Ironheart

“Do you fink Jesus will come, Betty?” a small voice inquired anxiously.

“I think he’ll send some one, dear—Dad or Lon or—some one.”

Ruth considered. “Do you fink he’ll send him in time for bweakfast? I’m offul hungwy.”

Betty did not know about breakfast, but aloud she quite confidently thought so. Hope was resurgent in her heart. The worst of the flood was over. Its level had already receded two or three inches. She had just discovered that. Within the past hour its fury had beaten in and torn away one wall of the house. Another had been partially destroyed. The shell of a building that was left could not much longer endure. But she did not believe that much time would pass before a rescue was attempted. A few minutes since she had heard Dusty’s cheerful shout, and, though he was probably marooned himself, it was a comfort to know that her party was not the only one in the devastated valley.

“My fry-pans an’ my cook-stove an’ my kitchen are plumb scattered every which way. I reckon I nevah will see them no mo’,” Mandy mourned. “An’ las’ week I done bought dem luminous dishes frum dat peddler.”

“Aluminum, Mandy.”

“Das all right. Luminous or luminum, I ain’ carin’ which. What I wuz sayin’ is—”

Mandy stopped, to let out a yell of fright. A dripping figure, hatless, coatless, shoeless, was standing at the head of the stairs. The face was white and haggard. The body drooped against the door jamb for support.

Straight from Betty’s heart a cry of joy leaped. He had come to her. Through all the peril of the flood he had come to her.

“Tug!” she cried, irradiate, and moved to him with hands outstretched.

He was profoundly touched, but his words reflected the commonplace of the surface mind. “I’m wet,” he warned.

She laughed that to scorn, a little hysterically, and went blindly into his arms, a smirr of mist in her eyes. All night she had been under a strain, had carried the responsibility of facing peril for all of them. Now she cast that burden, without a moment’s hesitation, on broader shoulders.

His lip trembled. “I was afraid,” he whispered, as his arms went round her. “Horribly afraid till Dusty told me he’d heard you singing.”

“Oh, I’m glad you’ve come! I’m glad!” she wailed softly.

He held her close, as though he were afraid that even yet malign fate might try to snatch her from him. Beyond a shadow of a doubt he knew now that if they lived nothing could keep them apart. She had been right. The sin that had held him from her was a dead and shriveled thing. It was no more a part of him than are discarded horns part of a living stag.

Tug murmured, with emotion, “Thank God! Thank God!”

Into this stress of feeling Ruth interjected herself. She saw no reason for being out of the picture.

“Did Jesus send you?” she asked, tugging at his shirt-sleeve.

He did not quite understand.

Ruth explained, with the impatience of superiority. “Why, don’chu know? ‘Hold the fort, f’r I am comin’, Jesus signals still.’ Betty said ’f he didn’t come he’d send some one.”

“I’m sure God sent him,” Betty said, her voice unsteady.

“Bress de Lawd,” Mandy chimed in. “Now you git us off’n this yere busted house, Mr. Man, fer I don’ like no rampagin’ roun’ thisaway on no ocean v’yages.”

Betty explained that he could not get them off just yet. They would have to wait to be rescued.

“Whaffor he come ’f he ain’ gwine rescue us?” Mandy sniffed.

The girl smiled into the eyes of her lover. She knew why he had come, and in his presence by some magic the fear had dropped from her heart. The current dragging at their tottering place of refuge could not shake her sure confidence that all was well with them.

Hollister looked the situation over with the trained eye of an engineer. He must get them to the rocks before what was left of the house collapsed. But how? He could not take them with him through the waves beating against the sandstone. It was not certain that he could make a safe landing himself.

But if he could reach the flat ledge above, he might contrive some kind of bridge out of the dead and down trees lying there. It would be a hazardous affair, but he was in no position to be choice about ways and means.

Briefly he explained to Betty his plan. She clung to him, tremulously, reluctant to let him go.

“Must you?” she murmured, and shuddered at the black waters rushing past. “Must you go in again? Couldn’t we just wait here?”

“’Fraid not, dear. You feel how the house is shaking. It can’t last long. We’ve got to reach the rocks.”

“It’s been pretty awful, Tug. When the wall was swept out, I thought—” She shook that appalling memory out of her mind and smiled at him, shyly, adorably. “I’m not afraid as long as you’re here.”

“Don’t be afraid,” he reassured. “I think I can do it, Betty.”

“Can’t I help?”

“Yes. Knot together two sheets to make a rope. I’ll need it later.”

He dropped from a window, found himself caught in an irresistible tide that swept him away like a chip. It was all over in a moment. He was whirled round and dashed into the rocks. The impact knocked the breath out of him. He clung, desperately, to a jutting spar of sandstone, hardly conscious of what he was doing.

The life went out of him. When he came to consciousness, he lay on the shelf, feet and legs still in the water. He noticed that his head was bleeding and for an instant wondered what it was all about.

Betty’s voice reached him. “Tug! Tug!”

She was leaning out of the window of the tossing house.

He rose and waved a hand. Strength flowed back to him in waves. The haze lifted from his brain. He visualized the problem of the bridge and set about meeting it.

The dead trees on the ledge were young pines. They had been broken off from the roots, probably blown from the crevices because they were insufficiently rooted. He dragged one to the edge of the sloping surface of the boulder and raised it till it was upright.

“Back from the window, Betty,” he shouted.

Her head and shoulders disappeared. He balanced the tree-trunk carefully, measured the distance again with his eye, and let it fall toward the house. The end of it crashed through the window panes and landed on the casing.

Tug dragged forward a second pole, shouted a warning to Betty once more, and balanced the pine carefully. A second later it toppled forward, urged by a slight push, and the butt dropped into the casing beside the others.

On this frail bridge Tug crept on hands and knees toward the building. The house tilted down and back. The end of the logs slipped. Betty clung to them, desperately, while Hollister edged forward.

“I’ll take that rope,” he told the girl.

Mandy handed out the sheets. As the bridge swayed and dipped, he knotted the linen round the logs, tying them together in two places. It was a hazardous business, but he got through with it safely.

A few seconds later he was in the bedroom.

“Ruth first,” said Betty.

Tug nodded. “Tie her to my back. She might get frightened and let loose.”

The child whimpered as he crept out upon the logs.

“Betty’s coming too in a minute,” her sister called cheerfully. “Just shut your eyes, Ruthie, and hang tight.”

The narrow suspension bridge swung dizzily with every lift of the racing flood. Tug inched along, his feet locked together beneath the water that reached for him. Once he lost his balance from a lurch of the logs, but he managed to recover himself. Ruth screamed.

“All right, dear,” he told her, and presently was pulling himself upon the rocks.

Hollister left the little girl there and recrossed to the building. Betty crawled out on the bridge, the man close behind her.

She looked down, and was appalled. The pour of the stream that was so close carried the power of a mountain river in flood. Her body swayed. She could never get across—never in the world.

The voice of her lover came, strong and comforting. “Steady, Bess. We’re all right.”

His assurance went through her veins like wine. Tug was behind her. Of course, they would reach the rocks.

The logs dipped almost to the water at the middle. A monster that seemed to be alive dragged at her feet.

“Oh, Tug!” she cried.

“Keep going. We’re almost across.”

And presently they were, safe on the slanting sandstone shelf.

He returned for Mandy.

“I cayn’t nevah git acrost on that there rickety rack,” she moaned. “I’d bust dem poles spang in two.”

Hollister was not sure himself that they would hold her weight, but he knew that before many minutes the house was going to break up. He coaxed and urged her to the attempt, and after she began the crossing he clung to the end of the bridge with all his weight.

How Mandy got across none of them ever knew. She stopped twice to announce that she could not do it, but after more exhortation continued edging along. To the very moment when Betty reached a hand to her, she insisted that she was going to be drownded.

Not three minutes after Tug had crossed to the rock shelf, the shell of the house shivered and collapsed. It went out with a rush, and presently was nothing but a lot of floating planks.

Betty watched it go, with trembling lips. “If you hadn’t come,” she murmured.

His soul went out to her in swift response. “I had to come. It wasn’t chance. That’s how it was meant to be. Why not? Why wouldn’t I be near enough to come when you needed me?”

She caught his hand. “You dear boy,” she breathed.

“There’s nobody like you—nobody I ever met,” he cried in a whisper, as lovers have done since Adam first wooed Eve. “Could any one have done more for me than you? Your faith rebuilt my life. If I’m ever anything, I owe it to you. And now—the greatest gift of all. Why to me? Why not to Merrick, far more worthy of you?”

In her smile was the world-old wisdom Leonardo has expressed in his Mona Lisa.

“Love doesn’t go by merit, does it? I wonder if Justin isn’t too worthy. He’s perfect in himself—complete. He doesn’t need me.”

“God knows I need you, if that’s a reason,” he said humbly. “But it’s not fair to you.”

“Was it Justin who swam through the flood to save me?” she asked softly, her face aglow.

“He’s doing a much more sensible thing—building a raft to get you ashore.”

“Who wants her lover to do the sensible thing?” She turned to him impulsively, warm, tender, luminous, a rapt young thing caught in a surge of generous emotion. “I’d want mine to do just what you did—come through water or through fire instantly when I needed you. I’d love you now, if I never had before.”

“And if Merrick had come?”

“He couldn’t come. It wouldn’t be Justin to do that—to fling his life away on a thousandth chance. Don’t you see, Tug? He doesn’t tread the mountain-tops—and you do.”

“I see you’re always giving. If I could only wipe the slate out, Betty—begin my life over again to-day,” he said wistfully.

In her deep, soft eyes a dream lingered. “That’s just what I want—to begin everything with you. It’s silly, but I’m jealous of all those years when I didn’t have you—of all the sorrows and joys you’ve had, of the girls and the men you’ve known—because I can’t share them with you. I’ve got to know all you think and share all your hopes. If you ever think, ‘She’s just my wife—’”

“Never that. Always, ‘She’s my wife,’” he promised.

“As long as you say it that way, Tug,” she murmured, and clung to him with a little feminine savagery of possession.

Ruth, impatient at being ignored, again claimed attention.

“Talk to me, too,” she ordered.

Tug caught her small hand in his. “Of course, we’ll talk to little sister.”

“Are you my big brother?” she asked.

Betty stooped and snatched the child to her. “He’s going to be,” she whispered.

Upon this Ruth set the seal of her approval. “Goody, I like him. An’ he’ll get me heaps ’n’ heaps of tandy. More’n anybody.”