She understood now why the old prospectors had never talked to her of her parents or told her how she happened to be their partnership daughter.
She understood now why the old prospectors had never talked to her of her parents or told her how she happened to be their partnership daughter.
MARTA began that day with such buoyant happiness that even her fathers, accustomed as they were to her habitually joyous nature, commented on it.
The air was tingling with the fresh and vigorous sweetness of the early morning. From the kitchen door, as she prepared breakfast, she saw the mountain tops, golden in the first waves of the sunshine flood that a few hours later would fill the sky from rim to rim and cover the earth from horizon to horizon with its dazzling beauty. From some shelf on the cañon wall, a cañon wren loosed a flood of joyous silvery music, gracing his song with runs and flourishes, rich and vibrant, as if the very spirit of the hour was in his melody, and while the cañon echoed and reëchoed to the wondrous, ringing music of the tiny minstrel and the girl, with happy eyes and smiling lips, listened, she saw a thin column of smoke rise from that neighboring cabin and knew that her neighbor, too, was beginning his day.
Like the puff of air that stirred the yellow blossomof the whispering bells beside the creek, the thought came: Was he enjoying with her the beauty and the sweetness of the morning? Was he sharing her happiness in the new day? Then, as she watched, Hugh appeared in the cabin doorway with a bucket in his hand. He was going for water to make his coffee. She saw him pause and look toward her, and her face was radiant with gladness as her voice rang out in merry greeting.
All that forenoon she went about her household work with a singing heart. When the midday meal was over, her fathers saddled Nugget and, as soon as she had washed the dishes, she set out for Oracle to purchase some needed supplies.
When the girl stopped at his cabin, as she always did, to ask if she could bring anything for him from the store, Edwards thought she had never looked so radiantly beautiful. Glowing with the color of her superb health and rich vitality—animated and eager with the fervor of her joyous spirit—she was so alluring that the man was sorely tempted to say to her those things that he had sternly forbidden himself even to think. Lest his eyes betray the feeling he had sentenced himself to suppress, he made pretext of giving some small attention to her horse’s bridle, so that from the saddle she could not see his face.
As she rode on up the trail, he stood there watching her. When she had passed from sight around a sharp angle of the cañon wall, he went slowly to the place where through the long days he labored in hissearch for the grains of yellow metal that had come to mean so much more to him than mere daily bread.
Where the trail to the little white house on the hill branches off from the main road to Oracle, Marta checked her horse. She wanted to go to Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton. She wanted them to know and share her happiness. She wanted to tell them how grateful she was for their love—for all that they had done to save her from the ignorant, undisciplined and dangerously impulsive creature she would have been but for their patient teaching. In the fullness of her heart she told herself that without Saint Jimmy and his mother she could never have known the joy and gladness that had come to her. Without conscious reasoning, she realized that it was their teaching, their love, their understanding of her needs, that had fitted her for that time of her awakening to the glad call of those deeper emotions that now moved her young womanhood. But above Mount Lemmon and back of Rice Peak, huge cumulus clouds were rolling up, and the girl knew that she must continue on the more direct way if she would finish her errand at the store and return before the storm that might come later in the day. On her way back, she could stop at the Burtons, for then, if the storm came, it would not so much matter.
Through narrow, rocky ravines and tree-shaded draws and sandy washes, up the steep sides of mountain spurs and along the ridges, Nugget carriedher, out of the Cañon of Gold to the higher levels. And everywhere about her as she rode, the mountain sides were bright with the blossoms of the “Little Spring.” Sego lilies and sulphur flowers, wild buckwheat, thistle poppies and bee plant, and, most exquisitely beautiful of all, perhaps, the violet-tinted blue larkspur—Espuela del caballero—Cavalier’s spur—the early Spaniards called it.
In George Wheeler’s pasture, not far from the corrals with the windmill and the water tank, she met the sturdy, red-cheeked Wheeler boys and Turquoise, one of the ranch dogs, playing Indian. From their ambush behind a granite rock, they shot at her with their make-believe guns, and charged with such savage fury and fierce war whoops that Nugget danced in quick excitement. While she was laughing with them and they were courteously opening the big gate for her, their father shouted a genial greeting from the barn, and Mrs. Wheeler from the front porch called a cheery invitation for her to stop awhile. But she answered that it looked as if it were going to rain, and that she must be home in time for supper, and rode on her way to the little mountain village.
In the wide space in front of the store, a group of saddle horses stood with heads down and hanging bridle reins, waiting with sleepy patience for their riders who were lounging on the high platform that, with steps at either end, was built across the front of the building. As she drew near, Marta recognized the Lizard. Then, as they watched her approaching,she saw the Lizard say something to his companions, and the company of idlers broke into loud laughter. The girl’s face flushed with the uncomfortable feeling that she was the victim of the fellow’s uncouth wit. Two of the men arose and stood a little apart from the Lizard and his fellow loungers.
When the girl stopped her horse, a sudden hush fell over the group, and as she dismounted she was conscious that every eye was fixed upon her. With burning cheeks and every nerve in her body smarting with indignant embarrassment, the girl went quickly up the steps and into the store. As she passed them, the two cowboys who stood apart lifted their hats.
The girl was just inside the open doorway when the Lizard spoke again, and again his companions roared with unclean mirth at the vulgar jest—and this time Marta heard. She stopped as if some one had struck her. Stunned with the shock, she stood hesitating, trembling, not knowing what to do. For the first time in her life the girl was frightened and ashamed.
Two women of the village who were buying groceries regarded her coldly for a moment, then, turning their backs, whispered together. Timidly the girl went to the farther end of the room where, to hide her emotions until she could gain control of herself, she pretended an interest in the contents of a show case.
Before the laughter of the Lizard’s crowd had ceased, one of the cowboys who had raised his hatwalked up to them. With an expression of unspeakable disgust and contempt upon his bronzed face, the rider looked the Lizard up and down. Those who had laughed sat motionless and silent. Slowly the man from Arkansas got to his feet.
The cowboy spoke in a low voice, as if not wishing his words to be heard in the store.
“That’ll be about all from you—you stinkin’ son of a polecat. Never mind yer gun,” he added sharply as the Lizard’s hand crept toward the leg of his chaps. “Thar ain’t goin’ to be no trouble—not here and now. I’m jest tellin’ you this time that such remarks are out of order a heap, here in Arizona. They may be customary back where you come from, but they won’t make you popular in this country—except, mebby, with varmints of your own sort.”
He included the Lizard’s friends in his look of cool readiness.
Not a man moved. The cowboy carefully rolled a cigarette. Calmly he lighted a match, and with the first deep inhalation of smoke, flipped the burnt bit of wood at the Lizard. To the others he said:
“I notice you hombres are thinkin’ it over. You’d best keep right on thinkin’. As for you——“
He again looked the man from Arkansas up and down with slow, contemptuous eyes. Then, without another word, he deliberately turned his back upon the Lizard and his friends and walked leisurely to his horse.
As the cowboy and his companion rode awayanother chorus of laughter came from the group of idlers and this time their merriment was caused, not by anything the Lizard said, but was directed at the Lizard himself.
“Better not let Steve Brodie catch you again,” advised one.
“He’ll sure climb your frame if he does,” said another.
“Steve’s a-ridin’ fer the Three C now, ain’t he?” asked another, seemingly anxious to change the subject.
“Uh-huh—Good man, Steve,” came from another.
With an oath, the Lizard slouched away to his horse and, mounting, rode off in the direction of his home.
In the store, Marta struggled desperately to regain at least a semblance of composure.
The two women, when they had made their purchases, were in no haste to go, and, under the pretext of taking advantage of their meeting for a friendly chat, furtively watched the Pardners’ girl.
Marta, pretending to examine some dress goods displayed on a table behind the stove, tried to hide herself. When the kindly clerk came to wait on her she started and blushed. Trembling and confused, she could not remember what it was that she had come to buy.
The clerk looked at her curiously. The women whispered again and tittered.
At last, in desperation, the girl stammered thatshe did not want anything—that she must go—that she would come in again before she started home. With downcast eyes and burning cheeks, she fled.
As she passed the men on the platform and walked swiftly to her horse she kept her eyes on the ground. She was so weak that she could scarcely raise herself to the saddle.
But the men were not watching her now. With their faces turned away they were, with one accord, interested in something that held their gaze in another direction.
Perplexed and troubled, Marta made her way slowly back toward the cañon. When Nugget, thinking quite likely of his supper, or perhaps observing the dark storm clouds that now hid the mountain tops, would have broken into a swifter pace, she pulled him down to a walk. Annoyed at the unusual restraint, the little horse fretted, tossed his head, and tugged at the bit. But she would not let him go. The girl wanted to think. She felt that shemustthink.
What was the meaning of that incident at the store? Why did those men laugh in just that way when they first saw her? Why had they watched her like that when she dismounted? Why had they looked at her so as she passed them? Why did those women refuse to speak to her?—they knew her. And what had they whispered after turning their backs upon her? She had never before been conscious of anything like this. All her life she hadmet rough men. She had not been unaccustomed to rude jests. She had been, in the presence of men, like a young boy—unconscious of her sex. The only close association with men she had ever known was with Saint Jimmy and her fathers—until Edwards came. It could not be that these people were any different to-day than on other days when she had gone to the store. It must be that she herself was different.
“Yes,” she told herself at last, “shewasdifferent.”
Just as she had found a deeper happiness than she had ever before known, she had found a new consciousness—a new capacity for feeling—that had made her blush when the men looked at her—that had made her ashamed when she had heard the Lizard’s jest.
And then her mind went back to consider things which she had always accepted as a matter of course, without question or particular thought—as she had accepted her two fathers.
Why had she never been invited to the parties and dances at Oracle? Why was it that, except for Mother Burton and good Mrs. Wheeler, she had no women friends? Only men had attempted to be friendly with her, and they had approached her only when she met them by chance, alone. She knew them all—they all knew her. Suddenly she remembered how Saint Jimmy had warned her once—long before Hugh Edwards had come to the Cañada del Oro:
“You must be always very careful in your friendships, dear. Before you permit an acquaintance with any man to develop into anything like intimacy, you must know about his past. And by past, I mean parentage—family—ancestors, as well as his own personal record. For let me tell you that no one can escape these things. We are all what the past has made us.”
The inevitable question came in a flash. What was her own past—her parentage—her family? The conclusion came as quickly. She understood now why the old prospectors had never talked to her of her own parents, nor told her how she happened to be their partnership daughter. She understood now the significance of her name, Hillgrove—her two fathers had given her their names because she had no name of her own. Nothing else could so clearly explain the attitude of the people which had been so forcefully impressed upon her by her new consciousness.
Just as the young woman reached this point in her reasoning, her horse stopped of his own volition. The girl had been so engrossed with her thoughts that she had not seen the Lizard ride from behind a thick screen of low cedars beside the trail and check his horse directly across the path. She was not at all frightened when she looked up and saw him waiting there, barring her way. Indeed, she regarded the fellow with a new interest. It was as if one factor in her sad problem had suddenly presented itself in a very definite and tangible form.
“Well,” she said at last, “what doyouwant?”
The Lizard’s wide-mouthed, leering grin was not in the least reassuring.
“I knowed ye’d be a-comin’ along directly,” he said, “an’ ’lowed we’d ride t’gether.”
“But what if I do not care to ride with you?” she returned curiously.
“Oh, that ain’t a-botherin’ me none. I ain’t noways thin-skinned,” he returned, reining his horse aside from the trail to make room for her. “Come along—ye might as well be sociable like. I know I can’t make much of a-showin’ in eddication an’ fine school talk like you been used to, but I’m jist as good as that lunger Saint Jimmy, er that there fancy neighbor of yourn any day.”
Something in the fellow’s face, or some quality in his tone, brought the blood to Marta’s cheeks.
“Thank you,” she said curtly, “but I prefer to ride alone.”
She lifted the bridle rein and Nugget started forward.
But the Lizard again pulled his mount across the trail and the man’s ratlike face was twisted now, with sudden rage.
“Oh, you do, do you? Wall, let me tell you I’ve stood all I’m a-goin’ t’ stand on your account to-day.”
“Why, what do you mean?” she demanded, amazed.
“Never you mind what I mean, my lady. You jist listen to what I got t’ say. You’ve been a-playin’ th’ high an’ mighty with me long enough. D’ ye think I don’t know what you are? D’ ye think Idon’t know all about your carryin’ on. My Gawd a’mighty, hit’s a disgrace t’ any decent neighborhood. A pretty one you are t’ be a-puttin’ on airs with me. Why, you poor little fool, everybody knows what you are. Who’s yer father? Who’s yer mother? Decent people has got decent folks, an’ you—you ain’t got none. You ain’t even got a name of yer own—Hillgrove—two fathers. Yer jist low-down trash an’ nobody that’s decent won’t have nothin’ t’ do with you. You prefer t’ ride alone, do you? All right, my fine lady, you needn’t worry none, you’re goin’ t’ ride alone all right. I wouldn’t be seen within a mile of you.”
With the last brutal word, he whirled his horse about and set off down the trail as fast as the animal could run.
The girl, with her head bowed low over the saddlehorn, sat very still. Her trembling fingers nervously twisted a lock of Nugget’s mane. Here was confirmation, indeed, of all the doubts and fears to which she had been led by her own painful thoughts. Here was the answer to all her questions. Here at last was the explanation of those emotions which were to her so new and strange.
“There ain’t a God almighty thing that we can do ’til th’ mornin’.”
“There ain’t a God almighty thing that we can do ’til th’ mornin’.”
THE old Pardners, when their day’s work was finished, climbed slowly down from the mouth of the tunnel to the creek and, crossing the little stream, climbed as slowly up to the level above. As his head and shoulders came above the top of the steep bank, Thad, who was in the lead, stopped.
“What’s the matter?” called Bob, who was close behind in the narrow path with his head on a level with his pardner’s feet. “Gittin’ so old you can’t make the grade without takin’ a rest, be you?”
“Whar’s the little pinto hoss?” demanded Thad in an injured tone, as if the absence of Nugget was a personal grievance.
Bob climbed to his pardner’s side.
“Looks like Marta ain’t back yet.”
“She ought to be,” said Thad with an anxious eye on the threatening clouds that now hung dark and heavy over the upper cañon.
“Stopped at Saint Jimmy’s, I reckon,” returned Bob, who was also studying the angry sky. “Goin’ to storm some, ain’t it?”
“The gal sure can’t miss seein’ that,” returned the other, “an’ she ought to know that when we do get a storm this time of the year, it’s always a buster. I wish she was home.”
“Mebby she’s over to Edwards’,” said Bob hopefully.
They went on toward the house until they gained an unobstructed view of the neighboring cabin and premises.
“Her hoss ain’t there neither,” said Thad, and again he looked up at the dark, rolling clouds.
“Oh, she’ll be comin’ along in a minute or two,” offered Bob soothingly, but his voice betrayed the anxiety his words were meant to hide.
Marta was no novice in the mountains, and the old Pardners knew that it was not like their girl to ignore the near approach of a storm that would in a few moments change the murmuring cañon creek into a wild, roaring flood that no living horse could ford or swim. The trail, on its course from her home to the Burtons, and to Oracle, crossed and recrossed the creek many times, and should the storm break in the upper cañon at the right moment, it would easily be possible for the girl to be trapped at some point between the cañon walls and the bends of the stream, and forced to spend at least the night there. More than this, there was a place where the trail followed for some distance up the narrow, sandy bed of the creek itself, between sheer cliffs. The Pardners and Marta had more than once seen a rolling, plunging, raging wall of watercome thundering down the cañon from a storm above, with a mad force that no power on earth could check or face, and with a swiftness that no horse could outrun.
A few scattered drops of rain came pattering down. The Pardners without another word hurried over to Edwards’ cabin.
The younger man, who was coming up the path from his work, greeted them with a cheery, “Hello, neighbors—looks like we’re going to have a shower.” Then as he came closer and saw their faces, his own countenance changed and the old look of fear came into his eyes. “Why, what’s the matter—what has happened?” He glanced quickly around, as if half expecting to see some one else near-by.
“Marta ain’t come home,” said Thad.
And in the same instant Bob asked:
“Did she say anythin’ to you about bein’ specially late gettin’ back to-day?”
Edwards drew a long breath of relief.
“No, she said nothing to me about her plans. But really, there is no cause for worry, is there? She always stops at the Burtons’ with the mail on her way back, you know. Perhaps she stayed longer than she realized. Come on in out of the wet,” he added, as the pattering drops of rain grew more plentiful. “She will be along presently, I am sure.”
With a glance at the fast-approaching storm, Thad said quickly:
“You don’t understand, son, we ain’t worriedabout the gal gettin’ wet.” And then in a few words he explained the grave possibilities of the situation. “If she stops at Saint Jimmy’s, it’ll be all right, but if she’s a-tryin’ to make it home and gets caught in the cañon——“
A gust of wind and a swirling dash of rain punctuated his words.
Old Bob started for the cañon trail. The others followed at his heels. When they reached the narrow road a short distance away they halted for a second.
“There’s fresh hoss tracks,” said Bob. “Somebody’s been ridin’ this way. ’Tain’t the pinto, though.”
“It’s the Lizard probably,” said Edwards. “I saw him pass on his way up the cañon this forenoon.”
Half running, they hurried on. Before they reached the first turn in the cañon, a fierce downpour drenched them to the skin. The falling flood of water, driven by the blast that swept down from the mountain heights and swirled around the cliffs and angles of the cañon walls, hissed and roared with fury.
“There goes any chance of strikin’ her trail,” shouted Thad grimly.
The three men bent their heads and broke into a run.
At the beginning of that stretch of the trail which follows the bed of the creek, Bob stopped abruptly.
“Look here,” he said to the others, “we’ve got touse some sense an’ go at this thing right. If we all of us go ahead like this, we’ll all be caught on t’other side of the creek when the rise gets here. If she ain’t already in the cañon, she might be at Saint Jimmy’s, and she might not. There’s a chance that the gal got started home from the store late an’ was afraid to try comin’ this way, and so left Oracle by the Tucson highway, figurin’ to cut across the hills somewheres to the old cañon road an’ try crossin’ the creek lower down, like we do sometimes. It’ll be plumb dark pretty quick an’ if she ain’t at Saint Jimmy’s, there ought to two of us cover both trails—the one by Burtons’ an’ the one that goes direct, an’ there ought to one of us stay on this side of the creek in case she has made it the other way ’round. You won’t be much good nohow, son,” he continued to Edwards, “if it comes to huntin’ the hills out, ’cause you don’t know the country like we do. Suppose you go back down to the lower crossin’ where the old road comes into the cañon, you know—the way you come. If she don’t show up there in another hour or two, you’ll know she didn’t go that way. There ain’t another thing that you can do ’til daylight.”
“You men know best,” said Edwards and turned to go.
Thad caught the younger man by the arm.
“Wait.” For a second he paused, then spoke slowly: “It might not be a bad idea while you’re down that way to drop in on the Lizard.”
“Come on,” cried Bob. “We sure got to run for it if we beat the rise into this cut.”
The Pardners disappeared in the gray, swirling downpour. Edwards, with a new fear in his heart, ran with all his strength down the cañon. But it was not alone the thought of the coming flood that made his heart sink with sickening dread—it was the memory of the Lizard’s face that day when the fellow had first told him of Marta.
By the time he reached the cabin, Hugh heard the roaring thunder of the flood. For an instant he paused. Had the two old prospectors gained the higher ground beyond the stretch of trail in the creek bottom in time? He turned as if to go back, then came the thought he could not now retrace his steps beyond the first crossing. Whether the Pardners were safe or were caught by the flood, it was too late now for human aid to reach them.
Again he hurried on down the cañon. When he came to the place where he had made his camp that first night in the Cañon of Gold, it was almost dark, but over the spot where he had built his fire and spread his blanket bed he could see a leaping, racing torrent that filled the channel of the creek from bank to bank.
For nearly three hours he waited where the old road crossed the stream. Convinced at last that Marta had not come that way, he went on down the cañon, to the adobe house where the Lizard lived with his parents.
It was late now but there was a light in the window. The dogs filled the night with their clamor as heapproached and he stopped at the dilapidated gate to shout:
“Hello—Hello!”
The door opened and a long lane of light cut through the darkness. The Lizard’s voice followed the light:
“Hello yourself—what do you want—who be you?”
“I’m Edwards from up the cañon—call off your dogs, will you?”
From the gate, he could see the fellow in the doorway turn to consult with some one inside. Then the Lizard called to the dogs and shouted:
“Come on in, neighbor. Little late fer you t’ be out, ain’t it?” he added as Edwards approached, then: “Who you got with you?”
“There is no one with me,” returned Edwards as he paused in the light before the door.
“Come in—yer welcome—come right in an’ set by the fire. Yer some wet, I reckon.” As the Lizard spoke, he drew aside from the doorway and as Edwards entered he saw the man place a rifle, which he had held, against the wall.
An old woman sat beside the open fire smoking a cob pipe. The Lizard’s father stood with his back to the wall at the far end of the room. They greeted the visitor with a brief, “Howdy.” The Lizard offered a broken-backed chair.
“Thank you,” said Edwards, “but I can’t stop to sit down. I came to ask if you have seen Miss Hillgrove this afternoon.”
The Lizard and his father looked at each other. The old mother answered:
“What’s the matter, come up missin’, has she?”
Edwards told them in a few words.
The old woman spat in the fire and laughed.
“She’s most likely out in the brush somewheres with some no-account feller like herself. Sarves her right if she gits caught by the creek. Sich triflin’ hussies ought ter git drowned, I say—allus a-tryin’ t’ coax decent folks inter meanness. Best not waste yer time a-huntin’ sich as her, young man.”
Edwards spoke sharply to the Lizard, who was grinning with satisfaction.
“Did you see Miss Hillgrove this afternoon, anywhere on the trail between here and Oracle?”
The father answered in a voice shrill with vicious anger.
“Wal, an’ what ef he did—who be you to be a-comin’ here at this time o’ the night wantin’ t’ know ef my boy has or hain’t seed nobody?”
Hugh Edwards forced himself to speak calmly.
“I am asking a civil question which your son should be glad to answer.” He again faced the Lizard. “Did you see her?”
An insolent, wide-mouthed grin was the Lizard’s only reply.
The old woman by the fire looked over her shoulder.
“Tell him, boy, tell him,” she croaked. “You ain’t got no call to be skeered o’ sich as him.”
“Shucks, maw,” said the son. “I ain’t skeered o’ nothin’. I’m jist a-havin’ a little fun, that’s all.”
He addressed Edwards:
“You bet yer life I seed her ’bout a mile this side o’ Wheeler’s pasture it was. We shore had a nice little visit too. You an’ that thar Saint Jimmy needn’t t’ think you’re th’ only ones.”
Before Edwards could speak, the old woman cried again:
“Tell him, son—why don’t ye tell him what ye said?”
The Lizard grinned.
“I shore told her enough. I’d been a-aimin’ t’ lay her out first chanct I got. When I got through with her, you can bet she knowed more ’bout herself than she’d ever knowed before. She shore knows now what she is an’ what folks is a-thinkin’ ’bout her an’ her carryin’ on with that there lunger an’ you.” His voice rose and his rat eyes glistened with triumph. “She wouldn’t ride with me—Oh, no!—‘prefer t’ ride alone,’ says she. An’ I says, says I—when I’d finished a-tellin’ her what she was an’ how she didn’t have no folks, ner name, ner nothin’—‘You needn’t t’ worry none, there wouldn’t no decent man be seen within a mile of you.’ An’ then I left her settin’ thar like she’d been whipped.”
Hugh Edwards moved a step nearer. It seemed impossible to him that any man could do a thing so vile.
“Are you in earnest?” he asked. “Did you really say such things to Miss Hillgrove?”
“I shore did,” returned the Lizard proudly. “I believe in lettin’ sech people know whar they stand. She’s been a-playin’ th’ high an’ mighty with me long enough.”
Then Edwards struck. With every ounce of his strength behind it, the blow landed fair on the point of the Lizard’s chin. The loose mouth was open at the instant, the slack jaw received the impact with no resistance. The effect was terrific. The fellow’s head snapped back as if his neck were broken—he fell limp and senseless halfway across the room.
The old woman screeched to her man:
“Git him, Jole, git him!”
The Lizard’s father started forward and Edwards saw a knife.
A quick leap and Hugh caught up the rifle that the Lizard had placed against the wall. Covering the man with the knife, the visitor said coolly to the woman:
“Not to-night, madam. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he isn’t going to get any one just now.”
He backed to the door and opened it with his face toward them and his weapon ready.
“I will leave this gun at the gate,” he said. “If you are as wise as I think you are, you will not leave this room until you are sure that I am gone.”
He pulled the door shut as he backed across the threshold.
As Hugh Edwards made his way back up the cañon he reflected on what the Lizard had said.One thing was certain, Marta had not started home by the highway. But where was she now? At Saint Jimmy’s? Edwards doubted that the girl would go to her friends after such an experience. Nor did he believe that she would come directly home. He knew too well the sensitive pride that was under all the frank boyishness of her nature. No one was better fitted than he to appreciate the possible effects of the Lizard’s cruelty.
Hugh Edwards knew the dreadful power of humiliation and shame. He knew the burning, withering torture of unexpected and unjust public exposure and of undeserved popular condemnation. He knew the horror and despair of innocence subjected to the unspeakable cruelty of those evil-minded gossips whose one hope is that the venomous news they spread may be true, so that they will not be deprived of their vicious pleasure. Better than any one, Hugh Edwards knew why Marta had not come home after meeting the Lizard.
Like a hunted creature, wounded and spent, this man had come, as so many had come before him, to the Cañada del Oro. He had come to the Cañon of Gold to forget and to be forgotten—and he had found Marta. In the frankness and fearlessness of her innocence, the girl had not known how to keep her love from him. And seeing her love, hungering for that love as a starving man hungers for food, as a soul in torment hungers for peace, he had resolutely forbidden himself to speak the words that would make her his.
When he had first come to the cañon, he had hoped only to find gold enough to secure the bare necessities of life. And when out of their daily companionship his love had come with such distracting power, he had been the more miserable. But when he had heard from the Pardners their story of how they found the girl, he had seen that there was no reason save his own ill-starred past why, if he could win freedom from that past, he might not claim her. That freedom—the freedom from the thing that had driven him to hide in the Cañada del Oro—the freedom to tell her his love, could only be had in the gold for which he toiled in the sand and gravel and rocks beside the cañon creek.
As men, through all the years, have sought gold for love, so he had worked in that place of broken hopes and vanished dreams. Every day when she was with him he had sternly forced himself to wait. Every night he had dreamed, in his lonely cabin, of the time when he should be free. Every morning he had gone to his work at sunrise, buoyed with the hope that before dark his pick and shovel would uncover a rich pocket of the yellow metal. Every evening at sunset, as he climbed up the steep path from the place of his labor, he had whispered to himself, “To-morrow.” And now it had all come to this. With the knowledge of what the Lizard had done, and the full realization of all that might so easily result, the man’s control of himself was broken. He was beside himself with anxiety. IfMarta was not safe with her friends in the little white house on the mountain side, where was she? Had the Pardners found her? Was she wandering half insane with shame and despair through the storm and darkness? Had she been caught in that plunging flood that was roaring with such wild fury down the cañon? Was her beautiful body, that had been so vivid, so radiant with life, at that moment being crushed and torn by the grinding bowlders and jagged walls of rocks? Perhaps the Pardners, too, had been met by that rushing wall of water before they could escape from the trap into which he had seen them disappear. As these thoughts crowded upon him, the man broke into a run. There must be something—something that he could do. The sense of his utter uselessness was maddening.
At the gate to Marta’s home he stopped, and in the agony of his fears he shouted her name. Again and again he called, until the loneliness of the dark house and the sullen grinding, crashing roar of the creek drove him on. At the first crossing above his own cabin, the stream barred his way. Again he cried with all his might, “Marta! Marta! Thad! Bob!” But the sound of his voice was lost, beaten down, overwhelmed by the wild tumult of the plunging torrent. At last, weary and spent with his efforts, and realizing dully the foolishness of such a useless waste of his strength, he returned to Marta’s home.
He did not stop at his own cabin. Somethingseemed to lead him on to that house to which he had drifted months before, as a broken and battered ship drifts into a safe harbor from the storm that has left it nearly a wreck. Since the first hour of his coming, that home had been his refuge. Every morning from his own cabin door he had looked for the chimney smoke as a wretched castaway watches for a signal of hope and cheer. Every night in his loneliness he had looked for the lights as one lost in the desert looks at a guiding star. He could not bear the thought now of those dark windows and empty rooms.
As the Pardners were climbing out of the creek bed where the trail leaves the cañon for the higher levels they heard the thundering roar of the coming flood.
“Thank God, we know that won’t git her anyhow,” gasped old Thad. “That there run jest about winded me.”
Bob, panting heavily, managed a sickly grin.
“Like as not we’ll find her safe an’ dry eatin’ supper at Saint Jimmy’s, an’ ready to laugh at us for a pair of old fools gettin’ ourselves so worked up over nothin’.”
“Here’s hopin’,” returned the other. “But it’s bound to be a bad night for the boy back there. Pity there won’t be no way to get word to him ’til mornin’.”
They could not go very fast, and it was pitch dark before they reached the little white house. But at the sight of the lighted windows they hurried asbest they could, stumbling over the loose rocks and slipping in the mud up the narrow, zigzag trail.
In less than ten minutes from the time Saint Jimmy opened the door in answer to their knock they were again starting out into the night. And this time they separated. Thad returned to the point where the path that leads by the Burton place branches off from the main trail to make his way from there on, while Bob continued on the path from the white house which joins again the main trail at Wheeler’s pasture gate.
Another hour, and the storm was past. Through the ragged clouds, the stars peered timidly. But every ravine and draw and wash was a channel for a roaring freshet.
A little way from Wheeler’s corral, in the pasture, Thad met his pardner coming back. He was riding and leading another horse saddled.
“She didn’t start home on the highway,” said Bob.
“They seen her at Wheeler’s, did they?”
“Yes, George saw her himself when she was goin’, an’ when she come back. George, he’s saddled up an’ gone on into Oracle to pass the word. He’ll be out with a bunch of riders at sun-up.”
Thad climbed stiffly into the saddle and for some minutes the two old prospectors sat on their horses without speaking, while over their heads the windtorn clouds swept past as if hurrying to some meeting place beyond the distant hills.
“There ain’t a God almighty thing that we can do ’til th’ mornin’,” said Bob at last.
Slowly and in silence they rode back to the little white house on the mountain side, there to wait with Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton for the coming of the day.
The two old prospectors, who had spent the greater part of their lives amid scenes of hardship and danger and whose years had been years of disappointment and failure in their vain search for treasure of gold, had given themselves without reserve to the child that chance had so strangely placed in their keeping. Lacking the home love and the fatherhood that spurs the millions of toiling men to their tasks, and glorifies the burden of their labors, Bob and Thad had spent themselves in their love for their partnership daughter. But, because these men had been schooled in silence by the deserts and the mountains, they made no outward show of their anxiety and fear. They did not cry out in wild protest and vain regrets and idle conjectures. They did not walk the floor or wring their hands. They sat motionless in stolid silence—waiting.
Mother Burton, in the seclusion of her own room, found relief for her overwrought nerves in quiet tears and carried the burden of her anxious, aching mother-heart to the God of motherhood.
Saint Jimmy paced the floor with slow, measured steps, pausing now and then to look from the window into the night or to stand in the open doorway with his face lifted to the wind-swept sky, listening—listening for a voice in the darkness.
In Marta’s home beside the roaring creek—aloneamid the dear intimate things of her daily life—the man who had been made to live again in her love waited—waited for the eternity of the night to lift from the Cañon of Gold.
She did not know where she was going. She did not care. What did it matter where she went?
She did not know where she was going. She did not care. What did it matter where she went?
THE victim of the Lizard’s unspeakable brutality was as one dazed by an unexpected blow. Coming, as the fellow’s vicious attack did, so close upon her own uneasy thoughts, it seemed to answer all her troubled questions and she accepted every cruel word as the truth.
Nugget, wondering, perhaps, why his rider remained so motionless when the other horse and rider had gone on, essayed an inquiring step or two forward. When his mistress gave no heed to his movement, he tossed his head and pulled at the slack bridle rein invitingly. “What’s the matter?” he seemed to say. “Come on—why don’t we go?” But still she gave no sign of life. Slowly, as if still wondering and a bit doubtful, the little horse moved on down the familiar way toward home. At the pasture gate, the pinto, without a sign from his rider, placed himself so that she could reach the latch. Mechanically she opened the gate and the knowing animal helped her close it from the other side.
But when Nugget would have taken the trailwhich goes past that white house on the mountain side by which they always went home from Oracle, Marta reined him back with a sudden start. She could not go that way now. She remembered with a wave of hot shame how she had proposed to Saint Jimmy that they be married and run away somewhere—and how she had pictured their home. She understood now why he had laughed in that queer, strained way. It would have seemed funny to any man like Doctor Burton, with such a family name and birth and breeding, that a girl like her—born as she was without a name, with no right to be born at all, even—would dare to suggest such a thing.
Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton had been good to her—yes, they would be good to any one like that. They had pitied her and had wanted to help her. But of course Saint Jimmy had laughed when she asked him to marry her. She would love those dear friends always, but at the thought of ever meeting them again she shook with terror. She felt that she would die with shame.
As she rode on, the girl gave no heed to the heavy storm clouds that were massing above the upper cañon. At any other time she would have seen and would have pushed her horse to his utmost speed in a race with the coming flood. But now she was too occupied to think of the approaching danger. In fact, her thoughts of Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton were only momentary. When her horse had turned into the direct trail to the cañon, she was fighting to keep herself from thinking of the manwho lived in the cabin so close to her home. She was telling herself over and over that she must not think of him. And yet she did, and her thoughts burned like coals of fire.
Marta knew now with terrifying certainty that she loved Hugh Edwards—not, indeed, with the love that she gave Saint Jimmy and, which, until Edwards came, was the only kind of love she knew, but with that other love—the love that a woman gives to the one man she chooses above all others to be her man for all time to come, in the lives of her children—their children. Her happiness that morning had been born of the certainty that the man she had chosen wanted her. He had never spoken a word of love to her but she knew. In a thousand ways he had told her. His very efforts to keep from speaking had made her more sure in her happiness.
She had not understood. She had not even realized why she had wanted him to speak. She had only felt instinctively that she belonged to him, and that he wanted her, but that for some reason he hesitated. But now the Lizard had explained it all. She knew now that her love for Edwards was an evil love. She knew that her instinctive answer to him was a wicked thing. She knew that the emotions stirred by him were vile. She understood at last why he had not spoken the words she hungered to hear. He would never speak. He was like Saint Jimmy. The mother of Hugh Edwards’ sons must not be a nameless nobody—a creature of shameful birth and evil desires—a woman upon whomdecent women turn their backs and at whom men like the Lizard laughed in scorn.
The girl was almost in sight of Hugh’s cabin when, with sudden energy, she sat erect and again checked her horse. Around that next turn in the cañon wall he would be waiting. She could not go on. A barrier, invisible but mightier than any mountain wall, had fallen across her way. She was separated—shut out. She was unclean. She must not go near the one she loved.
Wheeling her horse, the girl rode away up the cañon, straight toward the storm that was gathering in the mountains above. She did not know where she was going. She did not care. What did it matter where she went? She would go anywhere but there where he was waiting.
Blindly she rode into that stretch of the trail that lies in the channel of the creek between the sheer walls. But when, at the end of the hall-like passage, her horse would have followed the trail out of the cañon, she pulled him back. The pinto fretted and tried to turn once more toward home, but she forced him to leave the trail and go on up the creek.
For some time the little horse labored through the sand and gravel or picked his way, as a mountain horse will, around bowlders and over the rocks. So that when those first few drops of rain came pattering down, the girl was already a considerable distance up the cañon. Again Nugget protested, and again she forced him on.
She had reached a point beyond where the cañon turns back toward the south when the storm broke and the rain came swirling down the mountain in torrents. The fierce downpour, driven by the heavy gusts of wind, forced her to bend low in the saddle. On every side the dense gray curtain enveloped her. Her horse broke in open rebellion. Nugget knew, if his rider had forgotten, the grave danger of their position in the creek bed, and he proceeded to take such action as would at least insure their immediate safety.
There were a few preliminary bounds, then a scrambling rush with flying gravel and rolling rocks and tearing brush, with plunging leaps and straining heavy lifts, during which the girl rider could do little more than cling to the saddle. When her horse finally consented again to the control of the bit, and stood trembling, with heaving flanks, on the steep side of the mountain, Marta had lost all sense of direction. In the terrific downpour, she could not see a hundred yards. Wrapped in the gray folds of that wind-blown curtain, every detail of the landscape save the near-by bushes was obscured beyond recognition. No familiar peak or sky-line could be seen.
Suddenly Nugget threw up his head—his ears pointed inquiringly. The girl, too, looked and listened. Then above the hiss of the rain on the rocks and bushes, and the roar of the wind along the mountain slope, she heard the thunder of the coming flood. Nearer and louder came the sound until presently that rolling crest of the flood, freighted with crushing, grinding bowlders, swept past and the gray depths of the cañon below her horse’s feet were filled with the wild uproar.
Marta knew that to go back the way she had come was impossible. She realized dully that Nugget had saved both her life and his. It did not much matter, but she was glad that the little horse was not down there in the bed of the creek. They might as well go on somewhere, she thought; perhaps Nugget could find some place where he at least would be more comfortable.
Giving her horse the signal to start, she dropped the bridle rein on his neck, thus permitting him to choose his own course. With sure-footed care, the little horse picked his way along the mountain side, always climbing a little higher until finally they reached what the girl knew must be the top of a ridge or spur of the main range. Following this ridge, which led always upward but at an easy grade, the pinto moved with greater freedom. They came at last to a low gap through which Nugget went without a sign of hesitation, and again he was making his way along the steep side of the mountain.
It was nearly dark when the girl became aware that her horse was following a faint trail. She did not know when they had come into this trail. It was so faintly marked that it could scarcely be distinguished, if at all. But Nugget seemed perfectly content and confident, and because there was noreason for doing otherwise, and because she did not care, she let the horse go the way he had chosen.
The night came swiftly down. The gray curtain deepened to black. The girl did not even try to guess where she was except that she knew she must be somewhere on one of the mountain slopes that form the upper part of Cañada del Oro—the wildest and most remote section of the Santa Catalina range.
She was exhausted with the stress of her emotions and numb with her rain-soaked clothing in the cool air of the altitude to which they had climbed. As the light failed and the black wall of the night closed in about her, she swayed, half fainting, in her saddle. Nugget stopped and the girl slipped to the ground, clinging to the saddle for support. Peering into the gloom she could barely distinguish the mass of a mountain cedar a little farther on.
Wearily she stumbled and crept forward until she could crawl beneath the low sodden branches.
The girl felt herself sinking into a thick darkness that was not the darkness of the night.