CHAPTER XLIIA CORNER OF HIS HEART
THE second evening after the closure Rickard was dining with the Marshalls in their car. ThePalmyrawas preparing to leave the siding. She was to pull out the next day. Already Marshall was restless. Tucson was calling him; Oaxaca was calling him! And he was due in Chicago for a conference with Faraday.
Rickard had been protesting against his new orders. It hurt him to curtail his force. “Not until the concrete gate is finished, and the whole length of levee done, will I feel safe.”
“Faraday says to go slow,” repeated Marshall. “He’s got something up his sleeve. It may be taken off his hands. If that’s the case, we’ve done our part.”
“I like to leave my work finished, not hanging in mid-air,” grumbled the engineer. “He’d hate to do this over again. I would! You will advise him when you see him next week, Mr. Marshall? Don’t let him cut down on the force we have now. Let us keep,” and then he smiled, “as many as we can!”
For the hobo ranks were thinning as late snows beneath the sun. Up North, a city was rebuilding. In Mexico, new mines were being opened up. The west coast of Mexico was calling to those restless soldiers who march without a captain.
“They are going out by way of Calexico,” Rickard was still smiling over some memories of desertion. “They’ve learned that they can hoof it to Cocopah, and from there sneak in on the work-trains. Work crews are more vulnerable than regular brakemen; they have more imagination. To them, these returning hoboes are heroes. It was they who saved the valley, not you, Mr. Marshall! That’s their opinion.”
“I preferred my ‘snap’ myself!” returned Marshall. “Have you cut down on the Indians?”
Rickard nodded, remembering how Hardin had opposed himself yesterday to the number of men retained; as being twice too many! The same Hardin! An awkward relationship swung toward the two men. Hardin, it was easy to see, was striving to remember his gratitude to the man who had stopped the river. He himself had different reasons for wishing to be fair to Tom Hardin! His name was brought up by Tod Marshall. “She was light potatoes,” he dismissed the woman. “But she’s broken the man’s spirit.”
Rickard, it was discovered, had nothing to say on the subject of the elopement.
“I’m sorry his sister is not here to-night,” began Marshall mischievously.
“I did ask her, Tod,” Claudia hastened to interrupt her lord. “But she would not leave her brother her last evening.”
“Herlastevening?” exclaimed Rickard. “Is she going away?”
Marshall subdued his twinkle. “We are carrying her off. She is to visit Mrs. Marshall while I am on the road.”
“Just a few days,” put in his wife. “She feels thather brother wants to be by himself. I think she is right.”
And thePalmyramade early runs! He must see her that night. He would leave as soon as he decently could. Tony’s dinner was endless to him.
Mrs. Marshall found opportunity in her guest’s abstraction to explain to her husband that at last Mrs. Silent had consented to let her take the boy, Jimmie, “out” with her.
“She’s not well herself. Another!” She arched her eyebrows meaningly.
Rickard gulped down his coffee, boiling. Tony was looking with tragic concern at the untasted dessert on the engineer’s plate. “Mrs. Marshall, will you let me run away early?” Why should he give any excuse? They knew what he was running away for!
He made his way to the little white tent on the far side of the trapezium. The door was open, the lamplight flaring through. He could see Coronel struggling with the straps of a brass-bound trunk. Innes, by the door, was bidding good-by to Señora Maldonado.
He could hear her voice as he drew near. “You’ll let me hear from you? How you are getting on? And the children?”
He forgot to greet the Mexican. She stood waiting; her eyes full of him. Surely, the kind señor had something to say to her? He had taken the white girl’s hand. He was staring into the white girl’s eyes. Something came to her, a memory like forgotten music. Silently, she slipped away into the night.
Rickard would not release Innes’ hand; her eyes could not meet the look in his.
“Wasn’t she good to come? She rode, horseback, all the way up here just to say good-by to me. She is goingto Nogales to live, taking the children. She thinks she has a good chance there. She asked me to tell you.” Her chatter, too, dropped before his silence. He kept her hand in his.
“Come out and have a walk with me! It’s not too late?”
Her foolish, chattering speech all mute!
“The levee?” asked Rickard. Still holding her hand, he drew it through the loop of his arm.
“You were not going to tell me you were going?”
No answer to that either! How could she tell him she was going when she knew what she knew!
“You were running away from me?” He leaned down to her face.
If she dared, she would be pert with him; she would not have torunaway from him!
“You know that I love you! I have been waiting for this minute, this woman, all these lonely years.”
Her head she kept turned from him. He could not see the little maternal smile that ran around the curves of her mouth. Those years, filled to the brim with stern work, had not been lonely. Lonely moments he had had, that was all. She could understand how a man like Rickard would find those moments lonely. There, he and Tom stood together. He was asking her to fill those minutes; those only. But he did not know that. He would not know what she meant if she told him that he was asking her to fill a corner of his heart!
“Nothing for me?” He stopped, and made her face him, by taking both of her hands in his.
She would not look at him yet, would not meet the look which always compelled her will, stultified her speech. She had something to say first.
“We don’t know each other; that is, you don’t know me!” She was not going to let them make that mistake, let him make that mistake!
“Is that all?” There was relief in his voice. For a bad moment he had wondered if it was possible, if Estrada—“I don’t know you? Haven’t I seen you day by day? Haven’t I seen your self-control tried, proved—haven’t I seen your justice, when you could not understand— Look at me!”
She shook her head, her eyes on the sand under her feet. He could scarcely catch her words. They did not know each other. He did not know her!
“Dear! I don’t know whether you love red or blue, that’s a fact; Ibsen or Rostand; heat or cold. Does that matter? I know you!”
An upward glance had caught him smiling. Her speech was routed. “I’m—the—only girl here!”
“Do you think that’s why I love you?”
“Ah, but you loved Gerty!” That slipped from her. She had not meant to say that!
“Does that hurt?” Abashed by her own daring, yet she was glad she had dared. She wanted him to deny it. For he would deny it? She wondered if he were angry, but she could not look at him.
The minutes, dragging like weighted hours, told her that he was not going to answer her. It came to her then that she would never know whether Gerty’s story were wholly false, or partly true. She knew, then, that no wheedling, wife’s or sweetheart’s, would tease that story from him. It did not belong to him.
His silence frightened her into articulateness. He must not think that she was foolish! It was not that, in itself, she meant. The words jostled one another intheir soft swift rush. He—he had made a mistake once before. He had liked the sort of woman he had thought Gerty was. She herself was not like the real Gerty any more than she was like the other, the woman that did not exist. He would find that they did not think alike, believe alike, that there were differences—
“Aren’t you making something out of nothing, Innes?”
That voice could always chide her into silence! Her speech lay cluttered in ruins, her words like useless broken bricks falling from the wall she was building.
He took her hand and led her to a pile of rock the river had not eaten. He pulled her down beside him.
“Isn’t it true, with us?”
“It is, with me,” breathed Innes. Their voices were low as though they were in church.
“And you think it isn’t, with me!” Rickard stood before her. “Is it because I trust you, I wonder? That I, loving you, love to have the others love you, too? Don’t you suppose I know how it is with the rest, MacLean; how it was with Estrada? Should I be jealous? Why, I’m not. I’m proud! Isn’t that because Iknowyou, know the fine steady heart of you? You hated me at first—and I am proud of that. I don’t love you enough?” He knelt at her feet, not listening to her pleading. He bent down and kissed one foot; then the other. “I love them!” The face he raised to her Innes had never seen before. He pressed a kiss against her knee. “That, too! It’s mine. I’ve not said my prayers since I was a boy. I shall say them again, here, you teaching me.” His kisses ran up her arm, from the tips of her limp fingers. His mouth, close to hers, stopped there. He whispered:
“You—kiss me, my girl!”
Slowly, unseeingly, as though drawn by an externalwill, her face raised to his; slowly, their lips met. His arms were around her; the world was blotted out.
Innes, minutes later, put her mouth against his ear. It was the Innes he did not know, that he had seen with others, mischievous, whimsical, romping as a young boy with MacLean on theDelta.
“I love—red,” she whispered. “And heat and sunshine. But I love blue, on you; and cold, if it were with you,—and the rest of the differences—”
He caught her to him. “There are not going to be any differences!”
THE END