders of the outlands were used to carry with a bit of flint so they might be safe for fire in any exigency. Without plan, these two objects now served Dan McMasters for the thing which he had not been able to put into speech.

“Anastasie,” said he, “look at this! It’s nothing—only a bit of ore I picked up near the Wichitas when I came through. But see, it’s magnetic. Look how steel clings to it! You hardly can draw them apart; it will pull to it every little piece of metal. It can’t help itself; they can’t help themselves.

“Taisie, what’s inside of it? I don’t know. What is that force that we can’t see? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. You ask me questions that I can’t answer. All I know is that the magnet and the steel come together—here, you see. And yet you ask me why am I here now? I don’t know. It’s the same reason that made me leave Rudabaugh alive in his camp and ride after you.

“Didn’t I tell you there are things we can’t weigh or measure? There’s something behind the world we can’t any of us find out! Why did I come? I don’t know.”

He tossed the little bit of rock and the clinging steel upon the ground beside the twisted fragment of Anastasie Lockhart’s draft, “In full to date.” His eyes were softened. The lines of chin and jaw seemed new to her.

“I have been trying to reason things out,” said he at last, in a new, strange, shaken voice she never yet had heard. “I am trying now to reason out why I don’t get on up and ride on away. We’ve said good-by. I’ve reasoned that you couldn’t love me. Am I right or wrong?”

Anastasie Lockhart slowly raised her face, her serious, grave eyes looking straight into his.

“You were wrong!” said she. “You have used me like a man. I was a woman.”

He stepped toward her, in the open sunlight where any might have seen, caught her face between his two hands and looked into her eyes with his own new eyes.

“You don’t mean we could both begin again? You don’t mean you could forget what I have been? You don’t mean I could ever be good enough for you? You don’t mean you could ever learn to love me in spite of what I was, for sake of what I am going to try to be? Tell me—answer me now, for I don’t think I can endure this.”

His two hands had fallen on her shoulders, straightened her up, held her at arm’s length for just an instant. The innate bravery of the girl aided her to look straight into his eyes in turn.

“You know,” she said, smiling slowly. “You must know now.”

The tension of the fingers on her shoulders lessened. His voice came almost in a whisper.

“I do know! Why, there is a new world, after all! We are the very first. There is no past.”

“Dan!” said she, after a long time. “Dan!”

Her fingers were twisting softly around his wrist, crumpling the white linen that they found there. Her eyes followed her fingers, not daring to look up. Her fingers were warm. He caught her chin in both his hands, though still her fingers clung.

“Taisie,” said he, “what fools we’ve been! Ah, what a blind fool I was! Forgive me!”

“Why, Dan!” she murmured.

Her head fell forward upon his shoulder, drowsily, although it was morning, and though the sun shone all around them, brilliantly, blindingly.

THE END

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