CHAPTER XIIISilver-Thatch
MOLLY MARTON sat leaning over the horn of her saddle. One elbow was propped upon it, while her brown hand supported her chin. The other hand was reaching down holding her mare’s reins, while the thirsty creature buried its muzzle in the speeding waters of the creek.
The afternoon was well advanced, and the sun was already approaching the crystal peaks of the more distant hills. Molly calculated there was a good three hours to complete darkness yet, and she could reasonably expect to reach home in less time than that. So far her search had been fruitless. She had discovered no sign of her missing cows. But she was quite undisturbed, and not a whit nearer agreement with Lightning as to the meaning of her loss.
The excuse of her search, however, had served Molly well enough. Ranging these hills, with Nature bursting into renewed life, was a joy that never failed in its appeal. Molly loved it all with a youthful passion. She loved the radiant sunlight—the immensity, the complete solitude, of this world of forest, and hill, and sheltered valley.
The scented spruce came right down to the grass-grown banks of the creek. Where she had entered the water was a boulder-strewn gap. It was clearly the bed of one of those swiftly passing spring torrents. Now it was almost dry, and had served as her approach to the shallow ford.
The happy waters surged about Rachel’s sturdy legs. Beyond, across the creek, the hills rose sharply, clad witha woven pattern in every shade of green. Molly had no intention of crossing the creek. Her homeward way lay back over her tracks, and down through the endless woods which lined almost the entire course of the creek.
But the girl had no thought just now for the beauty of her surroundings, or the business of returning home, or even the object of her search. She was all unconcerned that she had some fifteen miles to cover before she again saw her snug homestead. She was thinking of the dark, good-looking face of the man who had offered himself as her escort to a real dance.
For long weeks, and even months, thought of Andy McFardell had preoccupied her. There had been times when she had had no realisation of how deep was the appeal he made to her. Then there had been other times when she knew, and the youthful blood had swiftly swept to her head, and a sort of delirium of longing had left her a little horrified and ashamed.
There had been moments of doubt, when she had longed for the father who was dead. But all these emotions had been passing, lost in her healthy-mindedness. But now it seemed to her as if the whole combined strength and weakness of those past moments had descended upon her in an overwhelming rush. A passionate love for Andy McFardell was sweeping through her. And she knew and understood the wonderful thing that had befallen.
She knew none of the old earlier shame now. The woman in her had suddenly become dominant. In a wondrous revelation, all the innocence of childhood had been swept away like some obscuring mist, yielding in its place that splendid spectacle of a golden love wherein every emotion, every hope, every purpose in life, becomes definitely focused upon one single glorified human creature.
Molly gazed out upon this vision while her pinto drank.A deep emotion held her. Her unseeing gaze was upon the water-race. Her ears were deaf to everything, but the rush of happy thought passing headlong through her brain. She was ecstatically absorbed in her love for the man, with his warm, dark eyes, his splendid courage in adversity, and she longed for him. There were no reservations. In Molly there could be none. At that moment no less could satisfy her than to yield everything to him—everything that was hers, everything she herself might be.
The clatter of hoofs upon the boulders behind her left her wholly unaware of any approach, and it was not till her mare flung up her head that she awoke to realities. Rachel had quenched her thirst, and the girl reluctantly turned her about to regain the bank.
Molly sat like a statue on her unmoving mare. Her dream had tumbled headlong. She was alert and searching as she gazed upon the white-haired figure of a horseman in the act of watering his horse a few yards away.
She took the man in from head to foot, even to the last detail of the splendid, coal-black horse he was riding. And the man returned her stare with smiling interest. His wide-brimmed prairie hat cast a shadow over his eyes, and so hid something of the strength that looked out of them. Molly beheld the broad pattern of his tweed jacket, and the cord riding-breeches which terminated in his soft-topped boots. She noted that he was wearing a waistcoat; and, curiously enough, this was the thing that perhaps attracted her most. Right across it stretched the yellow links of a gold watch-chain.
Just for an instant a flutter of very natural apprehension disturbed her. She was alone. She was still miles from her home in the heart of the hills. Then she remembered. After all, these hills were her home. She had been born and bred to them. A stranger, clad in garments such as she associated with a city, need only exciteher interest. Besides, there was something very pleasant looking out of his eyes.
Jim Pryse had seen Molly as he approached the water on his way from Dan Quinlan’s; but he had failed to recognise her sex until she turned her pinto to return to the river bank. For a moment he had hesitated, doubtful of the wisdom of revealing himself. Then he had dismissed the thought. His horse must be watered, and this was the only suitable place along the whole of the densely wooded river. So he had passed on down to the ford.
Molly’s surprise as she faced him was no greater than that of the man. Jim could scarcely believe his senses as he gazed into the pretty face, with its big, grey, innocent eyes. He had been prepared for some rough cattleman; he had expected such. In the coated, divided riding-suit he had never for a moment looked for a girl. A white girl alone in these hills was a thought that had never entered his head. Now he was glad he had flung caution to the winds.
It was Molly who offered greeting, and it came in an impulsive expression of surprise.
“Why,” she exclaimed, “I just hadn’t a notion——” And she broke off in a little laugh of embarrassment.
“It doesn’t seem I had either, till—you turned your pinto around.”
Both were laughing. To Molly the man’s tone matched the expression of his eyes. It was deep and resonant, and reminded her of the organ she remembered to have heard at the Catholic church in Hartspool when she used to visit it during her father’s life. To the man the moment was one of sheer enjoyment. Beyond hissister, and the dusky wife of Dan Quinlan, he had not encountered a woman in many months.
His horse flung up its head and investigated the pinto. In a moment the man was forgotten in Molly’s admiration of the horse he was riding.
“My!” she cried. “What a lovely, lovely beast.”
Pryse leant over and patted the sweat-dried neck of his horse.
“Beelzebub’s quite a dandy,” he admitted, with smiling pride. “He was raised on a race-track down Kentucky way. But say, they’ve both finished watering, and the creek’s ice-cold.”
Molly nodded and urged her mare. And they both passed up the boulder-littered bed of the mountain torrent.
Molly led the way, her sure-footed mare infinitely more nimble than the other amongst the boulders. Neither spoke a word. Both were thinking hard. Molly was quietly making up her mind to ascertain the stranger’s identity, and then leave him while she continued her way alone. Jim Pryse was, on the other hand, deliberately intent upon riding with her just as far as she would permit him.
The girl drew rein at the edge of the forest, and Beelzebub gallantly came to a halt beside the pinto and rubbed his muzzle against her white neck.
“My way lies east,” she said quietly, as again she encountered the smile of the man.
“Mine, too, for a mile or so,” Jim said casually. “Then I break west up Three-Way Creek. There’s no get-out of this valley before that. We best ride on. We’re mostly lonesome folk. Company’s swell when we happen on it.”
Molly’s resolve was scattered to the winds. The man’s smile was irresistible. Besides, there could be no harm. And, anyway, what he said was perfectly true. This valley went on with only a break here and there rightdown to her home. The creek was the same that supplied the water-front on her farm, miles away on. If he were riding east, it would be simply churlish to refuse to ride with him.
“You know,” she said, with a frank laugh, “I’d just fixed it in my mind to quit you right here. You see, you’re a stranger.”
Jim nodded, watching the light in her eyes.
“That’s dead right, too,” he said. And then his eyes sobered admonishingly. “It doesn’t do riding around these hills with stranger men. Now you can’t tell. Maybe I’m a ‘hold-up,’ looking around for young gals on the ‘stray.’ Maybe I’m a ‘two-gun’ man. Or a cattle thief. Maybe I get around eating up any old thing in the human way all the time. You surely can’t tell. The more I think of all the things I might be the tougher it makes me feel. Now, say, hadn’t you best make me ride ahead of you, and hand out my talk over my shoulder, while you keep a gun pushed up against my spine? It ’ud help make things safe—for you.”
Molly broke into a peal of happy laughter.
“I like fool talk,” she cried. “But you hit things right in a way, too. Still, my gun, which is right here in my coat pocket, can stay where it is, and we can ride aside each other. Let’s get on. I need to make home by sundown. There’s all of fifteen miles of this valley to make. And I haven’t located a sight of my fool cows yet.”
“Your cows?” Jim asked curiously, as his horse moved along beside the sedate mare.
Molly’s gaze searched the distance through the tree-trunks as they loped over the rotting underlay of the woods.
“Yes. I’m out after ‘strays,’” she said, in explanation. “They got away two days back. The fool dears didn’t know better than to quit our corral for the openand the timber wolves. It makes you reckon they got no sort of sense,” she laughed. “Here we’re doing the best we know for them; we’re handing them feed, and shelter, and water. Then—do you reckon they’re thankful an’ pleased? No. It’s sure like us human folk, isn’t it? We just must do the things we want, an’ not what’s good for us. Lightning guesses they’ve been stole by rustlers. But——”
Jim listened to the girl’s explanation in wonder, and broke in as she hesitated.
“Do you live hereabouts?” he asked quickly. “You got a farm? I hadn’t a notion there was a soul around this valley but Dan Quinlan, away back there where I’ve just come from.”
Molly turned, soberly speculative as she studied the face beside her.
“Then you surely must be quite a stranger,” she said. “Marton’s farm has stood right down at the mouth of this valley twenty years. I was born on it, and I’m twenty,” she concluded in her precise fashion.
Jim soothed the impatient Beelzebub with a restraining hand. As the beast modified its gait he looked round.
“Marton’s farm?” he inquired, with an effort to conceal the excitement he was labouring under.
Molly nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s my name. Molly Marton. You see,” she added, “father’s dead. He’s been dead two years now. I run the farm with Lightning. He’s my hired man. At least, he calls himself that way. But he’s more than that. He’s a queer old tough. He’s been a cattleman all his life. He’s getting very old, but—he’s good to me. An’—an’ I guess I couldn’t run the farm right without him.”
But Jim was paying no heed to Molly’s eulogy of Lightning. In a moment his mind had leapt back to atime in his life when the name of Marton had meant complete salvation to him.
“I hadn’t a notion,” he muttered. Then, as they galloped silently down an incline towards a wide break in the forest that lay ahead, he bestirred himself under the girl’s scrutiny and laughed. “And you are Molly Marton?” he said. “And your father was George Marton a—a French-Canadian?”
“Then you do know us?” Molly swung her mare wide to avoid a fallen tree-trunk. But Beelzebub took it in his stride, and the girl noted the ease of the man’s seat in the saddle. As they came together again she went on. “Yes. He was my father,” she said, and waited.
Jim shook his head, and the silver whiteness of his bushy hair fascinated the girl.
“It beats everything,” he said. “I’d forgotten George Marton had a daughter. And yet I shouldn’t have,” he added, with an enigmatic smile. “But I only saw your father once. I hadn’t a ghost of an idea his farm was hereabouts.”
“Where did you know him?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking myself—months. It was somewhere around this hill country. But the particular locality?” He laughed and shrugged. “You can search me.”
Molly accepted his reply with all the trust of her unsuspicious nature. She nodded.
“That’s the way of things,” she said. “We meet folks, and pass right on. Don’t we? Then, when they happen into our lives again, we—we—just sit an’ wonder, an’ guess we must be dreaming. Maybe even you didn’t meet him in these hills at all. Maybe it was Hartspool, or—or—Calford. He used to go there.”
“Maybe.”
Jim drew a deep breath. They were nearing the edge of a wide break in the forest. Beyond lay a stretchof grass. Away beyond that the forest continued, but there was a definite change in its nature. It was low and sparse. Then away to the right of them lay the creek down which they had been riding. Silver stretches of water showed up. The valley was changing its course eastwards. Just behind an abutment of hill ahead was the opening that would take him westwards. Jim knew that the moment of parting was drawing near.
As they rode into the open Beelzebub strove fiercely to break into a race. But the man held him down.
In this fashion they rode on in silence. Jim was absorbed in the memory of a time when his fortunes had been at their lowest ebb, and he had been running a neck-and-neck race with disaster, and even death. His more spectacular association with Dan Quinlan had claimed his interest to the exclusion of that other. And yet he knew he owed just as deep a debt of gratitude to George Marton. This girl was his daughter—this child, with her innocent eyes, her pretty, dark face. It was she who had packed up that food that had kept him from sheer starvation for days.
Again they were in full sunlight, which transformed the valley, and the blue grass they were riding over, into something very wonderful. To the man it was like an omen—an omen of delight. He abruptly checked his horse, so that Molly came abreast of him.
“You know, Molly,” he said, using her first name without realising it, “it’s queer the tricks life plays about us. You’ve told me something I’m more glad about than I can say.”
“You mean—about father? Why?”
“Why?” Jim echoed. Then he shook his head. “No. It’s too long a yarn now.” He pointed out ahead at the break in the hillside, where Three-Way Creek debouched. “There lies my way now. Yours is ahead down the valley. The sun’s dropping fast, and we’ll both needto hustle or get benighted. Some time I’ll—— Say, look right down there amongst those spruce bluffs at the river. What’s that moving? It’s—say, there’s one—two—three—four—five—six. And they’re Pole-Angus cows. Were yours Pole-Angus?”
Molly turned in the direction he was pointing. And instantly her face became radiant.
“Why, say!” she cried. “Look at them! The foolish old dears! They’ve handed me a nightmare. And there they are gawking around like a bunch of foolishness eating stray grass in a spruce bluff when there’s all this swell feed right here. No, they’ve no sense. They just haven’t. Lightning’ll be crazy mad to think there’s no rustler around.”
Molly was alone with her truant cows. She was herding them before her along the creek bank. She had driven them across the stream that came out of the westerly gap with the aid of the white-haired man on his black horse. Then, at her bidding, the stranger had taken himself off.
In the moment of the discovery of her lost cows the girl had forgotten everything else. There had been the perverse work of rounding them up, which mainly devolved upon her. Beelzebub had missed all that sort of thing in his education. Then had come the passage of the creek. And then a hurried farewell. It was not until she had lost sight of the stranger that she remembered her unfulfilled purpose. She had let him go. And she knew no more whence he came, or his name, or whither he was going, than she had at the moment of their meeting at the water-hole.
It was absurd. It was something outrageous. She was angry with herself, and not without resentmentagainst him. For a moment she had thought to recall him. But she restrained the impulse. No. Why should she? She had been a fool. And he—he might at least have enlightened her in exchange for the enlightenment she had so foolishly afforded him. Evidently he could not have wanted to do so. Evidently he had no desire to discover himself. Well, let him go, with his coal-black horse and his queer white hair.
Her cows preoccupied her, and quickly enough her ill-humour passed in the business of driving the foolish, hornless creatures, whose antics so often made her want to laugh. Anyway, her long day had been more than successful, and as the valley opened out, and the woods gave way to the broad open as she drew near her home, the cows seemed to realise whither they were being herded, and to welcome a return to the shelter of their familiar corral. They hurried along almost frantically.
As she neared the end of her journey Molly’s thoughts were no longer dominated by the all-absorbing emotions which had been inspired by the man McFardell. It was not that they had undergone any change. On the contrary. It was simply the natural claim of the life that was hers. The solitude of the hills had been broken for her. A fresh interest had suddenly tumbled headlong into it. And she found herself thinking of the white-haired creature on his coal-black horse.
How came it that the stranger’s hair was so white? He was young—quite young. She was certain of that. She had heard that trouble sometimes whitened the hair. Yet there was no trouble in his smiling eyes. It was all very strange. It was—— What wonderful hair! It was like silver—polished silver. And as thick as a thatch.
She laughed aloud as she came in sight of the smoke rising from the chimney of her homestead. A sudden thought had flashed through her mind. It was a childishthought, that pleased her immensely. He had refused to reveal his identity. Well, it was of no consequence. She would very likely never see him again, and, anyway, she had coined a name for him. It was a good name, too—better than he deserved—Silver-Thatch.