To any man who knew the Sierra hereabouts less intimately than did Mark King, Gus Ingle's message would have brought only stupefaction. But to King now, as to Ben Gaynor before him, the "secret" lay bare. Old names held on; the three Italians had given a name to what was now known as Italy Gulch. The caves were on a certain fork of the American River then, and King had approximately the distances and direction.
"What is more," he thought triumphantly, "I know where two caves are in there. But where the devil is 'Caive thre'?"
* * * * *
Here he started up and thrust the old Bible into his shirt. There were steps on the porch. Jim and the "judge" were coming——
Chapter XV
"It strikes me," said Summerling sarcastically, "that there's mighty funny goings-on here to-night. I show up to marry one man to a girl and nex' thing I know I peek in a winder and see——"
"Never mind that," cut in King hastily. "You are going to marry her after all. Only to another man."
"Meanin' you, Mark?" demanded Jim. On his honest old face was a look of utter bewilderment; for the life of him he couldn't decide whether he or every one else had gone crazy.
King flushed under the look, but nodded and managed a calm "Yes, Jim."
Summerling cleared his throat and thereafter scratched his head.
"It's irregular. I told Gratton that. But he said there was—was extenuatin' circumstances and all that. Hadn't been time for a licence. It's irregular; don't know as I mightn't get in trouble for it——"
"The marriage would be binding, wouldn't it?" demanded King.
"Sure it would; once I said 'man and wife' nary man could setthataside. But, if any one wanted to getmein bad, seeing there's no licence—well, it would make trouble with my bondsmen and they'd make trouble with me."
King silenced the man with a scowl and led him and Jim into the living-room, closing the door. It was unthinkable that Gloria should hear a lot of talk about why's and how's. For Gloria, it struck him, had undergone enough for one day. "Look here," he said to Summerling then, "either you will or you won't. If you won't, then Miss Gaynor and myself will go elsewhere. Now, which is it?"
"Gratton promised me a hundred dollars," muttered the "judge." "And he cleared out without taking the trouble to pay me."
King's face cleared. His cheque for a hundred dollars decided the "judge."
"That's a might of money to pay the old duffer for one night's work,Mark," muttered Jim. "Strikes me that way, anyhow."
A might of money! King laughed.
"Now if you folks are ready," said Summerling, grown impatient the moment the cheque was in his pocket, "I've got a long ride ahead of me."
This time Gloria did not keep them waiting. She came down the staircase to Mark King standing at the bottom. In her pink dress, like a thistledown, floating down to him. He was thinking—she, too, remembered—how for the first time they had met thus. She smiled at him; she put out her two hands to him as she had done that other time. And right there they were married—on Gus Ingle's old Bible.
"It's done!" whispered Mark, bending over her. "You are mine now; mine for all time, Gloria. And, girl of mine," he added reverently, "may God deal with me as I deal with you."
"It's done!" In an awed little voice came Gloria's response, like an echo. Mark King had seen her across the quicksands.
Jim and the "judge" had gone. They two were alone in the still house.Gloria was nervous; King could see that and thought that he understood.So he went for wood, made a cheery blaze in the fireplace, and drew twochairs up to it.
"Tell me about papa's letter," said Gloria hastily Had there not been that obvious topic she would have caught at another, any other. "He didn't tell me how badly he was hurt or what had happened."
King put out his hand for hers, and while Gloria looked into the fire and he looked into her face, he told her. At the end he brought out Gus Ingle's Bible and read to her what was written in it. All the time that his eyes were occupied she watched him eagerly, a little anxiously. But by the time he had finished she had been intrigued for the moment out of her own self-centred thoughts, her fancies caught by all that underlay this crude tale of treasure and murder, of lust for gold, of treachery and lonely death.
"And you know where it is?"
"I can go to it as straight as a string. Two days to get to it and to stake a claim; two days to come out with a couple of horses loaded to the guards. And that itself means a fortune, if it's clean, raw gold, as would seem to be the case. We need not fear the poorhouse, you and I, Mrs. King!"
"But Brodie? And Mr. Gratton?"
"They don't know where it is! They can't know, since we've got the Bible, and Honeycutt was dead before they got to him! If they knew they would have been on their way already. And I'll be striking out before dawn, leaving no such trail that they can follow it in a hurry, even if they should seek to. No; Brodie and Gratton and the rest of them have lost the game!"
"You are going so soon? Papa wanted that?"
"He wanted me to telephone as soon as I got this." He rose, lingering over her. "We mustn't forget him, even for our own happiness." He brushed her hair with his lips; he hastened the few steps to the telephone in Ben's study.
"I—I am going upstairs, Mark," called Gloria after him.
"All right, Queen of the World," he answered her. "I'm just to phone in a message for him. It won't take me five minutes to get it done; just to say: 'Tell Ben that I start at dawn and that he's got my word for it that nothing's going to stop me! And—that I've just married Gloria!'"
But he was at the telephone longer than he thought to be. The operator buzzed into his ear as he took down the receiver; San Francisco was trying to get a message through. For Gloria Gaynor. Would he take the message? Then an operator in San Francisco, droning the words: "For Miss Gloria Gaynor. Your father is hurt in Coloma. Just sent me word. Says not dangerously, but I must go to him immediately. Meet me there. Mamma."
"Got it," said King, and San Francisco rang off. Thereafter he got his own message through; he wondered how Mrs. Gaynor would take the news of her new son-in-law. Ben would be glad; he was sure of Ben.
Gloria was still upstairs. King sat in front of the fire, staring into the flames, listening to the wind in the chimney, waiting for Gloria. When time passed and she did not come, he went softly upstairs and to her door. It was closed and he knocked lightly, then dropped his hand to the knob, awaiting her voice.
His knuckles had hardly brushed the door, this door which he approached in reverence; Gloria had not even heard him. He called softly, his voice little above a whisper:
"Gloria!" He heard her move; for a moment she did not answer. He could not know how she stood, scarcely breathing, her hands at her breast; nor how, now that the great step was taken, she was again half-frightened, half-regretful, altogether bewildered and uncertain. Of herself, of him, of everything——
"Is it you, Mark?"
"Yes. May I come in, Gloria?"
"Please, Mark. It's all so new, so strange … I intended to come right back downstairs, but I'm so tired, Mark. And I want to be alone a little; to think. I haven't had time to think of anything! You don't mind, do you, Mark?"
He answered promptly and heartily, refusing to allow himself to harbour a shadow of disappointment.
"No. No, of course not. You will go right to bed? I know you must be half-dead for sleep."
"Yes." There was a note of eagerness in the voice coming to him from beyond the shut door.
"There was a message from your mother; she has gone to your father and wanted you to meet her there. But we will talk of that later."
"Yes…. Good-night, Mark."
"Aren't you going to kiss me good-night?" he asked, hesitating a little between the words. His new privilege, a lover's, a husband's, was not an hour old; he felt strangely shy as he spoke softly to her.
"Please, Mark! I am terribly tired out, and—and I'm afraid I've mislaid the key, and——"
That hurt him; his eyes darkened with the quick pain that came to him from her words. He had hoped that Gloria had known him better than that.
"You need never lock your door against me, my dear," he told her gently. "I don't want you to be afraid of me. Why, God bless you, I wouldn't touch the hem of your dress if you didn't want me to."
"Yes," said Gloria. "I know. You are so good, Mark. But now——"
"I am going," he returned tenderly, "to sit by the fire and think. Just to soak myself in the realization," he added with a happy laugh, "that you are mine."
"Before you go in the morning you will come to my door?"
"If you want me to…."
"Of course, Mark."
"Then—good-night, dear."
"Good-night, Mark."
Chapter XVI
King was astir long before dawn. He got the fire going in the kitchen and started breakfast, seeking to be very silent and succeeding in making the usual clatter of a male among pots and pans. Whilst water heated and bacon sizzled, he rummaged through the store-room at the rear of the house, gathering what he meant to put into his pack for the four or five days' trip. As he returned from the last journey to the store-room, his arms full of camp accessories, including canvas and camp blankets, he confronted Gloria, fully dressed. He dropped his arm-load and filled his eyes with her. Any shadow left overnight in his heart was sent scurrying before his new joyousness. Gloria had come down to him while he deemed her fast asleep!
"Gloria!" he cried.
A more radiantly lovely Gloria he had never looked upon. She had slept and rested; she had bathed and groomed and set herself in order. She was dressed after a fashion to bewilder a mere man in the only utterly ravishing outing costume Mark King had ever seen. He felt insanely inclined to pick up her little boots, one after the other, and go down on his knees and kiss them; her hat was a flopsy turban, from under the brim of which the most adorable of golden-brown curls half escaped to throw kiss-shadows on her rosy cheeks. And Gloria's eyes!
This time there was no door between them, nor even the memory of a door. He gathered her up into his arms so that her boot-heels swung clear of the floor.
"Do you know … do you guess … have you the faintest suspicion how I love you?"
"The—the coffee!" gasped Gloria. "It's boiling over!"
He laughed joyously at that, and finally, when he had set her down,Gloria, bright and flushed, laughed too.
"Burning bacon last night, boiling coffee this morning!" he chuckled. And then, there in the kitchen, they sat down to breakfast. "It's sweet of you," he told her softly, "to get up and come down and see me off."
"Oh," said Gloria, "I am going with you."
Not once had King dared think of a thing like that. He had thought that at best he would be with her again in four or five days. But that she should go with him into the mountains on this quest of his? He sat and pondered and stared at her.
"Don't you want me?" asked Gloria. "Aren't you glad, Mark?"
She was serenely prepared for objections, should they be forthcoming. For it was not on any spur of the moment, but after long deliberation, that she had decided that she would go with him. She wanted no scandal in the papers; she meant that there should be none. If it were rumoured that she had gone out of town with Gratton; if Gratton wanted to be ugly and feed rumour; then on top of that if she appeared within reach of a reporter without a husband, there would be talk. If it were answered that she was married to Mark King, there would be the question: "And where, my dear, is this Mark King?" Those girl friends in San Francisco who had met him at her birthday-party would be fairly squirming with excited curiosity to knoweverything. Among themselves they would make insinuations about the Bear Tamer or the Animal Trainer, as Gloria knew that they would variously and mirthfully designate him. They would find it unusual that King had married her one day and had gone off the next without her. They would hazard endless unpleasant explanations; they would get their heads together; they would make an astonishing patchwork of scraps of distorted rumour and bits of wild speculation…. From upstairs last night she had heard fragmentary outbursts from the "judge." "Irregular; no licence." Now Gloria meant to kill the snake outright, not to allow the scotched reptile to writhe free. She was married; she was going with her husband into the wilderness on the most romantic of all honeymoons. The papers were free to make much of that.
"Of course I want you," said King slowly. "Glad? Glad that you want to come with me? Can't you see that I am the gladdest man on earth? But——"
"I have already written a message I wanted to send to a girl friend in San Francisco…." It was to Miss Mildred Carter, who was engaged to be married to Bob Dwight of theChronicle…. "I was going to have it phoned in to her. It tells her I'm—married. To you, Mark. And that we're off on the most wonderful trip together into the heart of the wild country."
"God bless you," he said heartily. But Gloria, glancing at him swiftly, saw that his eyes were clouded with perplexity.
"Of course," she said, "if you don't want a girl along——"
"Gloria!"
"Well, then? It's settled? I'm to go?"
"Only I'm afraid it isn't the sort of a trip for a girl. It's hard going, and—Oh, it's a cursed shame I can't put it off."
"You said last night that you weren't afraid of anything Brodie and his men could do? That they didn't even know where to go? That they'd never know where to find you?"
"Yes. And I meant it. But——"
He wanted her with him; she wanted to come. Further, it pained him to think that those first glorious days should be spent with the mountains between them. He was tempted, sorely tempted. Gloria knew; she smiled at him across the table; she tempted him further. …Was there really any danger, would there be danger to her? If he thought so, that there was the faintest likelihood of harm to her, he would say no, no matter what the yearning in his heart. But if they made a quick dash in and out; two days each way, not over one day at Gus Ingle's caves? If they went on horseback nearly all the way, and travelled light? He carried a rifle nowadays, and he rather believed he might carry it ten years without ever firing a shot at any man of their hulking crowd. They could go in one way, come out another. They had at least a full day's head start of any possible followers. No, in his heart he did not believe that there would be any danger to Gloria. Further, the thought struck him that she would not be altogether safe here; there was venom in Gratton, God only knew how virulent. And there was sinister significance in the fact that Gratton was hand in glove now with Swen Brodie. Then, too, Gratton knew from Gloria's own lips that she had brought the message from her father in Coloma; hence Gratton might suspect, and Brodie after him, that Gloria was in possession of old Loony Honeycutt's secret. Instead of seeming hazardous to take Gloria with him, it began to appear that his new responsibility of guarding her from all harm had begun already, and that he could best protect her from any possible evil by having her always with him. He could not allow her to go to her parents in Coloma; he thought of that, but that was Brodie's hangout, and Ben was in no condition to send for her. Nor was it advisable for her to go alone to San Francisco; her mother was not there, and Gratton might be looked on to follow her….So with himself communed Mark King, never a man overly given to caution, but seeking now to measure chances, to set them in the scales over against the desire of his heart. A fanciful thought insisted on being heard: had Gus Ingle's treasure hidden itself all these years, awaiting the time when he and Gloria together came to it? Their wedding gift! How much more precious then than mere gold!
"We'd travel light," he said thoughtfully, and Gloria knew that she had won. "We'd go in quick, out quick. It's getting late in the year," he added with a smile, "and we'd have to hurry, Brodie or no Brodie. I've no notion for a prolonged honeymoon snow-bound in those mountains."
Her eyes danced.
"Wouldn't that be fun!"
His smile quickened. Her childish ignorance of what such an adventure would mean was in keeping with her vast inexperience with matters of the outdoors; she had merely begun, in his company, to glimpse the true meanings of the solitudes. She would learn further—with him. And a warm glow of pleasure came with the thought that Gloria wanted to go.
* * * * *
The pearl-grey dawn was flowering into a still pink morning when they locked the door behind them and stepped out into the crisp, sweet freshness of the autumn air. He had made two small packs, provisions rolled into the bedding and the whole wrapped in pieces of canvas; he estimated they would be gone five days, and then, making due allowance for any reasonable delay, provisioned for ten. When he saw that Gloria had noted how for the first time on a woodland jaunt with her he carried a very businesslike-looking rifle, he explained laughingly that if they developed abnormal appetites there were both deer and bear to be had. She was much interested in everything, and looked out to the mountains eagerly when King had swung her up to her saddle on Blackie, the tall, sober-faced horse, where she sat with a roll of blankets at her back and with the horn before her decorated with a miscellany of camp equipment—a frying-pan, a short-handled axe in its sheath, an overcoat done into a compact bundle. Here was another moment when thoughts were too slow processes to emphasize themselves; she was swayed by emotions provoked by the moment. Where were the trunks and suitcases and hat-boxes to accompany the young bride? In their stead, a coat tied into a tight bundle and a frying-pan before her. King looked at her and marvelled; her cheeks were roses, her eyes were Gloria's own, wonderful and big and deep beyond fathoming. From his own saddle on the buckskin he nodded his approval of her.
"You are not afraid that I can't take care of you, are you, Gloria?" he asked.
And Gloria laughed gaily, answering:
"My dear Mr. Man, I am not the least little bit afraid of anything in all the world this morning!"
So with the glorious day brightening all about them they turned away from the log house and into the trail which straightway King dubbed "Adventure Trail." And as they went he sang out joyously:
"The Lord knows what we'll find, dear heart, and the deuce knows whatwe'll do.But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,And Life runs large on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new."
Chapter XVII
The magnificent wilderness into which rode Mark and Gloria King seemed to prostrate its august self to do them honour upon this their wedding morning. Succeeding the paler tints of the earlier hour came the rare blue day. Last night's clouds had vanished; the air was clear and crisp, with still a hint of frost. On all hands had October in passing splashed the world with colour. Along the creek the aspens danced and played and shivered in bright golden raiment; through the bushes there was a glimpse of vivid scarlet where the leaves of a dwarf maple were as bright as snow-plants. A little grove of gracefully slender poplars trembled in yellow against the azure above. The clear, thin sunlight pricked out colours until it made the woods a riot of them, greens dark and light, the grey of sage, the white of a granite seam, the black of a lava rock, and in the creek spray a brilliant vari-coloured rainbow sheen. They two, riding side by side, while the broad trail permitted, passed over the ridge and out of sight of the house. Immediately the solitudes shut down about them with titanic walls. They rode down into a long, shadowy hollow, out through a tiny verdant meadow fringed with the rusty brown of sunflower leaves, and on up to the crest of the second ridge. Already they were alone in the world, a man and his mate, with only infinity and its concrete symbols embracing them, ancient and ageless trees, limitless sky, mile after mile of ridge and precipice and barren peak. And upon them and about them and within them the utter serene hush of the Sierra.
With every swinging step of the horses taking them on, a new gladness blossomed in King's heart. For they were pushing ever further into the portion of the world which he knew best, loved best. The present left him nothing to wish for; he had Gloria, and Gloria had elected to come with him. Until high noon they would wind along, for the most part climbing pretty steadily with the old trail—Indian trail, miners' trail, trail which even to-day seems to lead from the first generation of the twentieth century straight back into the heart of 1850 and beyond. Here men did not penetrate save at long intervals; here was true solitude. And soon, when they should leave this trail to travel as straight a line as the broken country would allow toward Gus Ingle's caves, they would enter a region given over entirely to the wild's own bright-eyed, shy inhabitants.
There were red spots in Gloria's cheeks when they started. King sought to guess at what might be the emotions of a young girl going on with Gloria's present emotional adventure—vain task of a mere man seeking to fathom those troubled feminine depths!—marking that she was a little nervous and distrait.
"I know the place Gus Ingle tried to describe," he said, "as well as I know my old hat. Or at least I'd have said so until he mentioned the third cave. I've been there dozens of times, too, but I've got to see more than two caves there yet."
Together they had read the crabbed lines in the Bible; they had been silent thereafter as to each came imagined pictures like ghosts from the past; ghosts of greed and envy and despair. Now Gloria mused aloud:
"I wonder—do you suppose we'll find it as he says?"
"At least we'll see about it. And whether there be heaps and piles of red, red gold, as the tale telleth, be sure our trip is going to be worth the two days' ride. I'll show you such chasms and gorges and crags as you've never turned those two lovely eyes of yours upon, Mrs. Gloria King." (He couldn't abstain absolutely from all love-making.) "And a little grove of sequoias which belongs to me. Or, at least, I believe I am the only man who knows where they are. Friends of mine, those big fellows are, five old noble-souled monarchs."
She looked interested and treated him to a fleeting smile, but asked curiously:
"How can a man speak of a tree that way? As though it were alive—" She broke off, laughing, and amended: "But theyarealive, aren't they? I mean—human."
"Why, you poor little city-bred angel," he cried heartily. "You will answer your own question inside of two days. No doubt I'm going to grow jealous of old Vulcan and Thor and Majesty. Sure, I've named them," he chuckled. "And you'll come with me into their dim cathedral to-morrow at dusk and listen with me to their old sermon. A man ought to go to church to them at least once a year, to keep his soul cleaned out and growing properly."
Gloria appeared thoughtful; that she was interested just now less in that of which he spoke than in the man himself he did not suspect. She was noting how he spoke of trees as friends; how he was different from other men whom she knew in that he stood so much closer to the ancient mother, the wilderness now embracing them. Instinctively she knew that it behoved her to penetrate as deeply as she might into the inner nature of this man who, hardly more than a pleasant, attractive stranger yesterday, was to-day her husband.
"What is the oldest thing in the world?" he asked her abruptly.
She wrinkled her brows prettily at him.
"Church to-morrow evening and school now?" she countered lightly.
"Answer," insisted King. "Just at a rough guess what would you say was the oldest thing in the world?"
Gloria cudgelled her brains. Finally, since he seemed quite serious, and she knew that wisdom lay in pleasing the male of the species in small and unimportant matters, she sought to reply.
"The Sphinx or the Pyramids, I'd guess," she offered.
"Naturally," he returned. "And what will you say when I introduce you to the Pharaoh who was a big, husky giant before Thebes was thought of?"
Again she looked to see a twinkle of jest in his eyes.
"Pharaoh?" she said. "Just a tree? Over two or three thousand years old!"
"By at least another thousand," he rejoined triumphantly. "And as staunch an old gentleman as you'll find."
Even Gloria, a poor little city-bred angel, must muse upon the statement. Having caught her interest he told her picturesquely of his old friends; how they had dwelt on serenely while peoples were born and empires rose and fell; while Rome smote Greece and both went down in the dust; while Columbus pushed his three boats across the seas; while the world itself passed from one phase to another; how they were all but co-eternal with eternity.
"When you think how these old fellows were a thousand years old when the Christ was a little boy," he ended simply, "you will begin to realize the sort of things they have a way of saying to you while you lie still and look up and up, and still up among their branches that seem at night to brush against the stars."
She let her fancies drift in the leash of his. But again they left the picturesque ancient trees and returned to him. A little smile touched her lips and was gone before he was sure of it; she was thinking that a man like King kept always in his heart something of the simplicity of a little child; she wondered if she herself, though so much younger in actual years, were not worlds more sophisticated. For his part King noted that she displayed to-day none of that chattering, singing gaiety of their former rides together; he remembered, sympathetically, that she had had very little sleep last night, and that she had endured a wearisome twenty-four hours before, and that the long, nervous strain under which she had struggled must certainly have told upon her, both physically and mentally. So, believing that she would be grateful for silence, he grew silent with her.
Further and ever further into the heart of the solitudes they rode through the quiet hours of the forenoon, with Gloria ever more abstracted and Mark King holding apart from her, doing her reverence, drinking always deep of that soft, sweet beauty which was hers. They forsook the creeks where the yellow-leaved aspens fluttered their myriad little gleaming banners; they made slow, zigzag work of climbing a flinty-sided mountain; they looked back upon green meadow and gay poplar grove far below; they galloped their horses across a wide table-land over which shrilled the wind, already sharpened by the season for the work it had to do before many weeks passed. Though there were some few level spaces, though now and then as King sought for her the easier way they rode down short slopes, with every mile put behind them they had climbed perceptibly. Already Gloria had the sensation of being by the world forgotten—though for her the world could not be forgot. A ridge from which they looked out across the peaks and valleys seemed to her like an island, lost, remote, eternally set apart from other people whom she knew, from all her life as she had lived it. She went on and on and felt like one in a dream, journeying into a fierce, rugged land over which lay a spell of enchantment, a spell that had been cast over it before King's all but immortal trees had burst from the seeds, so that now, while the outside world pulsed and beat with life, and swung back and forth with its pendulous progress, here all was unchanged, changeless.
King led her, well before midday, to the spot in which from the first he had planned that they would noon. A forest pool ringed with boulders, which were green with moss under the splashing of the water from above, where the swaying pines mirrored themselves and shivered in the little breeze which ruffled the clear, cold water. Here was a tiny upland meadow and much rich grass; here a sheltered spot where Gloria might sit in the sun and be protected from the colder air.
He was quick to help her to dismount and noted that she came down stiffly; the eyes which she turned to him were heavy with fatigue; some of the rose flush had faded from her cheeks.
"Maybe I shouldn't have let you come after all, dear," he said contritely. "These are harder trails than we've ridden before, and we've had to keep at it steadier."
There was an effort in her smile answering him.
"The last two dayshavebeen hard to get through with," she said as she yielded to his insistence and sat down on the sun-warmed pine-needles. "I am sorry I am so—so——"
He did not allow her to run down the elusive word.
"Nonsense," he told her heartily. "You've got a right to be tired. But when you've had some hot lunch and a cup of hot coffee you'll be tip-top again. You'll see."
King unsaddled and tethered the horses where they could browse and rest and roll; built his little fire and went about lunch-getting with a joy he had never known in the old accustomed routine before. Now and then he glanced toward Gloria; he could not help that. But he saw that she was lying back, her eyes closed, and while his heart went out to her he did not force his sympathy on her. She was tired and, what was more, she had every right and reason to be tired. He hoped that she might get three winks of sleep. When he came near her for the coffee-pot he tiptoed. She seemed to be asleep.
But Gloria was not asleep. Never had her mind raced so. It was done and she was Mark King's wife! Higher and higher loomed that fact above all other considerations. But there were other considerations; her father hurt, she did not know how badly; her mother mystified, by now perhaps informed of Gloria's marriage; Gratton with the poison extracted from his fangs had the fangs still; gold ahead somewhere, in caves where men long ago had laboured and fought and snarled at one another like starving wolves and died; Brodie somewhere, Brodie with the horrible face. She shivered and stirred restlessly, and King, who saw everything, thought that she had dreamed a bad dream. But lunch was ready; he came to her with plate and cup. And again Gloria did her best to smile gratefully.
"You are so good to me, Mark," she said. Her eyes were thoughtful; would he always be good to her? Even when—but she was too weary to think. It seemed to her that only now was she beginning to feel the effects of all she had been through.
"I want to learn how to be good to you, wife of mine," he said very gently. "That is all on earth I ask. Just to make you happy."
"You love me so much, Mark?" she asked, as one who wondered at what she had read in his low voice and glimpsed in his eyes.
"Gloria," he told her gently, "I don't understand this thing they call love yet; it is too new, too wonderful. But I do know that in all the world there is nothing else that matters."
"Not even Gus Ingle's red, red gold?" she said rather more lightly than she had spoken.
"Not even Gus Ingle's red, red gold."
She looked at him long and curiously.
"You would do anything you could to make me happy? Anything, Mark?"
"I pray with all my heart and soul that I always may!"
Gloria seemed to rest through the noon hour and to brighten. When she saw him the second time look at the sun she got up from the ground and said:
"Time to go on? I'm ready. And after that banquet I feel allmeagain!"
He laughed and went off after the horses, singing at the top of his voice. She stood very still, looking off after him, her brows puckering into a shadowy frown. Oh, if she could only read herself as he allowed her to read him; if she could only be as sure of Gloria as she was of Mark; if she could only look deep into her heart as she looked into his. But she could not! His heart was like the clear pool just yonder across which the sunshine lay and far down in which she could see the stones and pebbles as through so much clear glass; hers was like the rushing stream above, eddying and swirling and hiding itself under its own light spray. All day long she had tried to see what lay under the surface.Did she love Mark King? She had thrilled to him as she had thrilled to no other man; but that had been in the springtime. Twice then she had been sure that she loved him. But that was so long ago. And now that she had allowed him to carry her out of the quicksands? What now? She was so borne down by all that she had lived through; he was so much a part of the mountainous solitudes towering about them. And was she one to love the wilderness—for long? Or did it not begin to bear down upon her uncertain spirit? Did it not menace and frighten and, in the end, would it not repel? Oh, if she had only let him go on alone this morning; if she had remained where she could rest and think and thus come to see clearly, even into her own troubled heart!
Their first hour after lunch led them through a region which, given over to silence itself, denied them any considerable opportunity for conversation. King rode ahead, turning off to the left from their resting-place by the pool, and riding through a sea of grey brush, following a narrow trail made by deer. Then the mountain-side reared its barrier and made all forward and upward progress slow and toilsome. Three times they dismounted and King led the horses; here Gloria clung to the steep mountain-side, looking fearfully down into the monster gorge carved at its base, dwelling with fascinated fancies on the thought of slipping, losing handhold and foothold and plunging down among the jagged boulders strewing the lower levels. There was really no great danger, she told herself over and over; King's cheery calls reassured her; no danger so long as they went forward on foot. But now and then when a horse's foot slipped and a wild cascade of loose soil and rocks went hurtling downward, she grew rigid with apprehension.
But there was only an hour of this. Thereafter they rode down a long slope and into a long, narrow, twisting ravine, rocky cliffs on one hand and a noisy stream on the other, a fair trail underfoot. Nearly always now King rode ahead, finding the way for her; and Gloria, her spirits drooping again with the advancing afternoon, vaguely oppressed by the solemn stillness about her, was glad that she too could be silent. When he did call to her she needed only nod or smile; he turned to point out some rare view that appealed to him, a vista worth her seeing, a cascade or a fall of cliff, or a ferny nook, or perhaps a late ceanothus- blossom. He pointed out a scampering Douglas squirrel and had her hearken to a quail.
"We're already in the finest timber belt in the world," he told her, full of enthusiastic loyalty to his beloved mountains.
Thus, he leading the way, she following with head down and shoulders drooping, they came about four o'clock to a small meadow, cliff-ringed, studded with big yellow pines and here and there graced with an incense cedar. Stopping in the open, sitting sideways in the saddle, he waited for her.
"And what do you think of this, Miss Gloria?" he called gaily as her horse thrust his black nose through the alders down by the creek.
Gloria drew rein and looked at him with large eyes across the twenty paces separating them.
"I can't go any further," she said bleakly. "I'm tired out!"
He was quick to see a gathering of tears, and swung down from his horse and went to her with long strides, his own eyes filled with concern.
"Poor little kidlet," he said humbly. "I've let you do yourself up…."
And it was his duty, his privilege, and no one's else in the world, to shelter her, to stand between her and all hardship. He put out his arms to take her into them quite as he could have picked up a little maid of six, something stirring in the depths of him which in man is twin to the maternal instinct in woman. But Gloria said hurriedly: "Please, Mark, I am so tired …" and drew back, and he let his hands fall to his side. For a second time her act hurt him; her gesture was akin to locking a door last night. But in a moment, his pity and loyalty and staunch faith in her crowding the small ache out of his heart, he was unrolling a pack, making a temporary couch for her and commanding her lovingly just to lie down and look up at the tree-tops above her, and rest while he staked out the horses. Sensing that perhaps the very bigness and majestic silence of these uplands might rest heavy upon her spirit and perhaps depress if not actually awake in her an emotion akin to fear, he strove to cheer her by his own blithe acceptance of the fortune of the hour. He told her heartily that she had earned a rest if any one ever had; that it was well, after all, to get an early start at pitching camp; that he was going to make his lady-love as cosy here in his big outdoor home as was ever princess in castle walls. Gloria shivered and threw herself face down on the blankets. Gloria did not know what possessed her; she fought for repression, hiding her face from him. Out of a hideously stern world a black spirit had leaped upon her; it clutched at her throat, it dragged at her heart. When King called a cheery word from beyond the thicket where he had gone with the horses, she could have screamed. She was so nervous that now and again a fierce tremor shook her from head to foot.
* * * * *
King was counting it fortunate that they were granted so likely a camp site for the night. He looked up at the tall black cliffs shutting in the little meadow; they would hold back the night winds from Gloria. He chose the spot, well back from the creek, where she would sleep. High overhead, like brooding giants, stood the upright pines. Where a little clump of mere youngsters, lusty fellows not a score of years old, had the air of pressing close together as though thus with their combined strength they sought to match the strength of their aloof parents, a compact grove to make a further shelter against the mountain air, Gloria would sleep. He stretched a strip of canvas from tree to tree, making a five-foot wall of it. Close by he started his fire, knowing from experience oft repeated how a cheery blaze in the forest may dispel shadows within even as it makes the sombrest of shadows dance gaily under the trees; to one side he laid many resinous faggots, planning on their crackling light later on when the dark came. He ringed his fire with rocks, lugging them as heavy as he could carry up from the creek side, making the rudest of fireplaces. But it had the merit that it threw the heat back toward his extended canvas, and there between it would be snug and warm. All about him, as he laboured, was the singing of water and, high in air, the singing of pine tops. They made merry music and King, gone down to the stream to fill his coffee-pot, sang with it from a full, brimming heart. Gloria was tired, but she was resting now. And in a little while, when dark came, he and she would sit by his fire and look into it and talk in hushed voices, hand locked in hand; they would watch for the first of the big blazing stars to come out—he and Gloria, alone in the wilderness.
He saw a trout swinging lazily in a quiet pool. Trout for Gloria! He glanced toward where she lay; he was glad that she was not looking. It would be a surprise for her. He hurried to his kit in his pack, got out hook and line, baited with a tiny bit of red flannel, and went back to the creek. For he knew that it was not likely that the trout here could have had any remembered encounters with man; they were plentiful and might, like many other sorts of beings, be lured to their undoing by curiosity and greed. He cut a willow pole, stood back and cast out his gay bit of bait, letting it drift with the riffles. There came a quick tug, another, sharp and vigorous, and he swung his prize out of the water, breaking the surface into scattering jewels, flashing in the sunlight as it struck against the grass along the creek's edge.
Dusk gathered while he worked over his fire. The aroma of boiling coffee rose, crept through the air, blended with the aromas of the woods. He had made toast, holding the bread to the coals upon a sharpened stick. There were strips of crisp bacon garnishing a trout browned to the last painstaking turn. There were fried potatoes, cut by King's pocket-knife into thin strips and turned into gold by the alchemy of cooking. He set out his dishes upon a flat-topped rock, replenished his fire, threw on some fresh-cut green cedar boughs for their delightful fragrance, and went to call Gloria.
* * * * *
Gloria, too tired bodily and mentally to wage a winning battle against those black vapours which flock so frequently about luckless youth, had suffered and yielded and gone down in misery. She had been crying, just why she knew not; crying because she could not help it. Hers was a state of overwrought nerves which forbade clear thinking, which distorted and warped and magnified. The babble of the water which had been music to King was to her a chorus of jeering voices; the wind in the pines an eerie moaning as of lost spirits wailing; the trees themselves, merging with the dusk, were brooding, shadowy giant things which she suddenly both feared and hated; the cliffs rising against the sky loomed so near and so gigantically tall that she felt as though they were pressing in upon her to suffocate her, to crush her, to annihilate her. The world was turning black with the night; the night rushed, treading out the last gleam of sunlight; even the one star which she had glimpsed through her tears impressed her only with its remoteness. She was frightened; not because of any physical violence, for Mark King stood between her and that. But of vague horrors. She thought of San Francisco; of her own bright room there; of the lights in the streets, of pedestrians and motors and street-cars filling that other steel-cañoned wilderness with familiar noises. And somehow, San Francisco seemed further away, immeasurably further away, than that one remote star blazing through the vastness of space.
"A cup of coffee and a bit of supper," King said gently. "You'll feel a lot better."
She rose wearily and followed him. Without a word she dropped down beside his banquet, putting out a listless hand to her tin cup. The firelight upon her face showed him her thoughtful eyes; but they were turned not toward him but toward the bed of coals. He had anticipated her lively surprise at the trout; she pushed the brown morsel aside, saying absently:
"I am not hungry. It was good of you to go to all of this trouble. I am afraid I am not much of a camper." She forced the shadow of a smile with the admission.
"Tuckered out," he thought as he looked into her face across which light and shadow flickered as flame and smoke in the camp-fire came and went fitfully, twisted by the evening breeze. "Clean tuckered out."
Gloria, feeling his gaze so steady upon her, turned her eyes toward his, eyes heavy and sober with her drooping spirit. As the flames frolicked about the pitch-pine he had tossed to the coals, he saw the traces of tears. He said nothing, supposing that he understood; he but strove the harder to be good to her, to share with her some of that rare joy filling his own heart. He sought with unobtrusive tenderness to anticipate her slightest want; he jumped to his feet and brought her a cup of water; he shoved aside a burning branch which rolled impudently too near the divine foot; he removed the offending fish from under her nostrils hastily and half apologetically; he piled the fire high when he saw her shiver. And finally when she pushed her cup away and let her two hands drop into her lap he gathered the dishes and carried them away to the nearest pool to wash them, leaving Gloria silent and thoughtful, brooding over his fire.
When he came back to her in the hush of the first hour of night, he thought that he understood her need for silence, and spoke only infrequently and briefly, and very, very softly, calling her attention now to the last lingering light upon the piney ridge behind them or to the liquid music of the creek, which, with the coming of night, seemed to grow clearer and finer and sweeter, or finally to the big star burning gloriously in the perfect deep-blue sky.
"And now," he said, taking up his short-handled axe, "I am going to make for my lady-love the finest couch for tranquil, restful sleep that mortal ever had."
As he strode away toward a grove of firs he was lost to her eyes before he had gone a hundred paces. The night came so swiftly it seemed to her feverish fancies that in the dark the big tree trunks were huddling closer together. In a moment she heard the sound of his axe, striking softly through green juicy branches. He worked swiftly, grudging every minute away from her. And then, with his arms full of the fragrant, balsamy boughs, he stopped and let them slip down to the ground and himself sat down upon a log and filled his pipe with slow fingers. He'd force himself to smoke one pipe before he went back to her, thinking that she would be grateful for a few moments alone.
Almost with the first puff of smoke there came to him Gloria's piercing scream. His heart stopping, he jumped up and ran through the trees to her, shouting: "Gloria I Gloria! I'm coming. What is it?"
Gloria was cowering against the nearest tree, her face showing frightened in the firelight, her eyes wide with nervous horror.
"There is something there … in the bushes!" she cried excitedly. "I heard it moving…."
He looked where she pointed. Down by the creek, just waddling back into the alders, was a fat old porcupine, dimly seen in the fringe of the camp-fire. But King did not laugh. His first impulse upon him, strengthened by Gloria's helplessness, he took her into his arms, holding her close to him.
"Why did you leave me?" asked Gloria petulantly. "So long."
He had been away from her fifteen minutes while he cut an armful of fir-boughs, and thereafter filled and lighted his pipe—and to Gloria the time had seemed long! Little enough of love's confession, surely, but a golden crumb to a man's starving love. He drew her closer; their faces, ruddy with fire-glow, each tense with its own emotion, were close together.
"Oh!" cried Gloria. She wrenched away from him violently. "You—you hurt me. Let me go!" She buried her face in her hands; he saw her shoulders lift and droop; he heard her sob: "Oh, I was a fool——"
His arms had dropped to his sides and he stood for a moment speechless, staring at her as across a chasm shadow-filled.
"Gloria," he said, bewildered.
But now her hands, too, were at her sides, clenched and nervous; her white face was lifted and she broke out passionately into hot words; he saw her breast heaving and sensed that she was stirred to depths never until now plumbed. What he could not glimpse were the vague, unreasonable reasons, the distorted horrors grinning at her among the spaces of black gloom into which her spirit had sunk; had he been a fancy-sick poet, a pale-blooded creature given to blue devils and nightmare conjecture, he might have come somewhere near an understanding. But being plain Mark King, a straightforward, healthy, and unjaundiced man, his comprehension found never a clue to a condition which in Gloria was hardly other than an inevitable result of all that had gone before.
"I was half-mad last night," she panted. "There was no way to turn. That beast of a man drove me to desperation. Then you came, and—and——Oh, I wish that I were dead!"
Incredulous, amazed, near stupefied, he stood rooted to the ground.
"I don't understand," he said dully after a long silence broken only by a tumble and frolic of the water and Gloria's quick, hard breathing. He strove to be very gentle with her. "Just what is it? Can you tell me, dear?"
"Don't call me dear … like that," she cried sharply. "Just as though I were your …property." He saw the roundness of her eyes. She shuddered. "You knew that I was driven to it, to save my name, to stop hideous gossip…."
In her disordered mind she had been flung, as upon shoals, to many bleak points of view; she had blamed fate for her undoing, she had blamed Gratton, she had laid the responsibility upon her mother for having allowed her to drift; but always she had looked upon herself as the victim. Now, in her agitation, which had risen close to hysteria, it was suddenly Mark King whom she blamed for everything; he, in the guise of fate, had betrayed her!
"You saw that I was half dead with terror; that I hardly knew what I was doing; that all I could think of was escape from the horrible trap that had been set for me; you——"
"So that was it?" But still his tone was utterly devoid of any emotion save that of incredulity. "You mean you didn't love me, Gloria?"
"When did you ever ask me if I loved you?"
"But you … you married me…. Great God!" He ran his hand across his brow as though to brush away an obsession. "Not loving me, you married me just to save yourself from possible scandal?"
"What girl wouldn't?" she cried wildly. "Driven as I was?"
He tried to think with all of that calm deliberation which this moment so plainly required. In mind he went back stage by stage through all of last night's events. And so he came in retrospect in due time to the moment when he had come to the porch and had looked in through the window to take his last farewell of her; when he had seen her standing at Gratton's side. She had drooped so like a figure of despondency; she had lifted her head slowly at the "judge's" question. And then there had occurred that sudden change in her bearing and in her voice alike, when abruptly she had cried out: "No. No and no and no!"
"Tell me," said King heavily, "when you refused to marry Gratton last night—did you know that I was outside?"
"Yes," she answered. She wondered why he asked. "There was a mirror; I saw your reflection in it."
"If I had not come—would you have gone on with the thing?" He hesitated, then said harshly: "Would you have married him?"
"I don't know. Oh," she exclaimed, twisting at her hands, "how can I tell what I would have done? driven one way, torn another——"
"You might have married him? You but chose me as the lesser of two evils? Was that it?"
"I tell you I don't know! I only know that I was hideously compromised; I would never have dared show my face again in San Francisco—anywhere—it would have killed me——"
And even yet there was in King's face only a queer tortured incredulity. For a long time neither moved nor spoke. His eyes were on her, hers intently on him. When he answered it was in a voice from which all of to-day's joyousness had fled.
"I'm going to make your bed, Gloria," he said evenly. "Near the fire, which I'll keep going. I'll make mine on the outside, so you need not be afraid of any prowling animal. Then in the morning we will talk."
She watched him go back for his scattered fir-boughs. And even Gloria noted how heavy was his walk. But she could not guess how when he was alone with his trees, and the darkness dropped curtainwise between him and her he went down on both knees and buried his face in one of those same fallen sprays from the fir.
Chapter XVIII
Flat on his back lay Mark King, his hands under his head, his eyes upon the slow procession of the stars. Just so had he lain many a night in the forest-land—but life then and now were as two distinct existences which had nothing in common, but were set apart in two separate worlds, remote one from the other. Now he saw the stars, as it were, with the physical eye alone, merely because they blazed so bright against the darkness above him; he was scarcely conscious of their gleam and sparkle. Of old he had been wont to commune with them; through the long years they had woven themselves into his rough-and-ready religion. Countless times had he watched them and mused and hearkened to the message which, as with a still voice, infinitely calming, travelled to him across the limitless vastitude of the universe. Countless times that voice had called him away from the toils and victories and defeats of the day, up into a place of quiet from which a man might look about him with a somewhat truer perspective; he glimpsed futility in much of human strife and striving; he saw nobility enshrined in a "small" act; he marked how, set in the scales of the eternal balances of scope and eternity, a copper penny set against a million dollars were as two feathers; they rode light, and there was little choice between them. He had known that firefly cluster of lights above to be the majestic processional of worlds. He saw himself as small; the universe as big. And the knowledge did not crush; it elevated. Throughout the whole of creation ran the fine chain of divine ordinance, of a law that flowered in beauty. There was God's work above him, about him, within him. And God stood back of it all, vouching for it, making it good. The spinning of worlds, the pulses of tides, the course of the blood in his veins—these were kindred phenomena; the law of God bound about with its fine chain of divine will and love the greater and the lesser bodies moving through the universe. Upon such a comprehension, brotherhood of man and tree and sun and flower, had been raised Mark King's haphazard edifice of a theory of life. The stars reminded him that through the eons all had been right with the world of worlds; they sang of hope and happiness and beauty. They showed a man the way to rich, full contentment. They lighted the path to generous dealings with other men. They threw their searchlight upon the day a man had just done with and set him thinking; they led his thoughts ahead to the day soon to dawn, making him wish to make a better job of things.
But to-night between him and his beloved stars stretched a region of shadows through which the eyes of his soul did not look. Something within him had been stricken; sorely wounded; beaten to its knees; chilled with death. He sought to think quite calmly, and for a long time clear consecutive thought was beyond his reach. A moment had come when he could onlyfeel. He was swept this way and that. He had given to Gloria his love without stint, without reservation, without limit. The love which no other woman had ever awakened had poured itself out before Gloria like a flood of clear swift water breaking free. He loved after the only fashion possible to him, with his whole heart and soul, with his whole being. He adored. He made of his beloved a princess, a goddess. He saw her upon a plane where no woman ever lived, in an atmosphere too rare for flesh-and-blood humanity. A man does not love through human reason; rather through a reason, hidden even to him, deeper than humanity. Then Gloria had put her hand into his; Gloria had married him; Gloria had elected to come with him. After that he had seen nothing in its true light; Gloria had remade the world into paradise ineffable.
He had been on the heights, lifted among the stars. And without warning, without mercy, the world had crashed about him. From the zenith to the nadir. Small wonder that thoughts did not come logically! He floundered, lost, crushed, bewildered.
Just yonder, on the bed of fir-boughs he had made for her, lay Gloria. He did not look that way. The wind was rising; he heard it go rushing through the tree-tops; it struck with sudden, relentless impact; it set the shivering needles to shrill whistling; it made the staunch old trunks shudder. He heard the canvas flap-flapping by Gloria's bed; above him tossing boughs scraped and creaked.
One thing only seemed clear to him: the time had come when a man must seek to hold himself in check, when he must not leap, when he must strive with all the stubborn will in him to reserve judgment. His own life's crisis had come to him, revealing itself with the blinding swiftness of a flash of lightning. A step forward or back now would be one step toward which his entire destiny, from the hour of birth until now, had led him; there would be no retracing it; it would be final; and everything—everything—was at stake. He must think; he must try to understand all that Gloria had experienced; to see what impulses had moved her; to make allowances for her; to come to read aright what lay in her heart. He must see clearly into two human hearts! Task for the gods! As though the wilderness about him were a colossal malevolent entity endowed with the power to look into human breasts, it jeered at him with its voice of the wind.
He had but half a mind to give to physical senses. Though the wind howled all night long, he scarce was conscious of it; though the cold increased, he did not know that he was cold before he had grown numb. He had given to Gloria all of their bedding, save alone the one blanket he had wrapped about him; he had kept on all his clothing, buttoned up his coat, and forgotten that he was not warmly covered. Now he got up and walked up and down; he made the fire blaze up; he sat huddled over it until it burned down to a bed of glowing red coals.
Once or twice he heard Gloria stir restlessly upon her fir-bough bed. But he did not speak. There was nothing to be said between them now; they would wait until she had rested, until morning. Then there would be no more delay. They would understand each other then as few men and women had understood; there would be plain words and but few of them. He grew impatient for morning and sat looking forward to its coming with a face set and hard, growing as stern as death.
Gloria, exhausted, had gone to sleep, snuggled warmly into her blankets. It was the wind that awoke her; she started wide awake, her heart in her throat, startled by the flapping of the canvas at her head. She lay still and looked up; the pines were black and swayed dismally; the wind among them made shuddersome music; the cold began to drive through her blankets, through her clothing. Her body was stiff and sore; the branches of fir under her hurt her through the canvas and one blanket which covered them. She turned, twisting into a position of less discomfort. The creek babbled and splashed; its voice merged with the wilds into a bleak, cheerless duet.
She lifted her head a little; the fire was dying out and King had gone! The darkness bore down upon her; she heard everywhere vague sounds, noises as of stealthy feet. She knew a moment of blind terror; she tried to cry out but only a little choking gasp resulted. She saw something moving, a vague, formless, dreadful something, and lay back, chilled with fright. It was King; he was bringing fresh fuel. She sank back and again looked up at the pines swaying against the field of stars. She began to shiver; a nervous chill. She felt the slow tears form and spill over and trickle down her cheeks. She gathered her nether lip between her teeth and lay very still, shaken now and then by a noiseless sob.
She existed through a period of suppressed excitement. If King found cool logic eluding him, Gloria's mind was an orgy of nervous imaginings. She was back with her mother, weeping, sobbing out upon a comforting breast all of her hideous adventures; she was reading the tall headlines in the newspapers; she was commenting on them with simulated flippancy to Georgia and Ernestine; she was meeting Mr. Gratton for the first time again, treating him to such haughty disdain as put hot blood into his white face; she was standing erect in the morning, confronting Mark King fearlessly, demanding her rights, commanding that he take her home. And, piteously lonely and frightened, she was longing to have him come to her now, to put his arms about her, to hold her tight, to set his fearless body between hers and the vague and terrible menaces of the night and the jeering night voices. She heard a twig snap; her heart beat wildly; she wondered what she would do when he came—and she saw that he sat motionless by the fire.
The night wore on. She dozed now and then, fitfully, awakened always rudely by unaccustomed noises or by the cold or the discomfort of her bed. She put her hand to her cheek, wondering if she were going to be feverish; her face was cold. She saw that King had lighted his pipe. She wanted to scream at him. How she hated him for that. That he could smoke while she lay here in such wretchedness made her briefly hot with anger. He was a man, and sweepingly she told herself that she loathed all mankind. She accused him of heartlessness, of lack of understanding, of brutal lack of sympathy. He and he alone was responsible for everything—that vague, terribleeverything. He sat there as still as a rooted tree; he bulked big through the gloom like a rugged boulder; he was a part of this wild land, as indifferent, as cold, as merciless. The thought now that he might come to her made her quake with fear; she was afraid of him.
If she could only sleep! No sleep to-night, little the night before, less the night before that. No wonder her brain swirled. If all this had happened at any other time—She was a bundle of nerves—nerves that vibrated at the slightest suggestion. She was going to be ill. Perhaps the end of it would be that she would die. All of the misshapen, monstrous fancies which are bred of a sleepless and nervous night made for her a period of such stress that as the hours wore on they blanched her cheeks and put dark shadows under her eyes and taunted her with longings for a rest which they denied her.
Thus, in the stern grips of their destinies, Mark King and Gloria lived through the night, two uncertain spirits awaiting the light of day. And thus their brains, those finite organs upon which mankind entrusts the ordering of great events, prepared themselves for the moment when they must grapple with and decide a matter of supreme moment. And all night the wind, like a hateful voice, jeered.
* * * * *
At four o'clock that chill, wind-blown morning King began the day. He saw that Gloria was awake and sitting up, looking straight ahead of her. He gave no sign of having noted her, but busied himself in a swift, silent sort of way with fire-building and breakfast preparation. Gloria, in turn, saw him; she experienced aloof wonder at the look on his face. He was haggard; his mouth was set and hard.
She had thought to be thankful when daylight came. Now she got up and went to the fire, rubbing her cold hands together, looking at an awakened world with dull, lack-lustre eyes. It was not yet full day; what light filtered down here into this sheltered spot was cheerless; as it drew forest details out of the thinning shadows it seemed to be painting them in cold grey monotones upon a cold grey world.
He and she, when he came back with an arm-load of wood, looked straight into each other's eyes, long and soberly, searchingly and hopelessly. After that they did not again look into each other's faces; no good-morning had passed between them since both sensed that any time for empty civilities had gone. There could be no conventional pretence at harmony even in small things; they must be in each other's arms or worlds apart.
Out of a night's grappling with chimeras, King had come to one and only one determination: he would go slowly, he would hold an iron check upon himself, he would throttle down a temper which more than once in his life, at moments of tempest, had blazed out uncontrollably. He would smother within himself that passion which in forthright men is so prone to burst into violence. Were Gloria to show herself to be this or that, were she to say this word or another, he would speak with her coolly, he would listen to her calmly, and in the end, since judge he must, he would judge with his heart ordered to beat steadily and not with a wild rush of blood. He had set a guard in his own breast as he might have set a guard over a camp of treacherous enemies.
Yet, from the outset, nothing was more unlikely than that these two should advance by smooth paths to a clear and utter understanding. His one glimpse of her face dethroned his cold logic and moved him very deeply; she was so white, so pitifully sad-looking. She, too, had suffered; God knew that she had battled through hours of anguish. He wanted her in his arms; he wanted to batter at the world with his fists to save her from its flings of grief and pain. He bit savagely at his lip and turned away. And she, seeing his haggard eyes, his drawn face, knew that she had been unjust last night when she had hated him for seeming a soulless man, who could smoke his pipe in all serenity and feel nothing of the unhappiness of the night. He did not look like the Mark King of yesterday; the glad gleam of joy had died in his eyes; the quick resiliency had gone out of his step. He, too, had lived through slow hours of torture. He did love her—she could never doubt that——
Had he suddenly caught her to him then, had he crushed her close in his arms, had he cried out in headlong passion that shemustlove him, that he would make her love him, that she was his, that he would not give her up—would she have wrenched away from him, hot with anger—or would she have crept close and known at last whether or not she loved him? But here was something else she could not know; he turned and went off for his wood; she crouched shivering by the fire.
They breakfasted in silence, the fire between them. Neither did much more than drink the strong coffee. Gloria sat tossing bits of bread into the fire. It was on his lips to tell her not to do that; waste in the wilderness is a crime. But he held his words back. He went methodically about camp work; cleaned the plates and cups and pans; remade the two packs. All this time she did not stir. At last he came back to her and stood by the dying fire, ominously silent. She grew nervously restive, wishing that he would say something.
"There's a day's work to be done," he said at last. His voice, meant to be impersonal, was only stern. "That means an early start. And—"
"Is it very much further to the caves?" she asked.
He had paused; she had to say something.
"It will take a long day getting there. You see, we didn't come very far yesterday."
This, she supposed, was a fling at her, and she stiffened under it. But when she spoke it was to ignore the innuendo, intended or not. For, wherever they might be led, she hoped it would not be into sordid quarrelling.
"It begins to be rather obvious that I should not have come. Doesn't it?" she asked.
"Well?"
"Now, if I turn back——"
"To the house?"
"And then to mamma and papa, in Coloma. And then to San Francisco."
"And I?"
"If you would go with me as far as the house——"
She saw how his body straightened, how his broad shoulders squared. There was something eloquent in the gesture; Mark King, with no toleration of a clutter of side issues, came straight to the main barrier, which must be swept aside for good and all, or which must be skirted and so passed and relegated to the limbo of dead hopes.
"Do you love me, Gloria?" he demanded. "As lovers love? As I have loved you? As a wife should love her husband?"
"Didn't I explain all of that last night?" she said petulantly. "Must we go over it all again? If I have … have pained you, I am sorry. I can't say any more than that, can I? I thought I made you see how I was placed, how there was but the one thing for me to do…."
"Marry Gratton or me? And you chose me?"
She hesitated. She knew that he was angry, though he gave so little outward sign. Nor did she fail to recognize that he had grounds for anger. But none the less she resented his insistent questionings. She stood looking blankly at him. If she had only obeyed her straightforward impulse at the house to go to him and explain her predicament!