The next afternoon, after the day's writing and prospecting were finished, Bennington resolved to go deer hunting. He had skipped thirteen chapters of his work to describe the heroine, Rhoda. She had wonderful eyes, and was, I believe, dressed in a garment whose colour was pink.
"Keep yore moccasins greased," Old Mizzou advised at parting; by which he meant that the young man was to step softly.
This he found to be difficult. His course lay along the top of the ridge where the obstructions were many. There were outcrops, boulders, ravines, broken twigs, old leaves, and dikes, all of which had to be surmounted or avoided. They were all aggravating, but the dikes possessed some intellectual interest which the others lacked.
A dike, be it understood, is a hole in the earth made visible. That is to say, in old days, when mountains were much loftier than they are now, various agencies brought it to pass that they split and cracked and yawned down to the innermost cores of their being in such hideous fashion that chasms and holes of great depth and perpendicularity were opened in them. Thereupon the interior fires were released, and these, vomiting up a vast supply of molten material, filled said chasms and holes to the very brim. The molten material cooled into fire-hardened rock. The rains descended and the snows melted. Under their erosive influence the original mountains were cut down somewhat, but the erstwhile molten material, being, as we have said, fire-hardened, wasted very little, or not at all, and, as a consequence, stands forth above its present surroundings in exact mould of the ancient cracks or holes.
Now, some dikes are long and narrow, others are short and wide, and still others are nearly round. All, however, are highest points, and, head and shoulders above the trees, look abroad over the land.
When Bennington came to one of these dikes he was forced to pick his way carefully in a detour around its base. Between times he found hobnails much inclined to click against unforeseen stones. The broken twig came to possess other than literary importance. After a little his nerves asserted themselves. Unconsciously he relaxed his attention and began to think.
The subject of his thoughts was the girl he had seen just twenty-four hours before. He caught himself remembering little things he had not consciously noticed at the time, as, for instance, the strange contrast between the mischief in her eyes and the austerity of her brow, or the queer little fashion she had of winking rapidly four or five times, and then opening her eyes wide and looking straight into the depths of his own. He considered it quite a coincidence that he had unconsciously returned to the spot on which they had met the day before—the rich Crazy Horse lode.
As though in answer to his recognition of this fact, her voice suddenly called to him from above.
"Hullo, little boy!" it cried.
He felt at once that he was pleased at the encounter.
"Hullo!" he answered; "where are you?"
"Right here."
He looked up, and then still up, until, at the flat top of the castellated dike that stood over him, he caught a gleam of pink. The contrast between it, the blue of the sky, and the dark green of the trees, was most beautiful and unusual. Nature rarely uses pink, except in sunsets and in flowers. Bennington thought pleasedly how every impression this girl made upon him was one of grace or beauty or bright colour. The gleam of pink disappeared, and a great pine cone, heavy with pitch, came buzzing through the air to fall at his feet.
"That's to show you where I am," came the clear voice. "You ought to feel honoured. I've only three cones left."
The dike before which Bennington had paused was one of the round variety. It rose perhaps twenty feet above thedébrisat its base, sheer, gray, its surface almost intact except for an insignificant number of frost fissures. From its base the hill fell rapidly, so that, even from his own inferior elevation, he was enabled to look over the tops of trees standing but a few rods away from him. He could see that the summit of this dike was probably nearly flat, and he surmised that, once up there, one would become master of a pretty enough little plateau on which to sit; but his careful circumvallation could discover no possible method of ascent. The walls afforded no chance for a squirrel's foothold even. He began to doubt whether he had guessed aright as to the girl's whereabouts, and began carefully to examine the tops of the trees. Discovering nothing in them, he cast another puzzled glance at the top of the dike. A pair of violet eyes was scrutinizing him gravely over the edge of it.
"How in the world did you get up there?" he cried.
"Flew," she explained, with great succinctness.
"Look out you don't fall," he warned hastily; her attitude was alarming.
"I am lying flat," said she, "and I can't fall."
"You haven't told me how you got up. I want to come up, too."
"How do you know I want you?"
"I have such a lot of things to say!" cried Bennington, rather at a loss for a valid reason, but feeling the necessity keenly.
"Well, sit down and say them. There's a big flat rock just behind you."
This did not suit him in the least. "I wish you'd let me up," he begged petulantly. "I can't say what I want from here."
"I can hear you quite well. You'll have to talk from there, or else keep still."
"That isn't fair!" persisted the young man, adopting a tone of argument. "You're a girl----"
"Stop there! You are wrong to start with. Did you think that a creature who could fly to the tops of the rocks was a mere girl? Not at all."
"What do you mean?" asked the easily bewildered Bennington.
"What I say. I'm not a girl."
"What are you then?"
"A sun fairy."
"A sun fairy?"
"Yes; a real live one. See that cloud over toward the sun? The nice downy one, I mean. That's my couch. I sleep on it all night. I've got it near the sun so that it will warm up, you see."
"I see," cried Bennington. He could recognise foolery—provided it were ticketed plainly enough. He sat down on the flat rock before indicated, and clasped his knee with his hands, prepared to enjoy more. "Is that your throne up there, Sun Fairy?" he asked. She had withdrawn her head from sight.
"It is," her voice came down to him in grave tones.
"It must be a very nice one."
"The nicest throne you ever saw."
"I never saw one, but I've often heard that thrones were unpleasant things."
"I am sitting, foolish mortal," said she, in tones of deep commiseration, "on a soft, thick cushion of moss—much more comfortable, I imagine, than hard, flat rocks. And the nice warm sun is shining on me—it must be rather chilly in the woods to-day. And there is a breeze blowing from the Big Horn—old rocks are always damp and stuffy in the shade. And I am looking away out over the Hills—I hope some people enjoy the sight of piles of quartzite."
"Cruel sun fairy!" cried Bennington. "Why do you tantalize me so with the delights from which you debar me? What have I done?"
There was a short silence.
"Can't you think of anything you've done?" asked the voice, insinuatingly.
Bennington's conscience-stricken memory stirred. It did not seem so ridiculous, under the direct charm of the fresh young voice that came down through the summer air from above, like a dove's note from a treetop, to apologize to Lawton's girl. The incongruity now was in forcing into this Arcadian incident anything savouring of conventionality at all. It had been so idyllic, this talk of the sun fairy and the cloud; so like a passage from an old book of legends, this dainty episode in the great, strong, Western breezes, under the great, strong, Western sky. Everything should be perfect, not to be blamed.
"Do sun fairies accept apologies?" he asked presently, in a subdued voice.
"They might."
"This particular sun fairy is offered one by a man who is sorry."
"Is it a good big one?"
"Indeed, yes."
The head appeared over the edge of the rock, inspected him gravely for a moment, and was withdrawn.
"Then it is accepted," said the voice.
"Thank you!" he replied sincerely. "And now are you going to let down your rope ladder, or whatever it is? I really want to talk to you."
"You are so persistent!" cried the petulant voice, "and so foolish! It is like a man to spoil things by questionings!"
He suddenly felt the truth of this. One can not talk every day to a sun fairy, and the experience can never be repeated. He settled back on the rock.
"Pardon me, Sun Fairy!" he cried again. "Rope ladders, indeed, to one who has but to close her eyes and she finds herself on a downy cloud near the sun. My mortality blinded me!"
"Now you are a nice boy," she approved more contentedly, "and as a reward you may ask me one question."
"All right," he agreed; and then, with instinctive tact, "What do you see up there?"
He could hear her clap her hands with delight, and he felt glad that he had followed his impulse to ask just this question instead of one more personal and more in line with his curiosity.
"Listen!" she began. "I see pines, many pines, just the tops of them, and they are all waving in the breeze. Did you ever see trees from on top? They are quite different. And out from the pines come great round hills made all of stone. I think they look like skulls. Then there are breathless descents where the pines fall away. Once in a while a little white road flashes out."
"Yes," urged Bennington, as the voice paused. "And what else do you see?"
"I see the prairie, too," she went on half dreamily. "It is brown now, but the green is beginning to shine through it just a very little. And out beyond there is a sparkle. That is the Cheyenne. And beyond that there is something white, and that is the Bad Lands."
The voice broke off with a happy little laugh.
Bennington saw the scene as though it lay actually spread out before him. There was something in the choice of the words, clearcut, decisive, and descriptive; but more in the exquisite modulations of the voice, adding here a tint, there a shade to the picture, and casting over the whole that poetic glamour which, rarely, is imitated in grosser materials by Nature herself, when, just following sunset, she suffuses the landscape with a mellow afterglow.
The head, sunbonneted, reappeared perked inquiringly sideways.
"Hello, stranger!" it called with a nasal inflection, "how air ye? Do y' think minin' is goin' t' pan out well this yar spring?" Then she caught sight of his weapon. "What are you going to shoot?" she asked with sudden interest.
"I thought I might see a deer."
"Deer! hoh!" she cried in lofty scorn, reassuming her nasal tone. "You is shore a tenderfoot! Don' you-all know that blastin' scares all th' deer away from a minin' camp?"
Bennington looked confused. "No, I hadn't thought of that," he confessed stoutly enough.
"I kind of like to shoot!" said she, a little wistfully. "What sort of a gun is it?"
"A Savage smokeless," answered Bennington perfunctorily.
"One of the thirty-calibres?" inquired the sunbonnet with new interest.
"Yes," gasped Bennington, astonished at so much feminine knowledge of firearms.
"Oh! I'd like to see it. I never saw any of those. May I shoot it, just once?"
"Of course you may. More than once. Shall I come up?"
"No. I'll come down. You sit right still on that rock."
The sunbonnet disappeared, and there ensued a momentary commotion on the other side of the dike. In an instant the girl came around the corner, picking her way over the loose blocks of stone. With the finger-tips of either hand she held the pink starched skirt up, displaying a neat little foot in a heavy little shoe. Diagonally across the skirt ran two irregular brown stains. She caught him looking at them.
"Naughty, naughty!" said she, glancing down at them with a grimace.
She dropped her skirt, and stood up beside him with a pretty shake of the shoulders.
"Now let's see it," she begged.
She examined the weapon with much interest, throwing down and back the lever in a manner that showed she was accustomed at least to the old-style arm.
"How light it is!" she commented, squinting through the sights. "Doesn't it kick awfully?"
"Not a bit. Smokeless powder, you know."
"Of course. What'll we shoot at?"
Bennington fumbled in his pockets and produced an envelope.
"How's this?" he asked.
She seized it and ran like an antelope—with the sameglidingmotion—to a tree about thirty paces distant, on which she pinned the bit of paper. They shot. Bennington hit the paper every time. The girl missed it once. At this she looked a little vexed.
"You are either very rude or very sincere," was her comment.
"You're the best shot I ever saw----"
"Now don't dare say 'for a girl!'" she interrupted quickly. "What's the prize?"
"Was this a match?"
"Of course it was, and I insist on paying up."
Bennington considered.
"I think I would like to go to the top of the rock there, and see the pines, and the skull-stones, and the prairies."
She glanced toward him, knitting her brows. "It is my very own," she said doubtfully. "I've never let anybody go up there before."
One of the diminutive chipmunks of the hills scampered out from a cleft in the rocks and perched on a moss-covered log, chattering eagerly and jerking his tail in the well-known manner of chipmunks.
"Oh, see! see!" she cried, all excitement in a moment. She seized the rifle, and taking careful aim, fired. The chattering ceased; the chipmunk disappeared.
Bennington ran to the log. Behind it lay the little animal. The long steel-jacketed bullet had just grazed the base of its brain. He picked it up gently in the palm of his hand and contemplated it.
It was such a diminutive beast, not as large as a good-sized rat, quite smaller than our own fence-corner chipmunks of the East. It's little sides were daintily striped, its little whiskers were as perfect as those of the great squirrels in the timber bottom. In its pouches were the roots of pine cones. Bennington was not a sentimentalist, but the incident, against the background of the light-hearted day, seemed to him just a little pathetic. Something of the feeling showed in his eyes.
The girl, who had drawn near, looked from him to the dead chipmunk, and back again. Then she burst suddenly into tears.
"Oh, cruel, cruel!" she sobbed. "What did I do it for? What did youletme do it for?"
Her distress was so keen that the young man hastened to relieve it.
"There," he reassured her lightly, "don't do that! Why, you are a great hunter. You got your game. And it was a splendid shot. We'll have him skinned when we get back home, and we'll cure the skin, and you can make something out of it—a spectacle case," he suggested at random. "I know how you feel," he went on, to give her time to recover, "but all hunters feel that way occasionally. See, I'll put him just here until we get ready to go home, where nothing can get him."
He deposited the squirrel in the cleft of a rock, quite out of sight, and stood back as though pleased. "There, that's fine!" he concluded.
With one of those instantaneous transitions, which seemed so natural to her, and yet which appeared to reach not at all to her real nature, she had changed from an aspect of passionate grief to one of solemn inquiry. Bennington found her looking at him with the soul brimming to the very surface of her great eyes.
"I think you may come up on my rock," she said simply after a moment.
They skirted the base of the dike together until they had reached the westernmost side. There Bennington was shown the means of ascent, which he had overlooked before because of his too close examination of the cliff itself. At a distance of about twenty feet from the dike grew a large pine tree, the lowest branch of which extended directly over the little plateau and about a foot above it. Next to the large pine stood two smaller saplings side by side and a few inches apart. These had been converted into a ladder by the nailing across of rustic rounds.
"That's how I get up," explained the girl. "Now you go back around the corner again, and when I'm ready I'll call."
Bennington obeyed. In a few moments he heard again the voice in the air summoning him to approach and climb.
He ascended the natural ladder easily, but when within six or eight feet of the large branch that reached across to the dike, the smaller of the two saplings ceased, and so, naturally, the ladder terminated.
"Hi!" he called, "how did you get up this?"
He looked across the intervening space expectantly, and then, to his surprise, he observed that the girl was blushing furiously.
"I—I," stammered a small voice after a moment's hesitation, "I guess I—shinned!"
A light broke across Bennington's mind as to the origin of the two dark streaks on the gown, and he laughed. The girl eyed him reproachfully for a moment or so; then she too began to laugh in an embarrassed manner. Whereupon Bennington laughed the harder. He shinned up the tree, to find that an ingenious hand rope had been fitted above the bridge limb, so that the crossing of the short interval to the rock was a matter of no great difficulty. In another instant he stood upon the top of the dike.
It was, as he had anticipated, nearly flat. Under the pine branch, which might make a very good chair back, grew a thick cushion of moss. The one tree broke the freedom of the eye's sweep toward the west, but in all other directions it was uninterrupted. As the girl had said, the tops of pines alone met the view, miles on miles of them, undulating, rising, swelling, breaking against the barrier of a dike, or lapping the foot of a great round boulder-mountain. Here and there a darker spot suggested a break for a mountain peak; rarely a fleck of white marked a mountain road. Back of them all—ridge, mountain, cavernous valley—towered old Harney, sun-browned, rock-diademed, a few wisps of cloud streaming down the wind from his brow, locks heavy with the age of the great Manitou whom he was supposed to represent. Eastward, the prairie like a peaceful sea. Above, the alert sky of the west. And through all the air a humming—vast, murmurous, swelling—as the mountain breeze touched simultaneously with strong hand the chords, not of one, but a thousand pine harps.
Bennington drew in a deep breath, and looked about in all directions. The girl watched him.
"Ah! it is beautiful!" he murmured at last with a half sigh, and looked again.
She seized his hand eagerly.
"Oh, I'm so glad you said that—and no more than that!" she cried. "I feel the sun fairy can make you welcome now."
"From now on," said the girl, shaking out her skirts before sitting down, "I am going to be a mystery."
"You are already," replied Bennington, for the first time aware that such was the fact.
"No fencing. I have a plain business proposition to make. You and I are going to be great friends. I can see that now."
"I hope so."
"And you, being a—well, an open-minded young man" (Now what does she mean by that? thought Bennington), "will be asking all about myself. I am going to tell you nothing. I am going to be a mystery."
"I'm sure----"
"No, you're not sure of anything, young man. Now I'll tell you this: that I am living down the gulch with my people."
"I know—Mr. Lawton's."
She looked at him a moment. "Exactly. If you were to walk straight ahead—not out in the air, of course—you could see the roof of the house. Now, after we know each other better, the natural thing for you to do will be to come and see me at my house, won't it?"
Bennington agreed that it would.
"Well, you mustn't."
Bennington expressed his astonishment.
"I will explain a very little. In a month occurs the Pioneer's Picnic at Rapid. You don't know what the Pioneer's Picnic is? Ignorant boy! It's our most important event of the year. Well, until that time I am going to try an experiment. I am going to see if—well, I'll tell you; I am going to try an experiment on a man, and the man is you, and I'll explain the whole thing to you after the Pioneer's Picnic, and not a moment before. Aren't you curious?"
"I am indeed," Bennington assured her sincerely.
She took on a small air of tyranny. "Now understand me. I mean what I say. If you want to see me again, you must do as I tell you. You must take me as I am, and you must mind me."
Bennington cast a fleeting wonder over the sublime self-confidence which made this girl so certain he would care to see her again. Then, with a grip at the heart, he owned that the self-confidence was well founded.
"All right," he assented meekly.
"Good!" she cried, with a gleam of mischief. "Behold me! Old Bill Lawton's gal! If you want to be pards, put her thar!"
"And so you are a girl after all, and no sun fairy," smiled Bennington as he "put her thar."
"My cloud has melted," she replied quietly, pointing toward the brow of Harney.
They chatted of small things for a time. Bennington felt intuitively that there was something a little strange about this girl, something a little out of the ordinary, something he had never been conscious of in any other girl. Yet he could never seize the impression and examine it. It was always just escaping; just taking shape to the point of visibility, and then melting away again; just rising in the modulations of her voice to a murmur that the ear thought to seize as a definite chord, and then dying into a hundred other cadences. He tried to catch it in her eyes, where so much else was to be seen. Sometimes he perceived its influence, but never itself. It passed as a shadow in the lower deeps, as though the feather mass of a great sea growth had lifted slowly on an undercurrent, and then as slowly had sunk back to its bed, leaving but the haunting impression of something shapeless that had darkened the hue of the waters. It was most like a sadness that had passed. Perhaps it was merely an unconscious trick of thought or manner.
After a time she asked him his first name, and he told her.
"I'd like to know your's too, Miss Lawton," he suggested.
"I wish you wouldn't call me Miss Lawton," she cried with sudden petulance.
"Why, certainly not, if you don't want me to, but what am I to call you?"
"Do you know," she confided with a pretty little gesture, "I have always disliked my real name. It's ugly and horrid. I've often wished I were a heroine in a book, and then I could have a name I really liked. Now here's a chance. I'm going to let you get up one for me, but it must be pretty, and we'll have it all for our very own."
"I don't quite see----" objected the still conventional de Laney.
"Your wits, your wits, haven't you any wits atall?" she cried with impatience over his unresponsiveness.
"Well, let me see. It isn't easy to do a thing like that on the spur of the moment, Sun Fairy. A fairy's a fay, isn't it? I might call you Fay."
"Fay," she repeated in a startled tone.
Bennington remembered that this was the name of the curly-haired young man who had lent him the bucking horse, and frowned.
"No, I don't believe I like that," he recanted hastily.
"Take time and think about it," she suggested.
"I think of one that would be appropriate," he said after some little time. "It is suggested by that little bird there. It is Phoebe."
"Do you think it is appropriate," she objected. "A Phoebe bird or a Phoebe girl always seemed to me to be demure and quiet and thoughtful and sweet-voiced and fond of dim forests, while I am a frivolous, laughing, sunny individual who likes the open air and doesn't care for shadows at all."
"Yet I feel it is appropriate," he insisted. He paused and went on a little timidly in the face of his new experience in giving expression to the more subtle feelings. "I don't know whether I can express it or not. You are laughing and sunny, as you say, but there is something in you like the Phoebe bird just the same. It is like those cloud shadows." He pointed out over the mountains. Overhead a number of summer clouds were winging their way from the west, casting on the earth those huge irregular shadows which sweep across it so swiftly, yet with such dignity; so rushingly, and yet so harmlessly. "The hills are sunny and bright enough, and all at once one of the shadows crosses them, and it is dark. Then in another moment it is bright again."
"And do you really see that in me?" she asked curiously. "You are a dear boy," she continued, looking at him for some moments with reflective eyes. "It won't do though," she said, rising at last. "It's too 'fancy.'"
"I don't know then," he confessed with some helplessness.
"I'll tell you what I've alwayswantedto be called," said she, "ever since I was a little girl. It is 'Mary.'"
"Mary!" he cried, astonished. "Why, it is such a common name."
"It is a beautiful name," she asserted. "Say it over. Aren't the syllables soft and musical and caressing? It is a lovely name. Why I remember," she went on vivaciously, "a girl who was named Mary, and who didn't like it. When she came to our school she changed it, but she didn't dare to break it to the family all at once. The first letter home she signed herself 'Mae.' Her father wrote back, 'My dear daughter, if the name of the mother of Jesus isn't good enough for you, come home.'" She laughed at the recollection.
"Then you have been away to school?" asked the young man.
"Yes," she replied shortly.
She adroitly led him to talk of himself. He told her naively of New York and tennis, of brake parties and clubs, and even afternoon teas and balls, all of which, of course, interested a Western girl exceedingly. In this it so happened that his immaturity showed more plainly than before. He did not boast openly, but he introduced extraneous details important in themselves. He mentioned knowing Pennington the painter, and Brookes the writer, merely in a casual fashion, but with just the faintest flourish. It somehow became known that his family had a crest, that his position was high; in short, that he was a de Laney on both sides. He liked to tell it to this girl, because it was evidently fresh and new to her, and because in the presence of her inexperience in these matters he gained a confidence in himself which he had never dared assume before.
She looked straight in front of her and listened, throwing in a comment now and then to assist the stream of his talk. At last, when he fell silent, she reached swiftly out and patted his cheek with her hand.
"You are a dear bigboy," she said quietly. "But I like it—oh, so much!"
From the tree tops below the clear warble of the purple finch proclaimed that under the fronds twilight had fallen. The vast green surface of the hills was streaked here and there with irregular peaks of darkness dwindling eastward. The sun was nearly down.
A sudden gloom blotted out the fretwork of the pine shadows that had, during the latter part of the afternoon, lain athwart the rock. They looked up startled.
The shadow of Harney had crept out to them, and, even as they looked, it stole on, cat-like, across the lower ridges toward the East. One after another the rounded hills changed hue as it crossed them. For a moment it lingered in the tangle of woods at the outermost edge, and then without further pause glided out over the prairie. They watched it fascinated. The sparkle was quenched in the Cheyenne; the white gleam of the Bad Lands became a dull gray, scarce distinguishable from the gray of the twilight. Though a single mysterious cleft a long yellow bar pointed down across the plains, paused at the horizon, and slowly lifted into the air. The mountain shadow followed it steadily up into the sky, growing and growing against the dullness of the east, until at last over against them in the heavens was the huge phantom of a mountain, infinitely greater, infinitely grander than any mountain ever seen by mortal eyes, and lifting higher and higher, commanded upward by that single wand of golden light. Then suddenly the wand was withdrawn and the ghost mountain merged into the yellow afterglow of evening.
The girl had watched it breathless. At its dissolution she seized the young man excitedly by the arm.
"The Spirit Mountain!" she cried. "I have never seen it before; and now I see it—with you."
She looked at him with startled eyes.
"With you," she repeated.
"What is it? I don't understand."
She did not seem to hear his question.
"What is it?" he asked again.
"Why—nothing." She caught her breath and recovered command of herself somewhat. "That is, it is just an old legend that I have often heard, and it startled me for a minute."
"Will you tell me the legend?"
"Not now; some time. We must go now, for it will soon be dark."
They wandered along the ridge toward Deerfoot Gulch in silence. She had taken her sunbonnet off, and was enjoying the cool of the evening. He carried the rifle over the crook of his arm, and watched her pensive face. The poor little chipmunk lay stiffening in the cleft of the rock, forgotten. The next morning a prying jay discovered him and carried him away. He was only a little chipmunk after all—a very little chipmunk—and nobody and nothing missed him in all the wide world, not even his mate and his young, for mercifully grief in the animal world is generally short-lived where tragedies are frequent. His life meant little. His death----
At the dip of the gulch they paused.
"I live just down there," she said, "and now, good-night."
"Mayn't I take you home?"
"Remember your promise."
"Oh, very well."
She looked at him seriously. "I am going to ask you to do what I have never asked any man before," she said slowly—"to meet me. I want you to come to the rock to-morrow afternoon. I want to hear more about New York."
"Of course I'll come," he agreed delightedly. "I feel as if I had known you years already."
They said good-bye. She walked a few steps irresolutely down the hillside, and then, with a sudden impulsive movement, returned. She lifted her face gravely, searchingly to his.
"I like you," said she earnestly. "You have kind eyes," and was gone down through the graceful alder saplings.
Bennington stood and watched the swaying of the leaf tops that marked her progress until she emerged into the lower gulch. There she turned and looked back toward the ridge, but apparently could not see him, though he waved his hand. The next instant Jim Fay strolled into the "park" from the direction of Lawton's cabin. Bennington saw her spring to meet him, holding out both hands, and then the two strolled back down the gulch talking earnestly, their heads close together.
Why should he care? "Mary, Mary, Mary!" he cried within himself as he hurried home. And in remote burial grounds the ancient de Laneys on both sides turned over in their lead-lined coffins.
That evening Old Mizzou returned from town with a watery eye and a mind that ran to horses.
"He is shore a fine cayuse," he asserted with extreme impressiveness. "He is one of them broncs you jestloves. An' he's jes 's cheap! I likes you a lot, sonny; I deems you as a face-card shore, an' ef any one ever tries fer to climb yore hump, you jest calls on pore Old Mizzou an' he mingles in them troubles immediate. You must have that cayuse an' go scoutin' in th' hills, yo' shore must! Ol' man Davidson'll do th' work fer ye, but ye shore must scout. 'Taint healthy not t' git exercise on a cayuse. It shorely ain't! An' you must git t' know these yar hills, you must. They is beautiful an' picturesque, and is full of scenery. When you goes back East, you wants to know all about 'em. I wouldn't hev you go back East without knowin' all about 'em for anythin' in the worl', I likes ye thet much!"
Old Mizzou paused to wipe away a sympathetic tear with a rather uncertain hand.
"Y' wants to start right off too, thet's th' worst of it, so's t' see 'em all afore you goes, 'cause they is lots of hills and I'm 'feared you won't stay long, sonny; I am that! I has my ideas these yar claims is no good, I has fer a fact, and they won't need no one here long, and then we'll lose ye, sonny, so you mus' shore hev that cayuse."
Old Mizzou rambled on in like fashion most of the evening, to Bennington's great amusement, and, though next morning he was quite himself again, he still clung to the idea that Bennington should examine the pony.
"He is a fine bronc, fer shore," he claimed, "an' you'd better git arter him afore some one else gits him."
As Bennington had for some time tentatively revolved in his mind the desirability of something to ride, this struck him as being a good idea. All Westerners had horses—in the books. So he abandonedAliris: A Romance of all Time, for the morning, and drove down to Spanish Gulch with Old Mizzou.
He was mentally braced for devilment, but his arch-enemy, Fay, was not in sight. To his surprise, he got to the post office quite without molestation. There he was handed two letters. One was from his parents. The other, his first business document, proved to be from the mining capitalist. The latter he found to inclose separate drafts for various amounts in favour of six men. Bishop wrote that the young man was to hand these drafts to their owners, and to take receipts for the amounts of each. He promised a further installment in a few weeks.
Bennington felt very important. He looked the letter all over again, and examined the envelope idly. The Spanish Gulch postmark bore date of the day before.
"That's funny," said Bennington to himself. "I wonder why Mizzou didn't bring it up with him last night?" Then he remembered the old man's watery eye and laughed. "I guess I know," he thought.
The next thing was to find the men named in the letter. He did not know them from Adam. Mizzou saw no difficulty, however, when the matter was laid before him.
"They're in th' Straight Flush!" he asserted positively.
This was astounding. How should Old Mizzou know that?
"I don't exactly know," the old man explained this discrepancy, "but they generally is!"
"Don't they ever work?"
"Work's purty slack," crawfished Davidson. "But I tells you I don'tknow. We has to find out," and he shuffled away toward the saloon.
Anybody but Bennington would have suspected something. There was the delayed letter, the supernatural knowledge of Old Mizzou, the absence of Fay. Even the Easterner might have been puzzled to account for the crowded condition of the Straight Flush at ten in the morning, if his attention had not been quite fully occupied in posing before himself as the man of business.
When Mizzou and his companion entered the room, the hum of talk died, and every one turned expectantly in the direction of the newcomers.
"Gents," said Old Mizzou, "this is Mr. de Laney, th' new sup'rintendent of th' Holy Smoke. Mr. de Laney, gents!"
There was a nodding of heads.
Every one looked eagerly expectant. The man behind the bar turned back his cuffs. De Laney, feeling himself the centre of observation, grew nervous. He drew from his pocket Bishop's letter, and read out the five names. "I'd like to see those men," he said.
The men designated came forward. After a moment's conversation, the six adjourned to the hotel, where paper and ink could be procured.
After their exit a silence fell, and the miners looked at each other with ludicrous faces.
"An' he never asked us to take a drink!" exclaimed one sorrowfully. "That settles it. It may not be fer th' good of th' camp, Jim Fay, but I reckons it ain't much fer th' harm of it. I goes you."
"Me to," "and me," "and me," shouted other voices.
Fay leaped on the bar and spread his arms abroad.
"Speech! Speech!" they cried.
"Gentlemen of the great and glorious West!" he began. "It rejoices me to observe this spirit animating your bosoms. Trampling down the finer feelings that you all possess to such an unlimited degree, putting aside all thought of merely material prosperity, you are now prepared, at whatever cost, to ally yourselves with that higher poetic justice which is above barter, above mere expediency, above even the ordinary this-for-that fairness which often passes as justice among the effete and unenlightened savages of the East. Gentlemen of the great and glorious West, I congratulate you!"
The miners stood close around the bar. Every man's face bore a broad grin. At this point they interrupted with howls and cat-calls of applause. "Ain't he apeach!" said one to another, and composed himself again to listen. At the conclusion of a long harangue they yelled enthusiastically, and immediately began the more informal discussion of what was evidently a popular proposition. When the five who had been paid off returned, everybody had a drink, while the newcomers were made acquainted with the subject. Old Mizzou, who had listened silently but with a twinkle in his eye, went to hunt up Bennington.
They examined the horse together. The owner named thirty dollars as his price. Old Mizzou said this was cheap. It was not. Bennington agreed to take the animal on trial for a day or two, so they hitched a lariat around its neck and led it over to the wagon. After despatching a few errands they returned to camp. Bennington got out his ledger and journal and made entries importantly. Old Mizzou disappeared in the direction of the corral, where he was joined presently by the man Arthur.
On his way to keep the appointment of the afternoon, Bennington de Laney discovered within himself a new psychological experience. He found that, since the evening before, he had been observing things about him for the purpose of detailing them to his new friend. Little beauties of nature—as when a strange bird shone for an instant in vivid contrast to the mountain laurel near his window; an unusual effect of pine silhouettes near the sky; a weird, semi-poetic suggestion of one of Poe's stories implied in a contorted shadow cast by a gnarled little oak in the light of the moon—these he had noticed and remembered, and was now eager to tell his companion, with full assurance of her sympathy and understanding. Three days earlier he would have passed them by.
But stranger still was his discovery that he hadalwaysnoticed such things, and had remembered them. Observations of the sort had heretofore been quite unconscious. Without knowing it he had always been a Nature lover, one who appreciated the poetry of her moods, one who saw the beauty of her smiles, or, what is more rare, the greater beauty of her frown. The influence had entered into his being, but had lain neglected. Now it stole forth as the odour of a dried balsam bough steals from the corner of a loft whither it has been thrown carelessly. It was all delightful and new, and he wanted to tell her of it.
He did so. After a little he told her aboutAliris: A Romance of all Time, in which she appeared so interested that he detailed the main idea and the plot. At her request, he promised to read it to her. He was very young, you see, and very inexperienced; he threw himself generously, without reserve, on this girl's sympathies in a manner of which, assuredly, he should have been quite ashamed. Only the very young are not ashamed.
The girl listened, at first half amused. Then she was touched, for she saw that it was sincere, and youthful, and indicative of clear faith in what is beautiful, and in fine ideals of what is fitting. Perhaps, dimly, she perceived that this is good stuff of which to make a man, provided it springs from immaturity, and not from the sentimentalism of degeneracy. The loss of it is a price we pay for wisdom. Some think the price too high.
As he talked on in this moonshiny way, really believing his ridiculous abstractions the most important things in the world, gradually she too became young. She listened with parted lips, and in her great eyes the soul rose and rose within, clearing away the surface moods as twilight clears the land of everything but peace.
He was telling of the East again with a certain felicity of expression—have we not said he had the gift of words?—and an abandon of sentiment which showed how thoroughly he confided in the sympathy of his listener. When we are young we are apt to confide in the sympathy of every listener, and so we make fools of ourselves, and it takes us a long time to live down our reputations. As we grow older, we believe less and less in its reality. Perhaps by and by we do not trust to anybody's sympathy, not even our own.
"We have an old country place," he was saying; "it belonged to my grandfather. My grandfather came by it when the little town was very small indeed, so he built an old-fashioned stone house and surrounded it with large grounds." He was seeing the stone house and the large grounds with that new inner observation which he had just discovered, and he was trying to the best of his ability to tell what he saw. After a little he spoke more rhythmically. Many might have thought he spoke sentimentally, because with feeling; but in reality he was merely trying with great earnestness for expression. A jarring word would have brought him back to his everyday mood, but for the time being he was wrapt in what he saw. This is a condition which all writers, and some lovers, will recognise. "Now the place is empty—except in summer—except that we have an old woman who lives tucked away in one corner of it. I lived there one summer just after I finished college. Outside my window there was an apple tree that just brushed against the ledge; there were rose vines, the climbing sort, on the wall; and then, too, there was a hickory tree that towered 'way over the roof. In the front yard is what is known all over town as the 'big tree,' a silver maple, at least twice as tall as the house. It is so broad that its shade falls over the whole front of the place. In the back is an orchard of old apple trees, and trellises of big blue grapes. On one side is a broad lawn, at the back of which is one of the good old-fashioned flower gardens that does one good to look at. There are little pink primroses dotting the sod, sweet-william, lavender, nasturtiums, sweet peas, hollyhocks, bachelor's buttons, portulaca, and a row of tall sunflowers, the delight of a sleepy colony of hens. I learned all the flowers that summer." He clasped his hands comfortably back of his head and looked at her. She was gazing out over the Bad Lands to the East. "In the very centre, as a sort of protecting nurse to all the littler flowers," he went on, "is a big lilac bush, and there the bees and humming birds are thick on a warm spring day. There are plenty of birds too, but I didn't know so many of them. They nested everywhere—in the 'big tree,' the orchard, the evergreens, the hedges, and in the long row of maple trees with trunks as big as a barrel and limbs that touch across the street."
"It must be beautiful!" said the girl quietly without looking around.
Then he began to "suppose." This, as every woman knows, is dangerous business.
"Itwasbeautiful," said he. "I can't tell you about it. The words don't seem to fit some way. I wish you could see it for yourself. I know you'd enjoy it. I always wanted some one with me to enjoy it too. Suppose some way we were placed so we could watch the year go by in those deep windows. First there is the spring and the birds and the flowers, all of which I've been talking about. Then there is the summer, when the shades are drawn, when the shadows of the roses wave slowly across the curtains, when the air outside quivers with heat, and the air inside tastes like a draught of cool water. All the bird songs are stilled except that one little fellow still warbles, swaying in the breeze on the tiptop of the 'big tree,' his notes sliding down the long sunbeams like beads on a golden thread. Then we would read together, in the half-darkened 'parlour,' something not very deep, but beautiful, like Hawthorne's stories; or we would together seek for these perfect lines of poetry which haunt the memory. In the evening we would go out to hear the crickets and the tree toads, to see the night breeze toss the leaves across the calm face of the moon, to be silenced in spirit by the peace of the stars. Then the autumn would come. We would taste the 'Concords' and the little red grapes and the big red grapes. We would take our choice of the yellow sweetings, the hard white snow apples, or the little red-cheeked fellows from the west tree. And then, of course, there are the russets! Then there are the pears, and all the hickory nuts which rattle down on us every time the wind blows. The leaves are everywhere. We would rake them up into big piles, and jump into them, and 'swish' about in them. How bracing the air is! How silvery the sun! How red your cheeks would get! And think of the bonfires!"
"And in winter?" murmured the girl. Her eyes were shining.
"In the winter the wind would howl through the 'big tree,' and everything would be bleak and cold out doors. We would be inside, of course, and we would sit on the fur rug in front of the fireplace, while the evening passed by, watching the 'geese in the chimney' flying slowly away."
"'Suppose' some more," she begged dreamily. "I love it. It rests me."
She clasped her hands back of her head and closed her eyes.
The young man looked quietly about him.
"This is a wild and beautiful country," said he, "but it lacks something. I think it is the soul. The little wood lots of the East have so much of it." He paused in surprise at his own thoughts. His only experiences in the woods East had been when out picnicking, or berrying, and he had never noticed these things. "I don't know as I ever thought of it there," he went on slowly, as though trying to be honest with her, "but here it comes to me somehow or another." A little fly-catcher shot up from the frond below, poised a moment, and dropped back with closed wings.
"Do you know the birds?" she asked.
"I'm afraid not," he admitted; "I don't reallyknowmuch about Nature, but I love it, and I'm going to learn more. I know only the very common birds, and one other. Did you ever hear the hermit thrush sing?"
"Never."
"Oh!" he cried in sudden enthusiasm, "then there is another 'suppose' for us, the best of all."
"I love the dear old house!" she objected doubtfully.
"But the hermit thrush is better. The old country minister took me to hear him one Sunday afternoon and I shall never forget it."
She glanced at his animated face through half-closed eyes.
"Tell me," she urged softly.
"'Suppose' we were back East," he began, "and in the country, just about this time of year. We would wait until the afternoon—why! just about this time, when the sun is getting low. We would push through the bushes at the edge of the woods where the little tinkling birds sing in the fence corners, and would enter the deep high woods where the trees are tall and still. The moss is thick and soft in there, and there are little pools lying calm and dark, and there is a kind of ahushin the air—not silence, you know, but like when a big crowd of people are keeping still. And then we would walk very carefully, and speak low, and we would sit by the side of a fallen log and wait. After a while the thrush would sing, a deep note, with a thrill in it, like a bell slow and solemn. When you hear it you too feel a thrill as though you had heard a great and noble thought. Why, it is almostholy!"
He turned to the girl. She was looking at him.
"Why, hullo!" he exclaimed, "what's the matter?"
Her eyes were brimming with tears.
"Nothing," she said. "I never heard a man talk as you have been talking, that is all. The rest of them are cynical and hard and cold. They would be ashamed to say the things you have said. No, no!" she cried, laying her hand on his arm as he made a little uneasy movement, "do not misunderstand me. I like it. I love it. It does me good. I had lost faith. It is not nice to know the other kind—well."
"You speak bitterly," he expostulated.
She laughed. "It is a common experience enough. Pray that you may never know it. I began as a little child, loving and trusting every one, and giving my full free heart and confidence to every one who offered his best to me. All I can say is, that I am thankful for you that you have escaped the suffering such blind trust leads to."
She laughed again, bitterly, and threw her arms out.
"I suppose I shall go on trusting people forever. It's in my nature, and I can't help it."
"I hope you will feel you can trust me," said he, troubled at this passion so much beyond his experience. "I would do anything for you."
"Do! do!" she cried with contempt. "Yes. Any number of people willdoanything for me. I want some one tobefor me!"
"I'm so sorry!" he said simply, but with great feeling.
"Don't pity me, don't believe in me!" she cried suddenly in a passion. "I am not worth it. I am cruel and hard and cold, and I'll never care for anybody in any way. My nature has been hardened. Ican'tbe good. I can't care for people. Ican'tthink of giving way to it. It frightens me."
She burst into sudden tears and sobbed convulsively. In a moment she became calm. Then she took her hands from her eyes and smiled. In the distress of his sympathy Bennington thought he had never seen anything more beautiful than this breaking forth of the light.
"You must think I am a very peculiar young person," she said, "but I told you I was a mystery. I am a little tired to-day, that's all."
The conversation took a lighter tone and ran on the subject of the new horse. She was much interested, inquiring of his colour, his size, his gaits, whether he had been tried.
"I'll tell you what we will do," she suggested; "we'll go on an expedition some day. I have a pony too. We will fill up our saddlebags and cook our own dinner. I know a nice little place over toward Blue Lead."
"I've one suggestion to add," put in Bennington, "and that is, that we go to-morrow."
She looked a trifle doubtful.
"I don't know. Aren't we seeing a good deal of each other?"
"Oh, if it is going to bore you, by all means put it off!" cried Bennington in genuine alarm.
She laughed contentedly over his way of looking at it. "I'm not tired then, so please you; and when I am, I'll let you know. To-morrow it is."
"Shall I come after you? What time shall I start?"
"No, I'd rather meet you somewhere. Let's see. You watch for me, and I'll ride by in the lower gulch about nine o'clock."
"Very well. By the way, the band's going to practise in town to-night. Don't you want to go?"
"I'd like to, but I promised Jim I'd go with him."
"Jim?"
"Jim Fay."
Bennington felt this as a discordant note.
"Do you know him very well?" he asked jealously.
"He's my best friend. I like him very much. He is a fine fellow. You must meet him."
"I've met him," said Bennington shortly.
"Now you must go," she commanded, after a pause. "I want to stay here for a while." "No," as he opened his mouth to object. "I mean it! Please be good!"
After he had gone she sat still until sundown. Once she shook her shoulders impatiently. "It issilly!" she assured herself. As before, the shadow of Harney crept out to the horizon's edge. There it stopped. Twilight fell.
"No Spirit Mountain to-night," she murmured wistfully at last. "Almost do I believe in the old legend."