CHAPTER IV
BEASTS
The city rippled into light. It bloomed, blossom on blossom, like some enchanted jungle under the heavy summer sky. Dickie sat on a bench in Washington Square. He sat forward, his hands hanging between his knees, his lips parted, and he watched the night. It seemed to him that it was filled with the clamor of iron-throated beasts running to and fro after their prey. The heat was a humid, solid, breathless weight—a heat unknown to Millings. Dickie wore his threadbare blue serge suit. It felt like a garment of lead.
There were other people on the benches—limp and sodden outlines. Dickie had glanced at them and had glanced away. He did not want to think that he looked like one of these—half-crushed insects,—bruised into immobility. A bus swept round the corner and moved with a sort of topheavy, tipsy dignity under the white arch. It was loaded with humanity, its top black with heads. "It ain't a crowd," thought Dickie; "it's a swarm." His eyes followed the ragged sky-line. "Why is it so horrible?" he asked himself—"horrible and beautiful and sort of poisonous—it plumb scares a fellow—" A diminished moon, battered and dim like a trodden silver coin, stood up above him. By tilting his head he could look directly at it through an opening in the dusty, electric-brightened boughs. The stars were pin-pricks here and there in the dense sky. The city flaunted its easy splendor triumphantly before their pallid insignificance. Tarnished purities, forgotten ecstasies, burned-out inspirations—so the city shouted raucously to its faded firmament.
Dickie's fingers slid into his pocket. The moon had reminded him of his one remaining dime. He might have bought a night's lodging with it, but after one experience of such lodgings he preferred his present quarters. In Dickie's mind there was no association of shame or ignominy with a night spent under the sky. But fear and ignominy tainted and clung to his memory of that other night. He had saved his dime deliberately, going hungry rather than admit to himself that he was absolutely at the end of his resources. To-morrow he would not especially need that dime. He had a job. He would begin to draw pay. In his own phrasing he would "buy him a square meal and rent him a room somewhere." Upon these two prospects his brain fastened with a leech-like persistency. And yet above anything he had faced in his life he dreaded the job and the room. The inspiration of his flight, the impulse that had sped him out of Millings like a fire-tipped arrow, that determination to find Sheila, to rehabilitate himself in her esteem, to serve her, to make a fresh start, had fallen from him like a dead flame. The arrow-flight was spent. He had not found Sheila. He had no way of finding her. She was not at her old address. Her father's friend, the Mr. Hazeldean that had brought Sylvester to Marcus's studio, knew nothing of her. Mrs. Halligan, her former landlady, knew nothing of her. Dickie, having summoned Mrs. Halligan to her doorsill, had looked past her up the narrow, steep staircase. "Did she live away up there?" he had asked. "Yes, sorr. And 't was a climb for the poor little crayture, but there was days when she'd come down it like a burrd to meet her Pa." Dickie had faltered, white and empty-hearted, before the kindly Irishwoman who remembered so vividly Sheila's downward, winged rush of welcome. For several hours after his visit to the studio building he had wandered aimlessly about, then his hunger had bitten at him and he had begun to look for work. It was not difficult to find. A small restaurant displayed a need of waiters. Dickie applied. He had often "helped out" in that capacity, as in most others, at The Aura. He cited his experience, referred to Mr. Hazeldean, and was engaged. The pay seemed to him sufficient to maintain life. So much for that! Then he went to his bench and watched the day pant itself into the night. His loneliness was a pitiful thing; his utter lack of hope or inspiration was a terrible thing.
But as the night went slowly by, he faced this desolation with extraordinary fortitude. It was part of that curious detachment, that strange gift of impersonal observation. Dickie bore no grudges against life. His spirit had a fashion of standing away, tiptoe, on wings. It stood so now like a presence above the miserable, half-starved body that occupied the bench and suffered the sultriness of August and the pains of abstinence. Dickie's wide eyes, that watched the city and found it horrible and beautiful and frightening, were entirely empty of bitterness and of self-pity. They had a sort of wistful patience.
There came at last a cool little wind and under its ministration Dickie let fall his head on his arms and slept. He was blessed by a dream: shallow water clapping over a cobbled bed, the sharp rustle of wind-edged aspen leaves, and two stars, tender and misty, that bent close and smiled. He woke up and stared at the city. He got up and walked about. He was faint now and felt chilled, although the asphalt was still soft underfoot and smelled of hot tar. As he moved listlessly along the pavement, a girl brushed against him, looked up, and murmured to him. She was small and slight. His heart seemed to leap away from the contact and then to leap almost irresistibly to meet it. He turned away and went back quickly toward the Square. It seemed to him that he was followed. He looked over his shoulder furtively. But the girl had disappeared and there was no one in sight but a man who walked unsteadily. Dickie suddenly knew why he had saved that dime. The energy of a definite purpose came to him. He remembered a swinging door back there around a corner, but when he reached the saloon, it was closed. Dickie had a humiliating struggle with tears. He went back to his bench and sat there, trembling and swearing softly to himself. He had not the strength to look farther. He was no longer the Dickie of Millings, a creature possessed of loneliness and vacancy and wandering fancies, he was no longer Sheila's lover, he was a prey to strong desires. In truth, thought Dickie, seeking even now with his deprecatory smile for likenesses and words, the city was full of beasts, silent and stealthy and fanged. That spirit, aloof, maintained its sweet detachment. Beneath its observation Dickie fought with a grim, unreasoning panic that was very like the fear of a man pursued by wolves.
CHAPTER V
NEIGHBOR NEIGHBOR
Even in the shadow of after events, those first two months at Miss Blake's ranch swam like a golden galleon through Sheila's memory. Never had she felt such well-being of body, mind, and soul. Never had she known such dawns and days, such dusks, such sapphire nights. Sleep came like a highwayman to hold up an eager traveler, but came irresistibly. It caught her up out of life as it catches up a healthy child. Never before had she worked so heartily: out of doors in the vegetable garden; indoors in the sunny kitchen, its windows and door open to the tonic air; never before had she eaten so heartily. Nothing had tasted like the trout they caught in Hidden Creek, like the juicy, sweet vegetables they picked from their own laborious rows, like the berries they gathered in nervous anticipation of that rival berryer, the brown bear. And Miss Blake's casual treatment of her, half-bluff, half-mocking, her curt, good-humored commands, her cordial bullying, were a rest to nerves more raveled than Sheila knew from her experience in Millings. She grew rosy brown; her hair seemed to sparkle along its crisp ripples; her little throat filled itself out, round and firm; she walked with a spring and a swing; she sang and whistled, no Mrs. Hudson near to scowl at her. Dish-washing was not drudgery, cooking was a positive pleasure. Everything smelt so good. She was always shutting her eyes to enjoy the smell of things, forgetting to listen in order to taste thoroughly, forgetting to look in the delight of listening to such musical silences, and forgetting even to breathe in the rapture of sight … Miss Blake and she put up preserves, and Sheila had to invent jests to find some pretext for her laughter, so ridiculous was the look of that broad square back, its hair short above the man's flannel collar, and the apron-strings tied pertly above the very wide, slightly worn corduroy breeches and the big boots. Sheila was always thinking of a certain famous Puss of fairy-tale memory, and biting her tongue to keep it from the epithet. After Hilliard gave her the black horse and she began to explore the mountain game trails, her life seemed as full of pleasantness as it could hold. And yet … with just that gift of Hilliard's, the overshadowing of her joy began. No, really before that, with his first visit.
That was in late September when the nights were frosty and Miss Blake had begun to cut and stack her wood for winter, and to use it for a crackling hearth-fire after supper. They were sitting before such a fire when Hilliard came.
Miss Blake sat man-fashion on the middle of her spine, her legs crossed, a magazine in her hands, and on her blunt nose a pair of large, black-rimmed spectacles. Her feet and hands and her cropped head, though big for a woman's, looked absurdly small in comparison to the breadth of her hips and shoulders. She was reading the "Popular Science Monthly." This and the "Geographic" and "Current Events" were regularly taken by her and most thoroughly digested. She read with keen intelligence; her comments were as shrewd as a knife-edge. The chair she sat in was made from elk-horns and looked like the throne of some Norse chieftain. Behind her on the wall hung the stuffed head of a huge walrus, his tusks gleaming, the gift of that exploring brother who seemed to be her only living relative. There were other tokens of his wanderings, a polar-bear skin, an ivory Eskimo spear. As a more homelike trophy Miss Blake had hung an elk head which she herself had laid low, a very creditable shot, though out of season. She had been short of meat. In the corner was a pianola topped by piles of record-boxes. At her feet lay Berg, the dog, snoring faintly and as cozy as a kitten.
The firelight made Miss Blake's face and hair ruddier than usual; her eyes, when she raised them for a glance at Sheila, looked as though they were full of red sparks which might at any instant break into flame. Sheila was wearing one of her flimsy little black frocks, recovered from the wrinkles of its journey, and she had decorated her square-cut neck with some yellow flowers. On these Miss Blake's eyes rested every now and then with a sardonic gleam.
Outside Hidden Creek told its interminable chattering tale, centuries long, the little skinny horse cropped getting his difficult meal with his few remaining teeth. They could hear the dogs move with a faint rattle of chains. Sometimes there would be a distant rushing sound, a snow-slide thousands of feet above their heads on the mountain. Above these familiar sounds there came, at about eight o'clock that evening, the rattle of horse's hoofs through the little stream and at the instant broke out the hideous clamor of the dogs, a noise that never failed to whiten Sheila's cheeks.
Miss Blake sat up straight and snatched off her spectacles. She looked at
Sheila with a hard look.
"Have you been sending out invitations, Sheila?" she asked.
"No, of course not," Sheila had flushed. She could guess whose horse's hoofs were trotting across the little clearing.
A man's voice spoke to the dogs commandingly. Miss Blake's eyebrows came down over her eyes. A man's step struck the porch. A man's knock rapped sharply at the door.
"Come in!" said Miss Blake. She spoke it like a sentry's challenge.
The door opened and there stood Cosme Hilliard, hat in hand, his smiling
Latin mouth showing the big white Saxon teeth.
Sheila had not before quite realized his good looks. Now, all his lithe, long gracefulness was painted for her against a square of purple night. The clean white silk shirt fitted his broad shoulders, the wide rider's belt clung to his supple waist, the leather chaps were shaped to his Greek hips and thighs. No civilized man's costume could so have revealed and enhanced his beautiful strength. And above the long body his face glowed with its vivid coloring, the liquid golden eyes that moved easily under their lids, the polished black hair sleekly brushed, the red-brown cheeks, the bright lips, flexible and curved, of his Spanish mother.
"Who in God's name are you?" demanded Miss Blake in her deepest voice.
"This is Mr. Hilliard," Sheila came forward. "He is the man that brought me over The Hill, Miss Blake—after I'd lost my horse, you know." There was some urgency in Sheila's tone, a sort of prod to courtesy. Miss Blake settled back on her spine and recrossed her legs.
"Well, come in," she said, "and shut the door. No use frosting us all, is there?" She resumed her spectacles and her reading of the "Popular Science Monthly."
Hilliard, still smiling, bowed to her, took Sheila's hand for an instant, then moved easily across the room and settled on his heels at one corner of the hearth. He had been riding, it would seem, in the thin silk shirt and had found the night air crisp. He rolled a cigarette with the hands that had first drawn Sheila's notice as they held his glass on the bar; gentleman's hands, clever, sensitive, carefully kept. From his occupation, he looked up at Miss Blake audaciously.
"You'd better make friends with me, ma'am," he said, "because we're going to be neighbors."
"How's that?"
"I'm taking up my homestead right down here below you on Hidden Creek a ways. About six miles below your ford."
Miss Blake's face filled with dark blood. She said nothing, put up her magazine.
Sheila, however, exclaimed delightedly, "Taken up a homestead?"
"Yes, ma'am." He turned his floating, glowing look to her and there it stayed almost without deviation during the rest of his visit. "I've built me a log house—a dandy. I had a man up from Rusty to help me. I've bought me a cow. I'm getting my furnishings ready. That's what I've been doing these two months."
"And never rode up to call on us?" Sheila reproached him.
"No, ma'am. I'll tell you the reason for that. I wasn't sure of myself." She opened rather puzzled and astonished eyes at this, but for an instant his look went beyond her and remembered troubling things. "You see, Miss Arundel, I'm not used to settling down. That's something that I've had no practice in. I'm impatient. I get tired quickly. Damn quickly. I change my mind. It's the worst thing in me—a sort of devil-horse always thirsty for new things. It's touch and go with him. He runs with me. You see, I've always given him his head." His look had come back to her face and dwelt there speaking for him a language headier than that of his tongue. "I thought I'd tie the dern fool down to some good tough work and test him out. Well, ma'am, he hasn't quit on me this time. I think he won't. I've got a ball and chain round about that cloven foot." He drew at his cigarette, half-veiling in smoke the ardor of his look. "I'd like to show you my house, Miss Arundel. It's fine. I worked with a builder one season when I was a lad. I've got it peeled inside. The logs shine and I've got a fireplace twice the size of this in my living-room"—he made graceful gestures with the hand that held the cigarette. "Yes, ma'am, a living-room, and a kitchen, and," with a whimsical smile, "a butler's pantry. And, oh, a great big bedroom that gets the morning sun." He paused an instant and flushed from chin to brow, an Anglo-Saxon flush it was, but the bold Latin eyes did not fall. "I've made some furnishings already. And I've sent out an order for kitchen stuff."
Here Miss Blake changed the crossing of her legs. Sheila was angry with herself because she was consumed with the contagion of his blush. She wished that he would not look as if he had seen the blush and was pleased by it. She wished that his clean young strength and beauty and the ardor of his eyes did not speak quite so eloquently.
"I bought a little black horse about so high"—he held his hand an absurd distance from the floor and laughed—"just the size for a little girl and—do you know who I'm going to give him to?"
Here Miss Blake got up, strode to the pianola, adjusted it, and sat down, broad and solid and unabashed by absence of feminine draperies, upon the stool. She played a comic song.
"I don't like your _fam_ily—"
in some such dreadful way it expressed itself—
"They do not look good to me.
I don't think your _Unc_le John
Ever had a collar on …"
She played it very loud.
Hilliard stood up and came close to Sheila.
"She's mad as a March hare," he whispered, "and she doesn't like me a little bit. Come out while I patch up Dusty, won't you, please? It's moonlight. I'll be going." He repeated this very loud for Miss Blake's benefit with no apparent effect upon her enjoyment of the song. She was rocking to its rhythm.
Hilliard was overwhelmed suddenly by the appearance of her. He put his hand to his mouth and bolted. Sheila, following, found him around the corner of the house rocking and gasping with mirth. He looked at her through tears.
"Puss-in-Boots," he gasped, and Sheila ran to the edge of the clearing to be safe in a mighty self-indulgence.
There they crouched like two children till their laughter spent itself.
Hilliard was serious first.
"You're a bad, ungrateful girl," he said weakly, "to laugh at a sweet old lady like that."
"Oh, I am!" Sheila took it almost seriously. "She's been wonderful to me."
"I bet she works you," he said jealously.
"Oh, no. Not a bit too hard. I love it."
"Well," he admitted, "you do look pretty fine, that's a fact. Better than you did at Hudson's. What did you quit for?"
Sheila was sober enough now. The moonlight let some of its silver, uncaught by the twinkling aspen leaves, splash down on her face. It seemed to flicker and quiver like the leaves. She shook her head.
He looked a trifle sullen. "Oh, you won't tell me…. Funny idea, you being a barmaid. Hudson's notion, wasn't it?"
Sheila lifted her clear eyes. "I thought asking questions wasn't good manners in the West."
"Damn!" he said. "Don't you make me angry! I've got a right to ask you questions."
She put her hand up against the smooth white trunk of the tree near which she stood. She seemed to grow a little taller.
"Oh, have you? I don't think I quite understand how you got any such right. And you like to be questioned yourself?"
She had him there, had him rather cruelly, though he was not aware of the weapon of her suspicion. She felt a little ashamed when she saw him wince. He slapped his gloves against his leather chaps, looking at her with hot, sulky eyes.
"Oh, well… I beg your pardon…. Listen—" He flung his ill-humor aside and was sweet and cool again like the night. "Are you going to take the little horse?"
"I don't know."
His face shadowed and fell so expressively, so utterly, that she melted.
"Oh," he stammered, half-turning from her, "I was sure. I brought him up."
This completed the melting process. "Of course I'll take him!" she cried.
"Where is he?"
She inspected the beautiful little animal by the moonlight. She even let Hilliard mount her on the shining glossy back and rode slowly about clinging to his mane, ecstatic over the rippling movement under her.
"He's like a rocking-chair," said Cosme. "You can ride him all day and not feel it." He looked about the silver meadow. "Good feed here, isn't there? I bet he'll stay. If not, I'll get him for you."
Sheila slipped down. They left the horse to graze.
"Yes, it's first-rate feed. Do you think Miss Blake will let me keep him?"
His answer was entirely lost by a sudden outbreak from the dogs.
"Good Lord!" said Cosme, making himself heard, "what a breed! Isn't that awful! Why does she keep the brutes? Isn't she scared they'll eat her?"
Sheila shook her head. Presently the tumult quieted down. "They're afraid of her," she said. "She has a dreadful whip. She likes to bully them. I think she's rather cruel. But she does love Berg; she says he's the only real dog in the pack."
"Was Berg the one on the bearskin inside?"
"Yes."
"He's sure a beauty. But I don't like him. He has wolf eyes. See here—you're shivering. I've kept you out here in the cold. I'll go. Good-night. Thank you for keeping the horse. Will you come down to see my house? I built it"—he drawled the words—"for you"—and added after a tingling moment—"to see, ma'am."
This experiment in words sent Sheila to the house, her hand crushed and aching with his good-bye grasp, her heart jumping with a queer fright.
Miss Blake stood astraddle on the hearth, her hands behind her back.
"You better go to bed, Sheila," she said; "it's eleven o'clock and to-morrow's wash-day."
Her voice was pleasant enough, but its bluffness had a new edge. Sheila found it easy to obey. She climbed up the ladder to the little gabled loft which was her bedroom. Halfway up she paused to assert a belated independence of spirit. "Good-night," she said, "how do you like our neighbor?"
Miss Blake stared up. Her lips were set tight. She made no answer. After an instant she sauntered across the room and out of the door. The whip with which she beat the dogs swung in her hand. A moment later a fearful howling and yelping showed that some culprit had been chosen for condign punishment.
Sheila set down her candle, sat on the edge of her cot, and covered her ears with her hands. When it was over she crept into bed. She felt, though she chided herself for the absurdity, like a naughty child who has been forcibly reminded of the consequences of rebellion.
CHAPTER VI
A HISTORY AND A LETTER
The next morning, it seemed Miss Blake's humor had completely changed. It showed something like an apologetic softness. She patted Sheila's shoulder when she passed the girl at work. When Hilliard next appeared, a morning visit this time, he was bidden to share their dinner; he was even smiled upon.
"She's not such a bad old girl, is she?" he admitted when Sheila had been given a half-holiday and was riding on the black horse beside Hilliard on his Dusty across one of the mountain meadows.
"I think she's a dear," said Sheila, pink with gratitude; then, shadowing, "If only she wouldn't beat the dogs and would give up trapping."
"Why in thunder shouldn't she trap?"
"I loathe trapping. Do you remember how you felt in the pen? It's bad enough to shoot down splendid wild things for food, but, to trap them!—small furry things or even big furry things like bears, why, it's cruel! It's hideously cruel! When a woman does it—"
"Come, now, don't call her a woman!"
"Yes, she is. Think of the aprons! And she is so tidy."
"That's not just a woman's virtue."
"Maybe not. I'm not sure. But I've a feeling that it was Eve who first discovered dust."
"Very bad job if she did. Think of all the bother we've been going through ever since."
"There!" Sheila triumphed. "To you it's just bother. You're a man. To me it's a form of sport…. I wonder what Miss Blake's story is."
"You mean—?" He turned in his saddle to stare wonderingly at her. "You don't know?"
"No." Sheila blushed confusedly. "I—I don't know anything about her—"
"Good Lord!" He whistled softly. "Sometimes those ventures turn out all right." He looked dubious. "I'm glad I'm here!"
Sheila's smile slipped sweetly across her mouth and eyes. "So am I. But," she added after a thoughtful moment, "I don't know much about your story either, do I?"
"I might say something about asking questions," began Cosme with grimness, but changed his tone quickly with a light, apologetic touch on her arm, "but—but I won't. I ran away from school when I was fourteen and I've been knocking around the West ever since."
"What school?" asked Sheila.
He did not answer for several minutes. They had come to the end of the meadow and were mounting a slope on a narrow trail where the ponies seemed to nose their way among the trees. Now and then Sheila had to put out her hand to push her knee away from a threatening trunk. Below were the vivid paintbrush flowers and the blue mountain lupine and all about the nymph-white aspens with leaves turning to restless gold against the sky. The horses moved quietly with a slight creaking of saddles. There was a feeling of stealth, of mystery—that tiptoe breathless expectation of Pan pipes…. At last Cosme turned in his saddle, rested his hand on the cantle, and looked at Sheila from a bent face with troubled eyes.
"It was an Eastern school," he said. "No doubt you've heard of it. It was Groton."
The name here in these Wyoming woods brought a picture as foreign as the artificiality of a drawing-room.
"Groton? You ran away?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Sheila's suspicions were returning forcibly. "I'll have to ask questions, Mr. Hilliard, because it seems so strange—what you are now, and your running away and never having been brought back to the East by—by whoever it was that sent you to Groton."
"I want you to ask questions," he said rather wistfully. "You have the right."
This forced her into something of a dilemma. She ignored it and waited, looking away from him. He would not leave her this loophole, however.
"Why don't you look at me?" he demanded crossly.
She did, and smiled again.
"You have the prettiest smile I ever saw!" he cried; then went on quickly, "I ran away because of something that happened. I'll tell you. My mother"—he flushed and his eyes fell—"came up to see me at school one day. My mother was very beautiful…. I was mad about her." Curiously enough, every trace of the Western cowboy had gone out of his voice and manner, which were an echo of the voice and manner of the Groton schoolboy whose experience he told. "I was proud of her—you know how a kid is. I kind of paraded her round and showed her off to the other fellows. No other fellow had such a beautiful mother. Then, as we were saying good-bye, a crowd of the boys all round, I did something—trod on her foot or something, I don't quite know what—and she lifted up her hand and slapped me across the face." He was white at the shocking memory. "Right there before them all, when I—I was adoring her. She had the temper of a devil, a sudden Spanish temper—the kind I have, too—and she never made the slightest effort to hold it down. She hit me and she laughed as though it was funny and she got into her carriage. I cut off to my room. I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't face any one. I wanted never to see her again. I guess I was a queer sort of kid…. I don't know …" He drew a big breath, dropped back to the present and his vivid color returned. "That's why I ran away from school, Miss Arundel."
"And they never brought you back?"
He laughed. "They never found me. I had quite a lot of money and I lost myself pretty cleverly…a boy of fourteen can, you know. It's a very common history. Well, I suppose they didn't break their necks over me either, after the first panic. They were busy people—my parents—remarkably busy going to the devil…. And they were eternally hard-up. You see, my grandfather had the money—still has it—and he's remarkably tight. I wrote to them after six years, when I was twenty. They wrote back; at least their lawyer did. They tried, not very sincerely, though, I think, to coax me East again… told me they'd double my allowance if I did—they've sent me a pittance—" He shuddered suddenly, a violent, primitive shiver. "I'm glad I didn't go," he said.
There was a long stillness. That dreadful climax to the special "business" of the Hilliards was relived in both their memories. But it was something of which neither could speak. Sheila wondered if the beautiful mother was that instant wearing the hideous prison dress. She wished that she had read the result of the trial. She wouldn't for the world question this pale and silent young man. The rest of their ride was quiet and rather mournful. They rode back at sunset and Hilliard bade her a troubled good-bye.
She wanted to say something comforting, reassuring. She watched him helplessly from where she stood on the porch as he walked across the clearing to his horse. Suddenly he slapped the pocket of his chaps and turned back. "Thunder!" he cried, "I'd forgotten the mail. A fellow left it at the ford. A paper for Miss Blake and a letter for you."
Sheila held out her hand. "A letter for me?" She took it. It was a strange hand, small and rather unsteady. The envelope was fat, the postmark Millings. Her flush of surprise ebbed. She knew whose letter it was—Sylvester Hudson's. He had found her out.
She did not even notice Cosme's departure. She went up to her loft, sat down on her cot and read.
"MY DEAR MISS SHEILA:
"I don't rightly know how to express myself in this letter because I know what your feelings toward Pap must be like, and they are fierce. But I have got to try to write you a letter just the same, for there are some things that need explaining. At first, when my hotel and my Aura were burned down [here the writing was especially shaky] and I found that you and Dickie had both vamoosed, I thought that you had paid me out and gone off together. You can't blame me for that thought, Miss Sheila, for I had found him in your room at that time of night or morning and I couldn't help but see that he was aiming to kiss you and you were waiting for his kiss. So I was angry and I had been drinking and I kissed you myself, taking advantage of you in a way that no gentleman would do. But I thought you were different from the Sheila I had brought to be my barmaid.
"Well, ma'am, for a while after the fire, I was pretty near crazy. I was about loco. Then I was sick. When I got well again, a fellow who come over from Hidden Creek told me you had gone over to be at a ranch there and that you had come in alone. That sort of got me to thinking about you more and more and studying you out, and I begun to see that I had made a bad mistake. Whatsoever reason brought that damn fool Dickie to your room that morning, it wasn't your doings, and the way you was waiting for his kiss was more a mother's way. I have had some hard moments with myself, Miss Sheila, and I have come to this that I have got to write and tell you how I feel. And ask your forgiveness. You see you were something in my life, different from anything that had ever been there. I don't rightly know—I likely never will know—what you meant in my life. I handled you in my heart like a flower. Before God, I had a religion for you. And that was just why, when I thought you was bad, that it drove me crazy. I wonder if you will understand this. You are awful young and awful ignorant. And I have hurt your pride. You are terrible proud for your years, Miss Sheila. I ache all over when I think that I hurt your pretty mouth. I hope it is smiling now. I am moving out of Millings,—Me and Momma and Babe. But Girlie is agoing to marry Jim. He run right back to her like a little lost lamb the second you was gone. Likely, he'll never touch liquor again. I haven't heard from Dickie. I guess he's gone where the saloons are bigger and where you can get oysters with your drinks. He always was a damn fool. I would dearly like to go over to Hidden Creek and see you, but I feel like I'd better not. It would hurt me if I got a turn-down from you like it will hurt me if you don't answer this letter, which is a mighty poor attempt to tell you my bad reasons for behaving like I did. I am not sorry I thrashed Dickie. He had ought to be thrashed good and plenty. And he has sure paid me off by burning down my Aura. That was a saloon in a million, Miss Sheila, and the picture of you standing there back of my bar, looking so dainty and sweet and fine in your black dress and your frills—well, ma'am, I'll sure try to be thinking of that when I cash in.
"Well, Miss Sheila, I wish you good fortune in whatever you do, and I hope that if you ever need a friend you will overlook my bad break and remember the artist that tried to put you in his big work and—failed."
This extraordinary document was signed—"Sylvester." Sheila was left bewildered with strange tears in her throat.
CHAPTER VII
SANCTUARY
There came to the restaurant where Dickie worked, a certain sallow and irritable man, no longer in his early youth. He came daily for one of his three meals: it might be lunch or dinner or even breakfast, Dickie was always in haste to serve him. For some reason, the man's clever and nervous personality intrigued his interest. And this, although his customer never threw him a glance, scowled at a newspaper, barked out an order, gulped his food, stuck a fair-sized tip under the edge of his plate, and jerked himself away.
On a certain sluggish noon hour in August, Dickie, as far as the kitchen door with a tray balanced on his palm, realized that he had forgotten this man's order. He hesitated to go back. "Like as not," reasoned Dickie, "he didn't rightly know what the order was. He never does look at his food. I'll fetch him a Spanish omelette and a salad and a glass of iced tea. It's a whole lot better order than he'd have thought of himself."
Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that he set the omelette down before that lined and averted countenance. Its owner was screwed into his chair as usual, eyes, with a sharp cleft between their brows, bent on his folded newspaper, and he put his right hand blindly on the fork. But as it pricked the contents of the plate a savory fragrance rose and the reader looked.
"Here, you damn fool—that's not my order," he snapped out.
Dickie tasted a homely memory—"Dickie damn fool." He stood silent a moment looking down with one of his quaint, impersonal looks.
"Well, sir," then he said slowly, "it ain't your order, but you look a whole lot more like a feller that would order Spanish omelette than like a feller that would order Hamburger steak."
For the first time the man turned about, flung his arm over his chair-back, and looked up at Dickie. In fact, he stared. His thin lips, enclosed in an ill-tempered parenthesis of double lines, twisted themselves slightly.
"I'll be derned!" he said. "But, look here, my man, I didn't order
Hamburger steak; I ordered chicken."
Dickie deliberately smoothed down the cowlick on his head. He wore his look of a seven-year-old with which he was wont to face the extremity of Sylvester's exasperation.
"I reckon I clean forgot your order, sir," he said. "I figured out that you wouldn't be caring what was on your plate. This heat," he added, "sure puts a blinder on a feller's memory."
The man laughed shortly. "It's all right," he said. "This'll go down."
He ate in silence. Then he glanced up again. "What are you waiting for, anyway?"
Dickie flushed faintly. "I was sort of wishful to see how it would go down."
"Oh, I don't mean that kind of waiting. I mean—why are you a waiter in this—hash-hole?"
Dickie meditated. "There ain't no answer to that," he said. "I don't know why—" He added—"Why anything. It's a sort of extry word in the dictionary—don't mean much any way you look at it."
He gathered up the dishes. The man watched him, tilting back a little in his chair, his eyes twinkling under brows drawn together. A moment afterwards he left the restaurant.
It was a few nights later when Dickie saw him again—or rather when Dickie was again seen by him. This time Dickie was not in the restaurant. He was at a table in a small Free Library near Greenwich Avenue, and he was copying painstakingly with one hand from a fat volume which he held down with the other. The strong, heavily-shaded light made a circle of brilliance about him; his fair hair shone silvery bright, his face had a sort of seraphic pallor. The orderer of chicken, striding away from the desk with a hastily obtained book of reference, stopped short and stared at him; then came close and touched the thin, shiny shoulder of the blue serge coat.
"This the way you take your pleasure?" he asked abruptly.
Dickie looked up slowly, and his consciousness seemed to travel even more slowly back from the fairy doings of a midsummer night. Under the observant eyes bent upon it, his face changed extraordinarily from the face of untroubled, almost immortal childhood to the face of struggling and reserved manhood.
"Hullo," he said with a smile of recognition. "Well—yes—not always."
"What are you reading?" The man slipped into the chair beside Dickie, put on his glasses, and looked at the fat book. "Poetry? Hmp! What are you copying it for?—letter to your girl?"
Dickie had all the Westerner's prejudice against questions, but he felt drawn to this patron of the "hash-hole," so, though he drawled his answer slightly, it was an honest answer.
"It ain't my book," he said. "That's why I'm copying it."
"Why in thunder don't you take it out, you young idiot?"
Dickie colored. "Well, sir, I don't rightly understand the workings of this place. I come by it on the way home and I kep' a-seein' folks goin' in with books and comin' out with books. I figured it was a kind of exchange proposition. I've only got one book—and that ain't rightly mine—" the man looking at him wondered why his face flamed—"so, when I came in, I just watched and I figured you could read here if you had the notion to take down a book and fetch it over to the table and copy from it and return it. So I've been doin' that."
"Why didn't you go to the desk, youngster, and ask questions?"
"Where I come from"—Dickie was drawling again—"folks don't deal so much in questions as they do here."
"Where you came from! You came from Mars! Come along to the desk and I'll fix you up with a card and you can take an armful of poetry home with you."
Dickie went to the desk and signed his name. The stranger signed his—Augustus Lorrimer. The librarian stamped a bit of cardboard and stuck it into the fat volume. She handed it to Dickie wearily.
"Thank you, ma'am," he said with such respectful fervor that she looked up at him and smiled.
"Now, where's your diggings," asked Lorrimer, who had taken no hints about asking questions, "east or west?" He was a newspaper reporter.
"Would you be carin' to walk home with me?" asked Dickie. There was a great deal of dignity in his tone, more in his carriage.
"Yes. I'd be caring to! Lead on, Martian!" And Lorrimer felt, after he said that, that he was a vulgarian—a long-forgotten sensation. "In Mars," he commented to himself, "this young man was some kind of a prince."
"What do you look over your shoulder that way for, Dick?" he asked aloud, a few blocks on their way. "Scared the police will take away your book?"
Dickie blinked at him with a startled air. "Did I? I reckon a feller gets into queer ways when he's alone a whole lot. I get kind of feelin' like somebody was following me in this town—so many folks goin' to and fro does it to me most likely."
"Yes, a fellow does get into queer ways when he's alone a whole lot," said Lorrimer slowly. His mind went back a dozen years to his own first winter in New York. He looked with keenness at Dickie's face. It was a curiously charming face, he thought, but it was tight-knit with a harried, struggling sort of look, and this in spite of its quaint detachment.
"Know any one in this city?"
"No, sir, not rightly. I've made acquaintance with some of the waiters.
They've asked me to join a club. But I haven't got the cash."
"What pay do you draw?"
Dickie named a sum.
"Not much, eh? But you've got your tips."
"Yes, sir. I pay my board with my pay and live on the tips."
"Must be uncertain kind of living! Where do you live, anyway?
What? Here?"
They had crossed Washington Square and were entering a tall studio building to the south and east. Dickie climbed lightly up the stairs. Lorrimer followed with a feeling of bewilderment. On the top landing, dimly lighted, Dickie unlocked a door and stood aside.
"Just step in and look up," he said, "afore I light the light. You'll see something."
Lorrimer obeyed. A swarm of golden bees glimmered before his eyes.
"Stars," said Dickie. "Down below you wouldn't hardly know you had 'em, would you?"
Lorrimer did not answer. A moment later an asthmatic gas-jet caught its breath and he saw a bare studio room almost vacant of furniture. There was a bed and a screen and a few chairs, one window facing an alley wall. The stars had vanished.
"Pretty palatial quarters for a fellow on your job," Lorrimer remarked.
"How did you happen to get here?"
"Some—people I knowed of once lived here." Dickie's voice had taken on a
certain remoteness, and even Lorrimer knew that here questions stopped.
He accepted a chair, declined "the makings," proffered a cigarette.
During these amenities his eyes flew about the room.
"Good Lord!" he ejaculated, "is all that stuff your copying?"
There was a pile of loose and scattered manuscript upon the table under the gas-jet.
"Yes, sir," Dickie smiled. "I was plumb foolish to go to all that labor."
Lorrimer drew near to the table and coolly looked over the papers. Dickie watched him with rather a startled air and a flush that might have seemed one of resentment if his eyes had not worn their impersonal, observing look.
"All poetry," muttered Lorrimer. "But some of it only a line—or a word." He read aloud,—"'Close to the sun in lonely lands—' what's that from, anyway?"
"A poem about an eagle by a man named Alfred Tennyson. Ain't it the way a feller feels, though, up on the top of a rocky peak?"
"Never been on the top of a rocky peak—kind of a sky-scraper sensation, isn't it? What's all this—'An' I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, after my fashion'?"
Dickie's face again flamed in spite of himself. "It's a love poem. The feller couldn't forget. He couldn't keep himself from loving that-away because he loved so much the other way—well, sir, you better read it for yourself. It's a mighty real sort of a poem—if you were that sort of a feller, I mean."
"And this is 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' And here's a sonnet, 'It was not like your great and gracious ways'—? Coventry Patmore. Well, young man, you've a catholic taste."
"I don't rightly belong to any church," said Dickie gravely. "My mother is a Methodist."
Lorrimer moved; abruptly away and moved abruptly back.
"Where were you educated, Dick?"
"I was raised in Millings"—Dickie named the Western State—"I didn't get only to grammar school. My father needed me to work in his hotel."
"Too bad!" sighed Lorrimer. "Well, I'll bid you good-night. And many thanks. You've got a fine place here." Again he sighed. "I dare say—one of these days—"
He was absent and irritable again. Dickie accompanied him down the three long, narrow flights and climbed back to his loneliness. He was, however, very much excited by his adventure, excited and disturbed. He felt restless. He walked about and whistled to himself.
Until now he had had but one companion—the thought of Sheila. It was extraordinary how immediate she was. During the first dreadful weeks of his drudgery in the stifling confusions of the restaurant, when even the memory of Sylvester's tongue-lashings faded under the acute reality of the head waiter's sarcasms, that love of his for Sheila had fled away and left him dull and leaden and empty of his soul. And his tiny third-story bedroom had seemed like a coffin when he laid himself down in it and tried to remember her. It had come to him like a mountain wind, overwhelmingly, irresistibly, the desire to live where she lived: the first wish he had had since he had learned that she was not to be found by him. And the miracle had accomplished itself. Mrs. Halligan had been instructed to get a lodger at almost any price for the long-vacant studio room. She lowered the rent to the exact limit of Dickie's wages. She had never bargained with so bright-eyed a hungry-looking applicant for lodgings. And that night he lay awake under Sheila's stars. From then on he lived always in her presence. And here in the room that had known her he kept himself fastidious and clean. He shut out the wolf-pack of his shrewd desires. The room was sanctuary. It was to rescue Sheila rather than himself that Dickie fled up to the stars. So deeply, so intimately had she become a part of him that he seemed to carry her soul in his hands. So had the young dreamer wedded his dream. He lived with Sheila as truly, as loyally, as though he knew that she would welcome him with one of those downward rushes or give him Godspeed on sultry, feverish dawns with a cool kiss. Dickie lay sometimes across his bed and drew her cheek in trembling fancy close to his until the anguish wet his pillow with mute tears.
Now to this dual loneliness Lorrimer had climbed, and Dickie felt, rather gratefully, that life had reached up to the aching unrealities of his existence. His tight and painful life had opened like the first fold of a fan. He built upon the promise of a friendship with this questioning, impertinent, mocking, keenly sympathetic visitor.
But a fortnight passed without Lorrimer's appearing at the restaurant and, when at last he did come, Dickie, flying to his chair, was greeted by a cold, unsmiling word, and a businesslike quotation from the menu. He felt as though he had been struck. His face burned. In the West, a fellow couldn't do that and get away with it! He tightened an impotent, thin fist. He filled the order and kept his distance, and, absurdly enough, gave Lorrimer's tip to another waiter and went without his own dinner. For the first time in his life a sense of social inferiority, of humiliation concerning the nature of his work, came to him. He felt the pang of servitude, a pang unknown to the inhabitants of frontier towns. When Sheila washed dishes for Mrs. Hudson she was "the young lady from Noo York who helps round at Hudson's house." Dickie fought this shame sturdily, but it seemed to cling, to have a sticky pervasiveness. Try as he might he couldn't brush it off his mind. Nevertheless, it was on the very heels of this embittering experience that life plucked him up from his slough. One of the leveling public catastrophes came to Dickie's aid—not that he knew he was a dumb prayer for aid. He knew only that every day was harder to face than the last, that every night the stars up there through Sheila's skylight seemed to glimmer more dully with less inspiration on his fagged spirit.
The sluggish monotony of the restaurant's existence was stirred that September night by a big neighboring fire. Waiters and guests tumbled out to the call of fire-engines and running feet. Dickie found himself beside Lorrimer, who caught him by the elbow.
"Keep by me, kid," he said, and there was something in his tone that softened injury. "If you want a good look-in, I can get through the ropes."
He showed his card to a policeman, pulled Dickie after him, and they found themselves in an inner circle of the inferno. Before them a tall, hideous warehouse broke forth into a horrible beauty. It was as though a tortured soul had burst bars. It roared and glowed and sent up petals of smoky rose and seeds of fire against the blue-black sky. The crowds pressed against the ropes and turned up their faces to drink in the terror of the spectacle.
Lorrimer had out his notebook. "Damn fires!" he said. "They bore me. Does all this look like anything to you? That fire and those people and their silly faces all tilted up and turned red and blue and purple—"
He was talking to himself, and so, really, was Dickie when he made his own statement in a queer tone of frightened awe. "They look like a flower garden in Hell," he whispered.
Lorrimer threw up his chin. "Say that again, will you?" he snapped out. "Go on! Don't stop! Tell me everything that comes into your damn young head of a wandering Martian! Fly at it! I'll take you down."
"You mean," said Dickie, "tell you what I think this looks like?"
"That's what I mean, do."
Dickie smiled a queer sort of smile. He had found a listener at last. A moment later Lorrimer's pencil was in rapid motion. And the reporter's eyes shot little stabbing looks at Dickie's unselfconscious face. When it was over he snapped an elastic round his notebook, returned it to his pocket, and laid his hand on Dickie's thin, tense arm.
"Come along with me, Dick," said Lorrimer. "You've won. I've been fighting you and my duty to my neighbor for a fortnight. Your waiter days are over. I've adopted you. I'm my brother's keeper all right. We'll both go hungry now and then probably, but what's the odds! I need you. I haven't been able to hand in a story like that for years. I'm a burnt-out candle and you're the divine fire. I'm going to educate the life out of you. I'm going to train you till you wish you'd died young and ungrammatical in Millings. I may not be much good myself," he added solemnly, "but God gave me the sense to know the real thing when I see it. I've been fighting you, calling myself a fool for weeks. Come along, young fellow, don't hang back, and for your credit's sake close your lips so you won't look like a case of arrested development. First we'll say good-bye to the hash-hole and the white apron and then I'll take you up to your sky parlor and we'll talk things over."
"God!" said Dickie faintly. It was a prayer for some enlightenment.
CHAPTER VIII
DESERTION
Hilliard rode up along Hidden Creek on a frosty October morning. Everywhere now the aspens were torches of gold, the cottonwood trees smoky and gaunt, the ground bright with fallen leaves. He had the look of a man who has swept his heart clean of devils…his face was keen with his desire. He sang as he rode—sweetly an old sentimental Spanish song, something his mother had taught him; but it was not of his mother he thought, or only, perhaps, deep down in his subconsciousness, of that early mother-worship, age-old and most mysterious, which now he had translated and transferred.
"Sweet, sweet is the jasmine flower—
Let its stars guide thee.
Sweet is the heart of a rose…
Sweet is the thought of thee…
Deep in my heart…"
The dogs were off coursing the woods that afternoon, and the little clearing lay as still as a green lake under the threatening crest of the mountain. Cosme slipped from his horse, pulled the reins over his head, and left him to graze at will.
Miss Blake opened the ranch-house door at his knock. She greeted him with a sardonic smile. "I don't know whether you'll see your girl or not," she said. "Give her time to get over her tantrums."
Cosme turned a lightning look upon her. "Tantrums? Sheila?"
"Oh, my friend, she has a devil of her own, that little angel-face! Make yourself comfortable." Miss Blake pointed him to a chair. "I'll tell her you're here."
She went to the foot of the ladder, which rose from the middle of the living-room floor, and called heartily, an indulgent laugh in her voice, "You, Sheila! Better come down! Here's your beau."
There was no answer.
"Hear me, Sheila? Mis-ter Cos-me Hill-iard."
This time some brief and muffled answer was returned. Miss Blake smiled and went over to her elk-horn throne. There she sat and sewed—an incongruous occupation it looked.
Cosme was leaning forward, elbows on knees, his face a study of impatience, anger, and suspicion.
"What made her mad?" he asked bluntly.
"O-oh! She'll get over it. She'll be down. Sheila can't resist a young man. You'll see."
"What did you do?" insisted the stern, crisp, un-western voice. When
Cosme was angry he reverted rapidly to type.
"Why," drawled Miss Blake, "I crept up when she was drying her hair and I cut it off." She laughed loudly at his fierce start.
"Cut off her hair! What right—?"
"No right at all, my friend, but common sense. What's the good of all that fluffy stuff hanging about and taking hours of her time to brush and wash and what-not. Besides"—she shot a look at him—"it's part of the cure."
"By the Lord," said Cosme, "I'd like you to explain."
The woman crossed her legs calmly. She was still indulgently amused.
"Don't lose your head, young man," she advised. "Better smoke."
After an instant Cosme rolled and lighted a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. His anger had settled to a sort of patient contempt.
"I've put her into breeches, too," said Miss Blake.
"What the devil! What do you mean? She has a will of her own, hasn't she?"
"Oh, yes. But you see I've got Miss Sheila just about where I want her. She's grateful enough for her food and the roof over her head and for the chance I'm giving her."
"Chance?" He laughed shortly. "Chance to do all your heavy work?"
"Why not say honest work? It's something new to her."
There was a brief, thunderous silence. Cosme's cigarette burned between his stiff fingers. "What do you mean?" he asked, hoarse with the effort of his self-control.
She looked at him sharply now. "Are you Paul Carey Hilliard's son—the son of Roxana Hilliard?" she asked. She pointed a finger at him.
"Yes," he answered with thin lips. His eyes narrowed. His face was all
Latin, all cruel.
"Well"—Miss Blake slid her hands reflectively back and forth on the bone arms of her chair. She had put down her work. "I was just thinking," she said slowly and kindly, "that the son of your mother would be rather extra careful in choosing the mother of his sons."
"I shall be very careful," he answered between the thin lips. "I am being careful."
She fell back with an air of relief. "Oh," she said, as though illuminated. "O-oh! I understand. Then it's all right. I didn't read your game."
His face caught fire at her apparent misunderstanding.
"I don't read yours," he said.
"Game? Bless you, I've no game to play. I'm giving Sheila her chance. But I'm not going to give her a chance at the cost of your happiness. You're too good a lad for that. I thought you were going to ask her to be your wife. And I wasn't going to allow you to do it—blind. I was going to advise you to come back three years from now and see her again. Maybe this fine clean air and this life and this honest work and the training she gets from me will make her straight. My God! Cosme Hilliard, have you set eyes on Hudson? What kind of girl travels West from New York at Sylvester Hudson's expense and in his company and queens it in the suite at his hotel?"
"Miss Blake," he muttered, "do you know this?"
The cigarette had burnt itself out. Cosme's face was no longer cruel. It was dazed.
She laughed shortly. "Why, of course, I know Sheila. I know her whole history—and it's some history! She's twice the age she looks. Do you think I'd have her here with me this way without knowing the girl? I tell you, I want to give her a chance. I don't care if you try to test her out. I'd like to see if two months has done anything for her. She was real set on being a good girl when she quit Hudson. I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that she'll turn you down."
From far away up the mountain-side came the fierce baying of the dog pack. Cosme pulled himself together and stood up. His face had an ignorant, baffled look, the look of an unskilled and simple mind caught in a web.
"I reckon she—she isn't coming down," he said slowly, without lifting his eyes from the floor. "I reckon I'll be going. I won't wait."
He walked to the door, his steps falling without spring, and went out and so across the porch and the clearing to his horse.
At the sound of the closing door there came a flurry of movement in the loft. The trap was raised. Sheila came quickly down the ladder. She was dressed in a pair of riding-breeches and her hair was cropped like Miss Blake's just below the ears. The quaintest rose-leaf of a Rosalind she looked, just a wisp of grace, utterly unlike a boy. All the soft, slim litheness with its quick turns revealed—a little figure of unconscious sweet enchantment. But the face was flushed and tear-stained, the eyes distressed. She stood, hands on her belt, at the foot of the ladder.
"Why has he gone? Why didn't he wait?"
Miss Blake turned a frank, indulgent face. But it was deeply flushed. "Oh, shucks!" she said, "I suppose he got tired. Why didn't you come down?"
Sheila sent a look down her slim legs. "Oh, because I am a fool. Miss Blake—did you really burn my two frocks—both of them?" Her eyes coaxed and filled.
"It's all they're fit for, my dear. You can make yourself new ones. You know it's more sensible and comfortable, too, to work and ride in breeches. I know what I'm doing, child.—I've lived this way quite a number of years. You look real nice. I can't abide female floppery, anyhow. What's it a sign of? Rotten slavery." She set her very even teeth together hard as she said this.
But Sheila was neither looking nor listening. She had heard horse's hoofs. Her cheeks flamed. She ran to the door. She stood on the porch and called.
"Cosme Hilliard! Come back!"
There was no answer. A few minutes later she came in, pale and puzzled.
"He didn't even wave," she said. "He turned back in his saddle and stared at me. He rode away staring at me. Miss Blake—what did you say to him? You were talking a long time."
"We were talking," said Miss Blake, "about dogs and how to raise 'em. And then he up and said goodbye. Oh, Sheila, it's all right. He'll be back when he's got over being miffed. Why, he expected you to come tumblin' down the ladder head over heels to see him—a handsome fellow like that! Shucks! Haven't you ever dealt with the vanity of a young male before? It's as jumpy as a rabbit. Get to work."
And, as though to justify Miss Blake's prophecy, just ten days later, Hilliard did come again. It was a Sunday and Sheila had packed her lunch and gone off on "Nigger Baby" for the day. The ostensible object of her ride was a visit to the source of Hidden Creek. Really she was climbing away from a hurt. She felt Hilliard's wordless departure and prolonged absence keenly. She had not—to put it euphemistically—many friends. Her remedy was successful. Impossible, on such a ride, to cherish minor or major pangs. She rode into the smoky dimness of pine-woods where the sunlight burned in flecks and out again across the little open mountain meadows, jeweled with white and gold, blue and coral-colored flowers, a stained-glass window scattered across the ground. From these glades she could see the forest, an army of tall pilgrims, very grave, going up, with long staves in their hands, to worship at a high shrine. The rocks above were very grave, too, and grim and still against the even blue sky. Across their purplish gray a waterfall streaked down struck crystal by the sun. An eagle turned in great, swinging circles. Sheila had an exquisite lifting of heart, a sense of entire fusion, body blessed by spirit, spirit blessed by body. She felt a distinct pleasure in the flapping of her short, sun-filled hair against her neck, at the pony's motion between her unhampered legs, at the moist warmth of his neck under her hand—and this physical pleasure seemed akin to the ecstasy of prayer.
She came at last to a difficult, narrow, cañon trail, where the pony hopped skillfully over fallen trees, until, for very weariness of his choppy, determined efforts, she dismounted, tied him securely, and made the rest of her climb on foot. Hidden Creek tumbled near her and its voice swelled. All at once, round the corner of a great wall of rock, she came upon the head. It gushed out of the mountain-side in a tumult of life, not in a single stream, but in many frothy, writhing earth-snakes of foam. She sat for an hour and watched this mysterious birth from the mountain-side, watched till the pretty confusion of the water, with its half-interpreted voices, had dizzied and dazed her to the point of complete forgetfulness of self. She had entered into a sort of a trance, a Nirvana … She shook herself out of it, ate her lunch and scrambled quickly back to "Nigger Baby." It was late afternoon when she crossed the mountain glades. Their look had mysteriously changed. There was something almost uncanny now about their brilliance in the sunset light, and when she rode into the streaked darkness of the woods, they were full of ghostly, unintelligible sounds. To rest her muscles she was riding with her right leg thrown over the horn as though on a side saddle—a great mass of flowers was tied in front of her. She had opened her shirt at the neck and her head was bare. She was singing to keep up her heart. Then, suddenly, she had no more need of singing. She saw Cosme walking toward her up the trail.
His face lacked all its vivid color. It was rather haggard and stern. The devils he had swept out of his heart a fortnight earlier had, since then, been violently entertained. He stepped out of the path and waited for her, his hands on his hips. But, as she rode down, she saw this look melt. The blood crept up to his cheeks, the light to his eyes. It was like a rock taking the sun. She had smiled at him with all the usual exquisite grace and simplicity. When she came beside him, she drew rein, and at the same instant he put his hand on the pony's bridle. He looked up at her dumbly, and for some reason she, too, found it impossible to speak. She could see that he was breathing fast through parted lips and that the lips were both cruel and sensitive. His hand slid back along "Nigger Baby's" neck, paused, and rested on her knee. Then, suddenly, he came a big step closer, threw both his arms, tightening with a python's strength, about her and hid his face against her knees.
"Sheila," he said thickly. He looked up with a sort of anguish into her face. "Sheila, if you are not fit to be the mother of my children, you are sure fit for any man to love."
Her soft, slim body hardened against him even before her face. They stared at each other for a minute.
"Let me get down," said Sheila.
He stepped back, not quite understanding. She dropped off the horse, dragging her flowers with her, and faced him. She did not feel small or slender. She felt as high as a hill, although she had to look up at him so far. Her anger had its head against the sky.
"Why do you talk about a man's love?" she asked him with a queer sort of patience. "I think—I hope—that you don't know anything about a man's love, oh, the way men love!" She thought with swift pain of Jim, of Sylvester; "Oh, the way they love!" And she found that, under her breath, she was sobbing, "Dickie! Dickie!" as though her heart had called.
"Will you take back your horse, please?" she said, choking over these sobs which hurt her more at the moment than he had hurt her. "I'll never ride on him again. Don't come back here. Don't try to see me any more. I suppose it—it—the way you love me—is because I was a barmaid, because you heard people speak of me as 'Hudson's Queen.'" She conquered one of the sobs. "I thought that after you'd looked into my face so hard that night and stopped yourself from—from—my lips, that you had understood." She shook her head from side to side so violently, so childishly, that the short hair lashed across her eyes. "No one ever will understand!" She ran away from him and cried under her breath, "Dickie! Dickie!"
She ran straight into the living-room and stopped in the middle of the floor. Her arms were full of the flowers she had pulled down from "Nigger Baby's" neck.
"What did you want to bring in all that truck—?" Miss Blake began, rising from the pianola, then stopped. "What's the matter with you?" she asked. "Did your young man find you? I sent him up the trail." Her red eyes sparkled.
"He insulted me!" gasped Sheila. "He dared to insult me!" She was dramatic with her helpless young rage. "He said I wasn't fit to—to be the mother of his children. And"—she laughed angrily, handling behind Cosme's back the weapon that she had been too merciful to use—"and his mother is a murderess, found guilty of murder—and of worse!"
A sort of ripple of sound behind made her turn.
Cosme had followed her, was standing in the open door, and had heard her speech. The weapon had struck home, and she saw how it had poisoned all his blood.
He vanished without a word. Sheila turned back to Miss Blake a paler face. She let fall all her flowers.
"Now he'll never come back," she said.
She climbed up the ladder to her loft.
There she sat for an hour, listening to the silence. Her mind busied itself with trivial memories. She thought of Amelia Plecks…. It would have comforted her to hear that knock and the rattle of her dinner tray. The little sitting-room at Hudson's Hotel, with its bit of tapestry and its yellow tea-set and its vases filled with flowers, seemed to her memory as elaborate and artificial as the boudoir of a French princess. Farther than Millings had seemed from her old life did this dark little gabled attic seem from Millings. What was to be the end of this strange wandering, this withdrawing of herself farther and farther into the lonely places! She longed for the noise of Babe's hearty, irrepressible voice with its smack of chewing, of her step coming up the stairs to that little bedroom under Hudson's gaudy roof. Could it be possible that she was homesick for Millings? For the bar with its lights and its visitors and its big-aproned guardian? Her lids were actually smarting with tears at the recollection of Carthy's big Irish face…. He had been such a good, faithful watch-dog. Were men always like that—either watch-dogs or wolves? The simile brought her back to Hidden Creek. It grew darker and darker, a heavy darkness; the night had a new soft weight. There began to be a sort of whisper in the stillness—not the motion of pines, for there was no wind. Perhaps it was more a sensation than a sound, of innumerable soft numb fingers working against the silence … Sheila got up, shivering, lighted her candle, and went over to the small, four-paned window under the eaves. She pressed her face against it and started back. Things were flying toward her. She opened the sash and a whirling scarf of stars flung itself into the room. It was snowing. The night was blind with snow.