CHAPTER XI
Although the vehicle of his professional activities had for some years been a small and stertorous automobile locally known as “Puffy Pete,” Mr. James Mindle always referred to his process of postal transfer from the station to the town as “teamin’ over the mail.” He was a frail, grinny man from the prairie country, much given to romantic imaginings and an inordinate admiration for Banneker.
Having watched from the seat of his chariot the brief but ceremonial entry of Number Three, which, on regular schedule, roared through Manzanita at top speed, he descended, captured the mail-bag and, as the transcontinental pulled out, accosted the station-agent.
“What’d she stop for, Ban?”
“Special orders.”
“Didn’t say nothin’ about havin’ a ravin’ may-ni-ac aboard, did theh?”
“No.”
“Ban, was you ever in the State of Ohio?”
“A long time ago.”
“Are Ohio folks liable to be loony?”
“Not more than others, I reckon, Jimmy.”
“Pretty enthoosiastic about themselves, though, ain’t theh?”
“Why, I don’t know. It’s a nice country there, Jimmy.”
“There was one on Number Three sure thought so. Hadn’t scarcely come to a stop when off he jumps and waves his fins and gives three cheers for it.”
“For what?”
“Ohio. I’m tellin’ you. He ramps across the track yippin’ ‘Ohio! Ohio! Ohio!’ whoopity-yoop. He come right at me and I says, ‘Watch yehself, Buddy. You’ll git left.’”
“What did he say to that?” asked Banneker indulgently.
“Never looked at me no more than a doodle-bug. Just yelled ‘Ohio!’ again. So I come back at him with ‘Missourah.’ He grabs me by the shoulder and points to your shack. ‘Who owns that little shed?’ says he, very excited. ‘My friend, Mr. Banneker,’ says I, polite as always to strangers. ‘But I own that shoulder you’re leanin’ on, and I’m about to take it away with me when I go,’ I says. He leaned off and says, ‘Where did that young lady come from that was standin’ in the doorway a minute ago?’ ‘Young lady,’ Ban. Do you get that? So I says, ‘You’re lucky, Bud. When I get ’em, it’s usually snakes and bugs and such-like rep-tyles. Besides,’ I says, ‘your train is about to forgit that you got off it,’ I says. With that he gives another screech that don’t even mean as much as Ohio and tails onto the back platform just in time.”
Said Ban, after frowning consideration:
“You didn’t see any lady around the shack, did you, Jimmy?”
“Not on your life,” replied the little man indignantly. “I ain’t had anything like that since I took the mail-teamin’ contract.”
“How good time do you think Puffy Pete could make across-desert in case I should want it?” inquired the agent after a pause.
The mail-man contemplated his “team,” bubbling and panting a vaporous breath over the platform. “Pete ain’t none too fond of sand,” he confessed. “But if you want to git anywhere, him and me’ll git you there. You know that, Ban.”
Banneker nodded comradely and the post chugged away.
Inside the shack Io had set out the luncheon-things. To Banneker’s eyes she appeared quite unruffled, despite the encounter which he had surmised from Jimmy’s sketch.
“Get me some flowers for the table, Ban,” she directed. “I want it to look festive.”
“Why, in particular?”
“Because I’m afraid we won’t have many more luncheons together.”
He made no comment, but went out and returned with the flowers. Meantime Io had made up her mind.
“I’ve had an unpleasant surprise, Ban.”
“I was afraid so.”
She glanced up quickly. “Did you see him?”
“No. Mindle, the mail transfer man, did.”
“Oh! Well, that was Aleck Babson. ‘Babbling Babson,’ he’s called at the clubs. He’s the most inveterate gossip in New York.”
“It’s a long way from New York,” pointed out Banneker.
“Yes; but he has a long tongue. Besides, he’ll see the Westerleys and my other friends in Paradiso, and babble to them.”
“Suppose he does?”
“I won’t have people chasing here after me or pestering me with letters,” she said passionately. “Yet I don’t want to go away. I want to get more rested, Ban, and forget a lot of things.”
He nodded. Comfort and comprehension were in his silence.
“You can be as companionable as a dog,” said Io softly. “Where did you get your tact, I wonder? Well, I shan’t go till I must.... Lemonade, Ban! I brought over the lemons myself.”
They lunched a little soberly and thoughtfully.
“And I wanted it to be festive to-day,” said Io wistfully, speaking out her thoughts as usual. “Ban, does Miss Camilla smoke?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because if she does, you’ll think it all right. And I want a cigarette now.”
“If you do, I’ll know it’s all right, Butterfly,” returned her companion fetching a box from a shelf.
“Hold the thought!” cried Io gayly. “There’s a creed for you! ‘Whatever is, is right,’ provided that it’s Io who does it. Always judge me by that standard, Ban, won’t you?... Where in the name of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ghost did you get these cigarettes? ‘Mellorosa’ ... Ban, is this a Sears-Roebuck stock?”
“No. It came from town. Don’t you like it?”
“It’s quite curious and interesting. Never mind, my dear; I won’t tease you.”
For all that Io’s “my dear” was the most casual utterance imaginable, it brought a quick flush to Banneker’s face. Chattering carelessly, she washed up the few dishes, put them away in the brackets, and then, smoking another of the despised Mellorosas, wandered to the book-shelves.
“Read me something out of your favorite book, Ban.... No; this one.”
She handed him the thick mail-order catalogue. With a gravity equal to her own he took it.
“What will you have?”
“Let the spirit of Sears-Roebuck decide. Open at random and expound.”
He thrust a finger between the leaves and began:
“Our Special, Fortified Black Fiber Trunk for Hard Travel. Made of Three-Ply Ven—”
“Oh, to have my trunks again!” sighed the girl. “Turn to something else. I don’t like that. It reminds me of travel.”
Obedient, Banneker made another essay:
“Clay County Clay Target Traps. Easily Adjusted to the Elevation—”
“Oh, dear!” she broke in again. “That reminds me that Dad wrote me to look up his pet shot-gun before his return. I don’t like that either. Try again.”
This time the explorer plunged deep into the volume.
“How to Make Home Home-like. An Invaluable Counselor for the Woman of the Household—”
Io snatched the book from the reader’s hand and tossed it into a corner. “Sears-Roebuck are very tactless,” she declared. “Everything they have to offer reminds one of home. What do you think of home, Ban? Home, as an abstract proposition. Home as the what-d’you-call-’em of the nation; the palladium—no, the bulwark? Home as viewed by the homing pigeon? Home, Sweet Home, as sung by—Would you answer, Ban, if I stopped gibbering and gave you the chance?”
“I’ve never had much opportunity to judge about home, you know.”
She darted out a quick little hand and touched his sleeve. The raillery had faded from her face. “So you haven’t. Not very tactful of me, was it! Will you throw me into the corner with Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck, Ban? I’m sorry.”
“You needn’t be. One gets used to being an air-plant without roots.”
“Yet you wouldn’t have fitted out this shack,” she pointed out shrewdly, “unless you had the instincts of home.”
“That’s true enough. Fortunately it’s the kind of home I can take along when they transfer me.”
Io went to the door and looked afar on the radiant splendor of the desert, and, nearer, into the cool peace of the forest.
“But you can’t take all this,” she reminded him.
“No. I can’t take this.”
“Shall you miss it?”
A shadow fell upon his face. “I’d miss something—I don’t know what it is—that no other place has ever given me. Why do you talk as if I were going away from it? I’m not.”
“Oh, yes; you are,” she laughed softly. “It is so written. I’m a seeress.” She turned from the door and threw herself into a chair.
“What will take me?”
“Something inside you. Something unawakened. ‘Something lost beyond the ranges.’ You’ll know, and you’ll obey it.”
“Shall I ever come back, O seeress?”
At the question her eyes grew dreamy and distant. Her voice when she spoke sank to a low-pitched monotone.
“Yes, you’ll come back. Sometime.... So shall I ... not for years ... but—” She jumped to her feet. “What kind of rubbish am I talking?” she cried with forced merriment. “Is your tobacco drugged with hasheesh, Ban?”
He shook his head. “It’s the pull of the desert,” he murmured. “It’s caught you sooner than most. You’re more responsive, I suppose; more sens—Why, Butterfly! You’re shaking.”
“A Scotchman would say that I was ‘fey.’ Ban, do you think it means that I’m coming back here to die?” She laughed again. “If I were fated to die here, I expect that I missed my good chance in the smash-up. Fortunately I’m not superstitious.”
“There might be worse places,” said he slowly. “It is the place that would call me back if ever I got down and out.” He pointed through the window to the distant, glowing purity of the mountain peak. “One could tell one’s troubles to that tranquil old god.”
“Would he listen to mine, I wonder?”
“Try him before you go. You can leave them all here and I’ll watch over them for you to see that they don’t get loose and bother you.”
“Absolution! If it were only as easy as that! This is a haunted place.... Why should I be here at all? Why didn’t I go when I should? Why a thousand things?”
“Chance.”
“Is there any such thing? Why can’t I sleep at night yet, as I ought? Why do I still feel hunted? What’s happening to me, Ban? What’s getting ready to happen?”
“Nothing. That’s nerves.”
“Yes; I’ll try not to think of it. But at night—Ban, suppose I should come over in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, and call outside your window?”
“I’d come down, of course. But you’d have to be careful about rattlers,” answered the practical Ban.
“Your friend, Camilla, would intercept me, anyway. I don’t think she sleeps too well, herself. Do you know what she’s doing out here?”
“She came for her health.”
“That isn’t what I asked you, my dear. Do you know what she’s doing?”
“No. She never told me.”
“Shall I tell you?”
“No.”
“It’s interesting. Aren’t you curious?”
“If she wanted me to know, she’d tell me.”
“Indubitably correct, and quite praiseworthy,” mocked the girl. “Never mind; you know how to be staunch to your friends.”
“In this country a man who doesn’t is reckoned a yellow dog.”
“He is in any decent country. So take that with you when you go.”
“I’m not going,” he asserted with an obstinate set to his jaw.
“Wait and see,” she taunted. “So you won’t let me send you books?” she questioned after a pause.
“No.”
“No, I thank you,” she prompted.
“No, I thank you,” he amended. “I’m an uncouth sort of person, but I meant the ‘thank you.’”
“Of course you did. And uncouthness is the last thing in the world you could be accused of. That’s the wonder of it.... No; I don’t suppose it really is. It’s birth.”
“If it’s anything, it’s training. My father was a stickler for forms, in spite of being a sort of hobo.”
“Well, forms make the game, very largely. You won’t find them essentially different when you go out into the—I forgot again. That kind of prophecy annoys you, doesn’t it? There is one book I’m going to send you, though, which you can’t refuse. Nobody can refuse it. It isn’t done.”
“What is that?”
Her answer surprised him. “The Bible.”
“Are you religious? Of course, a butterfly should be, shouldn’t she? should believe in the release of the soul from its chrysalis—the butterfly’s immortality. Yet I wouldn’t have suspected you of a leaning in that direction.”
“Oh, religion!” Her tone set aside the subject as insusceptible of sufficient or satisfactory answer. “I go through the forms,” she added, a little disdainfully. “As to what I believe and do—which is what one’s own religion is—why, I assume that if the game is worth playing at all, there must be a Judge and Maker of the Rules. As far as I understand them, I follow them.”
“You have a sort of religious feeling for success, though, haven’t you?” he reminded her slyly.
“Not at all. Just human, common sense.”
“But your creed as you’ve just given it, the rules of the game and that; that’s precisely the Bible formula, I believe.”
“How do you know?” she caught him up. “You haven’t a Bible in the place, so far as I’ve noticed.”
“No; I haven’t.”
“You should have.”
“Probably. But I can’t, somehow, adjust myself to that advice as coming from you.”
“Because you don’t understand what I’m getting at. It isn’t religious advice.”
“Then what is it?”
“Literary, purely. You’re going to write, some day. Oh, don’t look doubtful! That’s foreordained. It doesn’t take a seeress to prophesy that. And the Bible is the one book that a writer ought to read every day. Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs. Pretty much all the Old Testament, and a lot of the New. It has grown into our intellectual life until its phrases and catchwords are full of overtones and sub-meanings. You’ve got to have it in your business; your coming business, I mean. I know what I’m talking about, Mr. Errol Banneker—moi qui parle. They offered me an instructorship in Literature when I graduated. I even threatened to take it, just for a joke on Dad. Now, will you be good and accept my fully explained and diagrammed Bible without fearing that I have designs on your soul?”
“Yes.”
“And will you please go back to your work at once, and by and by take me home and stay to supper? Miss Van Arsdale told me to ask you.”
“All right. I’ll be glad to. What will you do between now and four o’clock?”
“Prowl in your library and unearth more of your secrets.”
“You’re welcome if you can find any. I don’t deal in ’em.”
When Banneker, released from his duties until evening train time, rejoined her, and they were riding along the forest trail, he said:
“You’ve started me to theorizing about myself.”
“Do it aloud,” she invited.
“Well; all my boyhood I led a wandering life, as you know. We were never anywhere as much as a month at a time. In a way, I liked the change and adventure. In another way, I got dead sick of it. Don’t you suppose that my readiness to settle down and vegetate is the reaction from that?”
“It sounds reasonable enough. You might put it more simply by saying that you were tired. But by now you ought to be rested.”
“Therefore I ought to be stirring myself so as to get tired again?”
“If you don’t stir, you’ll rust.”
“Rust is a painless death for useless mechanism.”
She shot an impatient side-glance at him. “Either you’re a hundred years old,” she said, “or that’s sheer pose.”
“Perhaps it is a sort of pose. If so, it’s a self-protective one.”
“Suppose I asked you to come to New York?”
Intrepid though she was, her soul quaked a little at her own words, foreseeing those mail-order-cut clothes and the resolute butterflyness of the tie greeting her on Fifth Avenue.
“What to do?”
“Sell tickets at the Grand Central Station, of course!” she shot back at him. “Ban, you are aggravating! ‘What to do?’ Father would find you some sort of place while you were fitting in.”
No. I wouldn’t take a job from you any more than I’d take anything else.”
“You carry principles to the length of absurdity. Come and get your own job, then. You’re not timid, are you?”
“Not particularly. I’m just contented.”
At that provocation her femininity flared. “Ban,” she cried with exasperation and appeal enchantingly mingled, “aren’t you going to miss me at all when I go?”
“I’ve been trying not to think of that,” he said slowly.
“Well, think of it,” she breathed. “No!” she contradicted herself passionately. “Don’t think of it. I shouldn’t have said that.... I don’t know what is the matter with me to-day, Ban. Perhaps I am fey.” She smiled to him slantwise.
“It’s the air,” he answered judicially. “There’s another storm brewing somewhere or I’m no guesser. More trouble for the schedule.”
“That’s right!” she cried eagerly. “Be the Atkinson and St. Philip station-agent again. Let’s talk about trains. It’s—it’s so reliable.”
“Far from it on this line,” he answered, adopting her light tone. “Particularly if we have more rain. You may become a permanent resident yet.”
Some rods short of the Van Arsdale cabin the trail took a sharp turn amidst the brush. Halfway on the curve Io caught at Banneker’s near rein.
“Hark!” she exclaimed.
The notes of a piano sounded faintly clear in the stillness. As the harmonies dissolved and merged, a voice rose above them, resonant and glorious, rose and sank and pleaded and laughed and loved, while the two young listeners leaned unconsciously toward each other in their saddles. Silence fell again. The very forest life itself seemed hushed in a listening trance.
“Heavens!” whispered Banneker. “Who is it?”
“Camilla Van Arsdale, of course. Didn’t you know?”
“I knew she was musical. I didn’t know she had a voice like that.”
“Ten years ago New York was wild over it.”
“But why—”
“Hush! She’s beginning again.”
Once more the sweep of the chords was followed by the superb voice while the two wayfarers and all the world around them waited, breathless and enchained. At the end, Banneker said dreamily:
“I’ve never heard anything like that before. It says everything that can’t be said in words alone, doesn’t it? It makes me think of something—What is it?” He groped for a moment, then repeated:
“‘A passionate ballad, gallant and gay, Singing afar in the springtime of life, Singing of youth and of love And of honor that cannot die.’”
Io drew a deep, tremulous breath. “Yes; it’s like that. What a voice! And what an art to be buried out here! It’s one of her own songs, I think. Probably an unpublished one.”
“Her own? Does she write music?”
“She is Royce Melvin, the composer. Does that mean anything to you?”
He shook his head.
“Some day it will. They say that he—every one thinks it’s a he—will take Massenet’s place as a lyrical composer. I found her out by accidentally coming on the manuscript of a Melvin song that I knew. That’s her secret that I spoke of. Do you mind my having told you?”
“Why, no. It’ll never go any further. I wonder why she never told me. And why she keeps so shut off from the world here.”
“Ah; that’s another secret, and one that I shan’t tell you,” returned Io gravely. “There’s the piano again.”
A few indeterminate chords came to their ears. There followed a jangling disharmony. They waited, but there was nothing more. They rode on.
At the lodge Banneker took the horses around while Io went in. Immediately her voice, with a note of alarm in it, summoned him. He found her bending over Miss Van Arsdale, who lay across the divan in the living-room with eyes closed, breathing jerkily. Her lips were blue and her hands looked shockingly lifeless.
“Carry her into her room,” directed Io.
Banneker picked up the tall, strong-built form without effort and deposited it on the bed in the inner room.
“Open all the windows,” commanded the girl. “See if you can find me some ammonia or camphor. Quick! She looks as if she were dying.”
One after another Banneker tried the bottles on the dresser. “Here it is. Ammonia,” he said.
In his eagerness he knocked a silver-mounted photograph to the floor. He thrust the drug into the girl’s hand and watched her helplessly as she worked over the limp figure on the bed. Mechanically he picked up the fallen picture to replace it. There looked out at him the face of a man of early middle age, a face of manifest intellectual power, high-boned, long-lined, and of the austere, almost ascetic beauty which the Florentine coins have preserved for us in clear fidelity. Across the bottom was written in a peculiarly rhythmic script, the legend:
“Toujours à toi. W.”
“She’s coming back,” said Io’s voice. “No. Don’t come nearer. You’ll shut off the air. Find me a fan.”
He ran to the outer room and came back with a palm-leaf.
“She wants something,” said Io in an agonized half-voice. “She wants it so badly. What is it? Help me, Ban! She can’t speak. Look at her eyes—so imploring. Is it medicine?... No! Ban, can’t you help?”
Banneker took the silver-framed portrait and placed it in the flaccid hand. The fingers closed over it. The filmiest wraith of a smile played about the blue lips.
An hour later, Io came out to Banneker waiting fearfully in the big room.
“She won’t have a doctor. I’ve given her the strychnia and she insists she’ll be all right.”
“Don’t you think I ought to go for the doctor, anyway?”
“She wouldn’t see him. She’s very strong-willed.... That’s a wonderful woman, Ban.” Io’s voice shook a little.
“Yes.”
“How did you know about the picture?”
“I saw it on the dresser. And when I saw her eyes, I guessed.”
“Yes; there’s only one thing a woman wants like that, when she’s dying. You’re rather a wonderful person, yourself, to have known. That’s her other secret, Ban. The one I said I couldn’t tell you.”
“I’ve forgotten it,” replied Banneker gravely.
CHAPTER XII
Attendance upon the sick-room occupied Io’s time for several days thereafter. Morning and afternoon Banneker rode over from the station to make anxious inquiry. The self-appointed nurse reported progress as rapid as could be expected, but was constantly kept on the alert because of the patient’s rebellion against enforced idleness. Seizures of the same sort she had suffered before, it appeared, but none hitherto so severe. Nothing could be done, she told Io, beyond the administration of the medicine, for which she had full directions. One day an attack would finish it all; meantime, in spite of her power of self-repression, she chafed at the monotony of her imprisonment.
In the late afternoon of the day after the collapse, while Io was heating water at the fireplace, she heard a drawer open in the sick-room and hurried back to find Miss Van Arsdale hanging to the dresser, her face gray-splotched and her fingers convulsively crushing a letter which she had taken from under lock. Alarmed and angry, the amateur nurse got her back to bed only half conscious, but still cherishing her trove. When, an hour later, she dared leave her charge, she heard the rustle of smoothed-out paper and remained outside long enough to allow for the reading. On her return there was no sign of the letter. Miss Van Arsdale, a faint and hopeful color in her cheeks, was asleep.
For Banneker these were days of trial and tribulation. Added to the anxiety that he felt for his best friend was the uncertainty as to what he ought to do about the developments affecting her guest. For he had heard once more from Gardner.
“It’s on the cards,” wrote the reporter, “that I may be up to see you again. I’m still working, on and off, on the tip that took me on that wild-goose chase. If I come again I won’t quit without some of the wild goose’s tail feathers, at least. There’s a new tip locally; it leaked out from Paradise. [“The Babbling Babson,” interjected the reader mentally.] It looks as though the bird were still out your way. Though how she could be, and you not know it, gets me. It’s even a bigger game than Stella Wrightington, if my information is O.K. Have you heard or seen anything lately of a Beautiful Stranger or anything like that around Manzanita?... I enclose clipping of your story. What do you think of yourself in print?”
Banneker thought quite highly of himself in print as he read the article, which he immediately did. The other matter could wait; not that it was less important; quite the contrary; but he proposed to mull it over carefully and with a quiet mind, if he could ever get his mind back to its peaceful current again: meantime it was good for him to think of something quite dissociated from the main problem.
What writer has not felt the conscious red tingle in his cheeks at first sight of himself in the magnified personification of type? Here is something, once himself, now expanded far beyond individual limits, into the proportions of publicity, for all the world to measure and estimate and criticize. Ought it to have been done in just that way? Is there not too much “I” in the presentation? Would not the effect have been greater had the method been less personal? It seemed to Banneker that he himself stood forth in a stark nakedness of soul and thought, through those blatantly assertive words, shameless, challenging to public opinion, yet delightful to his own appreciation. On the whole it was good; better than he would have thought he could do.
What he had felt, in the writing of it, to be jerks and bumps were magically smoothed out in the finished product. At one point where the copy-reader’s blue pencil had elided an adjective which the writer had deemed specially telling, he felt a sharp pang of disappointed resentment. Without that characterization the sentence seemed lifeless. Again, in another passage he wished that he had edited himself with more heed to the just word. Why had he designated the train as “rumbling” along the cut? Trains do not rumble between rock walls, he remembered; they move with a sustained and composite roar. And the finger-wringing malcontent who had vowed to “soom”; the editorial pencil had altered that to “sue ’em,” thereby robbing it of its special flavor. Perhaps this was in accordance with some occult rule of the trade. But it spoiled the paragraph for Banneker. Nevertheless he was thrilled and elate.... He wanted to show the article to Io. What would she think of it? She had read him accurately: it was in him to write. And she could help him, if only by—well, if only by being at hand.... But Gardner’s letter! That meant that the pursuit was on again, more formidably this time. Gardner, the gadfly, stinging this modern Io out of her refuge of peace and safety!
He wrote and dispatched a message to the reporter in care of the Angelica City Herald:
Glad to see you, but you are wasting your time. No such person could be here without my knowing it. Thanks for article.
That was as near an untruth as Banneker cared to go. In his own mind he defended it on the ground that the projected visit would, in fact, be time wasted for the journalist since he, Banneker, intended fully that Gardner should not see Io. Deep would have been his disgust and self-derision could he have observed the effect of the message upon the cynical and informed journalist who, however, did not receive it until the second day after its transmission, as he had been away on another assignment.
“The poor fish!” was Gardner’s comment. “He doesn’t even say that she isn’t there. He’s got to lie better than that if he goes into the newspaper game.”
Further, the reporter had received a note from the cowman whom Ban and Io had encountered in the woods, modestly requesting five dollars in return for the warranted fact that a “swell young lady” had been seen in Banneker’s company. Other journalistic matters were pressing, however; he concluded that the “Manzanita Mystery,” as he built it up headline-wise in his ready mind, could wait a day or two longer.
Banneker, through the mechanical course of his office, debated the situation. Should he tell Io of the message? To do so would only add to her anxieties, probably to no good purpose, for he did not believe that she would desert Miss Van Arsdale, ill and helpless, on any selfish consideration. Fidelity was one of the virtues with which he had unconsciously garlanded Io. Then, too, Gardner might not come anyway. If he did Banneker was innocently confident of his own ability to outwit the trained reporter and prevent his finding the object of his quest. A prospective and possible ally was forecast in the weather. Warning of another rainfall impending had come over the wire. As yet there was no sign visible from his far-horizoned home, except a filmy and changeful wreath of palest cloud with which Mount Carstairs was bedecked. Banneker decided for silence.
Miss Van Arsdale was much better when he rode over in the morning, but Io looked piteously worn and tired.
“You’ve had no rest,” he accused her, away from the sick woman’s hearing.
“Rest enough of its kind, but not much sleep,” said Io.
“But you’ve got to have sleep,” he insisted. “Let me stay and look after her to-night.”
“It wouldn’t be of any use.”
“Why not?”
“I shouldn’t sleep anyway. This house is haunted by spirits of unrest,” said the girl fretfully. “I think I’ll take a blanket and go out on the desert.”
“And wake up to find a sidewinder crawling over you, and a tarantula nestling in your ear. Don’t think of it.”
“Ban,” called the voice of Camilla Van Arsdale from the inner room, clear and firm as he had ever heard it.
He went in. She stretched out a hand to him. “It’s good to see you, Ban. Have I worried you? I shall be up and about again to-morrow.”
“Now, Miss Camilla,” protested Banneker, “you mustn’t—”
“I’m going to get up to-morrow,” repeated the other immutably. “Don’t be absurd about it. I’m not ill. It was only the sort of knock-down that I must expect from time to time. Within a day or two you’ll see me riding over.... Ban, stand over there in that light.... What’s that you’ve got on?”
“What, Miss Camilla?”
“That necktie. It isn’t in your usual style. Where did you get it?”
“Sent to Angelica City for it. Don’t you like it?” he returned, trying for the nonchalant air, but not too successfully.
“Not as well as your spotty butterflies,” answered the woman jealously. “That’s nonsense, though. Don’t mind me, Ban,” she added with a wry smile. “Plain colors are right for you. Browns, or blues, or reds, if they’re not too bright. And you’ve tied it very well. Did it take you long to do it?”
Reddening and laughing, he admitted a prolonged and painful session before his glass. Miss Van Arsdale sighed. It was such a faint, abandoning breath of regret as might come from the breast of a mother when she sees her little son in his first pride of trousers.
“Go out and say good-night to Miss Welland,” she ordered, “and tell her to go to bed. I’ve taken a sleeping powder.”
Banneker obeyed. He rode home slowly and thoughtfully. His sleep was sound enough that night.
Breakfast-getting processes did not appeal to him when he awoke in the morning. He walked over, through the earliest light, to the hotel, where he made a meal of musty eggs, chemical-looking biscuits, and coffee of a rank hue and flavor, in an atmosphere of stale odors and flies, sickeningly different from the dainty ceremonials of Io’s preparation. Rebuking himself for squeamishness, the station-agent returned to his office, caught an O.S. from the wire, took some general instructions, and went out to look at the weather. His glance never reached the horizon.
In the foreground where he had swung the hammock under the alamo it checked and was held, absorbed. A blanketed figure lay motionless in the curve of the meshwork. One arm was thrown across the eyes, warding a strong beam which had forced its way through the lower foliage. He tiptoed forward.
Io’s breast was rising and falling gently in the hardly perceptible rhythm of her breathing. From the pale yellow surface of her dress, below the neck, protruded a strange, edged something, dun-colored, sharply defined and alien, which the man’s surprised eyes failed to identify. Slowly the edge parted and flattened out, broadwise, displaying the marbled brilliance of the butterfly’s inner wings, illumining the pale chastity of the sleeping figure as if with a quivering and evanescent jewel. Banneker, shaken and thrilled, closed his eyes. He felt as if a soul had opened its secret glories to him. When, commanding himself, he looked again, the living gem was gone. The girl slept evenly.
Conning the position of the sun and the contour of the sheltering tree, Banneker estimated that in a half-hour or less a flood of sunlight would pour in upon the slumberer’s face to awaken her. Cautiously withdrawing, he let himself into the shack, lighted his oil stove, put on water to boil, set out the coffee and the stand. He felt different about breakfast-getting now. Having prepared the arrangements for his prospective guest, he returned and leaned against the alamo, filling his eyes with still delight of the sleeper.
Youthful, untouched, fresh though the face was, in the revealing stillness of slumber, it suggested rather than embodied something indefinably ancient, a look as of far and dim inheritances, subtle, ironic, comprehending, and aloof; as if that delicate and strong beauty of hers derived intimately from the wellsprings of the race; as if womanhood, eternal triumphant, and elusive were visibly patterned there.
Banneker, leaning against the slender tree-trunk, dreamed over her, happily and aimlessly.
Io opened her eyes to meet his. She stirred softly and smiled at him.
“So you discovered me,” she said.
“How long have you been here?”
She studied the sun a moment before replying. “Several hours.”
“Did you walk over in the night?”
“No. You told me not to, you know. I waited till the dawn. Don’t scold me, Ban. I was dead for want of sleep and I couldn’t get it in the lodge. It’s haunted, I tell you, with unpeaceful spirits. So I remembered this hammock.”
“I’m not going to scold you. I’m going to feed you. The coffee’s on.”
“How good!” she cried, getting to her feet. “Am I a sight? I feel frowsy.”
“There’s a couple of buckets of water up in my room. Help yourself while I set out the breakfast.”
In fifteen minutes she was down, freshened and joyous.
“I’ll just take a bite and then run back to my patient,” she said. “You can bring the blanket when you come. It’s heavy for a three-mile tramp.... What are you looking thoughtful and sober about, Ban? Do you disapprove of my escapade?”
“That’s a foolish question.”
“It’s meant to be. And it’s meant to make you smile. Why don’t you? You are worried. ‘Fess up. What’s happened?”
“I’ve had a letter from the reporter in Angelica City.”
“Oh! Did he send your article?”
“He did. But that isn’t the point. He says he’s coming up here again.”
“What for?”
“You.”
“Does he know I’m here? Did he mention my name?”
“No. But he’s had some information that probably points to you.”
“What did you answer?”
Ban told her. “I think that will hold him off,” he said hopefully.
“Then he’s a very queer sort of reporter,” returned Io scornfully out of her wider experience. “No; he’ll come. And if he’s any good, he’ll find me.”
“You can refuse to see him.”
“Yes; but it’s the mere fact of my being here that will probably give him enough to go on and build up a loathsome article. How I hate newspapers!... Ban,” she appealed wistfully, “can’t you stop him from coming? Must I go?”
“You must be ready to go.”
“Not until Miss Camilla is well again,” she declared obstinately. “But that will be in a day or two. Oh, well! What does it all matter! I’ve not much to pack up, anyway. How are you going to get me out?”
“That depends on whether Gardner comes, and how he comes.”
He pointed to a darkening line above the southwestern horizon. “If that is what it looks like, we may be in for another flood, though I’ve never known two bad ones in a season.”
Io beckoned quaintly to the far clouds. “Hurry! Hurry!” she summoned. “You wrecked me once. Now save me from the Vandal. Good-bye, Ban. And thank you for the lodging and the breakfast.”
Emergency demands held the agent at his station all that day and evening. Trainmen brought news of heavy rains beyond the mountains. In the morning he awoke to find his little world hushed in a murky light and with a tingling apprehension of suspense in the atmosphere. High, gray cloud shapes hurried across the zenith to a conference of the storm powers, gathering at the horizon. Weather-wise from long observation, Banneker guessed that the outbreak would come before evening, and that, unless the sullen threat of the sky was deceptive, Manzanita would be shut off from rail communication within twelve hours thereafter. Having two hours’ release at noon, he rode over to the lodge in the forest to return Io’s blanket. He found the girl pensive, and Miss Van Arsdale apparently recovered to the status of her own normal and vigorous self.
“I’ve been telling Io,” said the older woman, “that, since the rumor is out of her being here, she will almost certainly be found by the reporter. Too many people in the village know that I have a guest.”
“How?” asked Banneker.
“From my marketing. Probably from Pedro.”
“Very likely from the patron of the Sick Coyote that you and I met on our walk,” added the girl.
“So the wise thing is for her to go,” concluded Miss Van Arsdale. “Unless she is willing to risk the publicity.”
“Yes,” assented Io. “The wise thing is for me to go.” She spoke in a curious tone, not looking at Banneker, not looking at anything outward and visible; her vision seemed somberly introverted.
“Not now, though,” said Banneker.
“Why not?” asked both women. He answered Io.
“You called for a storm. You’re going to get it. A big one. I could send you out on Number Eight, but that’s a way-train and there’s no telling where it would land you or when you’d get through. Besides, I don’t believe Gardner is coming. I’d have heard from him by now. Listen!”
The slow pat-pat-pat of great raindrops ticked like a started clock on the roof. It ceased, and far overhead the great, quiet voice of the wind said, “Hush—sh—sh—sh—sh!”, bidding the world lie still and wait.
“What if he does come?” asked Miss Van Arsdale
“I’ll get word to you and get her out some way.”
The storm burst on Banneker, homebound, just as he emerged from the woodland, in a wild, thrashing wind from the southwest and a downpour the most fiercely, relentlessly insistent that he had ever known. A cactus desert in the rare orgy of a rainstorm is a place of wonder. The monstrous, spiky forms trembled and writhed in ecstasy, heat-damned souls in their hour of respite, stretching out exultant arms to the bounteous sky. Tiny rivulets poured over the sand, which sucked them down with a thirsting, crisping whisper. A pair of wild doves, surprised and terrified, bolted close past the lone rider, so near that his mount shied and headed for the shelter of the trees again. A small snake, curving indecisively and with obvious bewilderment amidst the growth, paused to rattle a faint warning, half coiled in case the horse’s step meant a new threat, then went on with a rather piteous air of not knowing where to find refuge against this cataclysm of the elements.
Lashing in the wind, a long tentacle of the giant ocatilla drew its cimeter-set thong across Ban’s horse which incontinently bolted. The rider lifted up his voice and yelled in sheer, wild, defiant joy of the tumult. A lesser ocatilla thorn gashed his ear so that the blood mingled with the rain that poured down his face. A pod of the fishhook-barbed cholla drove its points through his trousers into the flesh of his knee and, detaching itself from the stem, as is the detestable habit of this vegetable blood-seeker, clung there like a live thing of prey, from barbs which must later be removed delicately and separately with the cold steel. Blindly homing, a jack-rabbit ran almost beneath the horse’s hooves, causing him to shy again, this time into a bulky vizcaya, as big as a full-grown man, and inflicting upon Ban a new species of scarification. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. He rode on, knees tight, lines loose, elate, shouting, singing, acclaiming the storm which was setting its irrefragable limits to the world wherein he and Io would still live close, a few golden days longer.
What he picked from the wire when he reached it confirmed his hopes. The track was threatened in a dozen places. Repair crews were gathering. Already the trains were staggering along, far behind their schedule. They would, of course, operate as far as possible, but no reliance was to be placed upon their movements until further notice. Through the night traffic continued, but with the coming of the morning and the settling down of a soft, seeping, unintermittent pour of gray rain, the situation had clarified. Nothing came through. Complete stoppage, east and west. Between Manzanita and Stanwood the track was out, and in the other direction Dry Bed Arroyo was threatening. Banneker reported progress to the lodge and got back, soaked and happy. Io was thoughtful and content.
Late that afternoon the station-agent had a shock which jarred him quite out of his complacent security. Denny, the operator at Stanwood, wired, saying:
Party here anxious to get through to Manzanita quick. Could auto make upper desert?
No (clicked Banneker in response). Describe party.
The answer came back confirming his suspicion:
Thin, nice-spoken, wears goggles, smokes cork-tips. Arrived Five from Angelica held here.
Tell impossible by any route (instructed Banneker). Wire result.
An hour later came the reply:
Won’t try to-night. Probably horse to-morrow.
Here was a problem, indeed, fit to chill the untimely self-congratulations of Banneker. Should the reporter come in—and come he would if it were humanly possible, by Banneker’s estimate of him—it would be by the only route which gave exit to the west. On the other side the flooded arroyo cut off escape. To try to take Io out through the forest, practically trackless, in that weather, or across the channeled desert, would be too grave a risk. To all intents and purposes they were marooned on an island with no reasonable chance of exit—except! To Banneker’s feverishly searching mind reverted a local legend. Taking a chance on missing some emergency call, he hurried over to the village and interviewed, through the persuasive interpretation of sundry drinks, an aged and bearded wreck whose languid and chipped accents spoke of a life originally far alien to the habitudes of the Sick Coyote where he was fatalistically awaiting his final attack of delirium tremens.
Banneker returned from that interview with a map upon which had been scrawled a few words in shaky, scholarly writing.
“But one doesn’t say it’s safe, mind you,” had warned the shell of Lionel Streatham in his husky pipe. “It’s only as a sporting offer that one would touch it. And the courses may have changed in seven years.”
Denny wired in the morning that the inquiring traveler had set out from Manzanita, unescorted, on horseback, adding the prediction that he would have a hell of a trip, even if he got through at all. Late that afternoon Gardner arrived at the station, soaked, hollow-eyed, stiff, exhausted, and cheerful. He shook hands with the agent.
“How do you like yourself in print?” he inquired.
“Pretty well,” answered Banneker. “It read better than I expected.”
“It always does, until you get old in the business. How would you like a New York job on the strength of it?”
Banneker stared. “You mean that I could get on a paper just by writing that?”
“I didn’t say so. Though I’ve known poorer stuff land more experienced men.”
“More experienced; that’s the point, isn’t it? I’ve had none at all.”
“So much the better. A metropolitan paper prefers to take a man fresh and train him to its own ways. There’s your advantage if you can show natural ability. And you can.”
“I see,” muttered Banneker thoughtfully.
“Where does Miss Van Arsdale live?” asked the reporter without the smallest change of tone.
“What do you want to see Miss Van Arsdale for?” returned the other, his instantly defensive manner betraying him to the newspaper man.
“You know as well as I do,” smiled Gardner.
“Miss Van Arsdale has been ill. She’s a good deal of a recluse. She doesn’t like to see people.”
“Does her visitor share that eccentricity?”
Banneker made no reply.
“See here, Banneker,” said the reporter earnestly; “I’d like to know why you’re against me in this thing.”
“What thing?” fenced the agent.
“My search for Io Welland.”
“Who is Io Welland, and what are you after her for?” asked Banneker steadily.
“Apart from being the young lady that you’ve been escorting around the local scenery,” returned the imperturbable journalist, “she’s the most brilliant and interesting figure in the younger set of the Four Hundred. She’s a newspaper beauty. She’s copy. She’s news. And when she gets into a railroad wreck and disappears from the world for weeks, and her supposed fiancé, the heir to a dukedom, makes an infernal ass of himself over it all and practically gives himself away to the papers, she’s big news.”
“And if she hasn’t done any of these things,” retorted Banneker, drawing upon some of Camilla Van Arsdale’s wisdom, brought to bear on the case, “she’s libel, isn’t she?”
“Hardly libel. But she isn’t safe news until she’s identified. You see, I’m playing an open game with you. I’m here to identify her, with half a dozen newspaper photos. Want to see ’em?”
“No, thank you.”
“Not interested? Are you going to take me over to Miss Van Arsdale’s?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why should I? It’s no part of my business as an employee of the road.”
“As to that, I’ve got a letter from the Division Superintendent asking you to further my inquiry in any possible way. Here it is.”
Banneker took and read the letter. While not explicit, it was sufficiently direct.
“That’s official, isn’t it?” said Gardner mildly.
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“And this is official,” added Banneker calmly. “The company can go to hell. Tell that to the D.S. with my compliments, will you?”
“Certainly not. I don’t want to get you into trouble. I like you. But I’ve got to land this story. If you won’t take me to the place, I’ll find some one in the village that will. You can’t prevent my going there, you know.”
“Can’t I?” Banneker’s voice had grown low and cold. A curious light shone in his eyes. There was an ugly flicker of smile on his set mouth.
The reporter rose from the chair into which he had wetly slumped. He walked over to face his opponent who was standing at his desk. Banneker, lithe, powerful, tense, was half again as large as the other; obviously more muscular, better-conditioned, more formidable in every way. But there is about a man, singly and selflessly intent upon his job in hand, an inner potency impossible to obstruct. Banneker recognized it; inwardly admitted, too, the unsoundness of the swift, protective rage rising within, himself.
“I don’t propose to make trouble for you or to have trouble with you,” said the reporter evenly. “But I’m going to Miss Van Arsdale’s unless I’m shot on the way there.”
“That’s all right,” returned the agent, mastering himself. “I beg your pardon for threatening you. But you’ll have to find your own way. Will you put up here for the night, again?”
“Thanks. Glad to, if it won’t trouble you. See you later.”
“Perhaps not. I’m turning in early. I’ll leave the shack unlocked for you.”
Gardner opened the outer door and was blown back into the station by an explosive gust of soaking wind.
“On second thought,” said he, “I don’t think I’ll try to go out there this evening. The young lady can’t very well get away to-night, unless she has wings, and it’s pretty damp for flying. Can I get dinner over at the village?”
“Such as it is. I’ll go over with you.”
At the entrance to the unclean little hotel they parted, Banneker going further to find Mindle the “teamer,” whom he could trust and with whom he held conference, brief and very private. They returned to the station together in the gathering darkness, got a hand car onto the track, and loaded it with a strange burden, after which Mindle disappeared into the storm with the car while Banneker wired to Stanwood an imperative call for a relief for next day even though the substitute should have to walk the twenty-odd miles. Thereafter he made, from the shack, a careful selection of food with special reference to economy of bulk, fastened it deftly beneath his poncho, saddled his horse, and set out for the Van Arsdale lodge. The night was pitch-black when he entered the area of the pines, now sonorous with the rush of the upper winds.
Io saw the gleam of his flashlight and ran to the door to meet him.
“Are you ready?” he asked briefly.
“I can be in fifteen minutes.” She turned away, asking no questions.
“Dress warmly,” he said. “It’s an all-night trip. By the way, can you swim?”
“For hours at a time.”
Camilla Van Arsdale entered the room. “Are you taking her away, Ban? Where?”
“To Miradero, on the Southwestern and Sierra.”
“But that’s insanity,” protested the other. “Sixty miles, isn’t it? And over trailless desert.”
“All of that. But we’re not going across country. We’re going by water.”
“By water? Ban, you are out of your mind. Where is there any waterway?”
“Dry Bed Arroyo. It’s running bank-full. My boat is waiting there.”
“But it will be dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Io, you mustn’t.”
“I’ll go,” said the girl quietly, “if Ban says so.”
“There’s no other way out. And it isn’t so dangerous if you’re used to a boat. Old Streatham made it seven years ago in the big flood. Did it in a bark canoe on a hundred-dollar bet. The Arroyo takes you out to the Little Bowleg and that empties into the Rio Solano, and there you are! I’ve got his map.”
“Map?” cried Miss Van Arsdale. “What use is a map when you can’t see your hand before your face?”
“Give this wind a chance,” answered Banneker. “Within two hours the clouds will have broken and we’ll have moonlight to go by.... The Angelica Herald man is over at the hotel now,” he added.
“May I take a suitcase?” asked Io.
“Of course. I’ll strap it to your pony if you’ll get it ready. Miss Camilla, what shall we do with the pony? Hitch him under the bridge?”
“If you’re determined to take her, I’ll ride over with you and bring him back. Io, think! Is it worth the risk? Let the reporter come. I can keep him away from you.”
A brooding expression was in the girl’s deep eyes as she turned them, not to the speaker, but to Banneker. “No,” she said. “I’ve got to get away sooner or later. I’d rather go this way. It’s more—it’s more of a pattern with all the rest; better than stupidly waving good-bye from the rear of a train.”
“But the danger.”
“Che sará, sará,” returned Io lightly. “I’ll trust him to take care of me.”
While Ban went out to prepare the horses with the aid of Pedro, strictly enjoined to secrecy, the two women got Io’s few things together.
“I can’t thank you,” said the girl, looking up as she snapped the lock of her case. “It simply isn’t a case for thanking. You’ve done too much for me.”
The older woman disregarded it. “How much are you hurting Ban?” she said, with musing eyes fixed on the dim and pure outline of the girlish face.
“I? Hurt him?”
“Of course he won’t realize it until you’ve gone. Then I’m afraid to think what is coming to him.”
“And I’m afraid to think what is coming to me,” replied the girl, very low.
“Ah, you!” retorted her hostess, dismissing that consideration with contemptuous lightness. “You have plenty of compensations, plenty of resources.”
“Hasn’t he?”
“Perhaps. Up to now. What will he do when he wakes up to an empty world?”
“Write, won’t he? And then the world won’t be empty.”
“He’ll think it so. That is why I’m sorry for him.”
“Won’t you be sorry a little for me?” pleaded the girl. “Anyway, for the part of me that I’m leaving here? Perhaps it’s the very best of me.”
Miss Van Arsdale shook her head. “Oh, no! A pleasantly vivid dream of changed and restful things. That’s all. Your waking will be only a sentimental and perfumed regret—a sachet-powder sorrow.”
“You’re bitter.”
“I don’t want him hurt,” protested the other. “Why did you come here? What should a girl like you, feverish and sensation-loving and artificial, see in a boy like Ban to charm you?”
“Ah, don’t you understand? It’s just because my world has been too dressed up and painted and powdered that I feel the charm of—of—well, of ease of existence. He’s as easy as an animal. There’s something about him—you must have felt it—sort of impassioned sense of the gladness of life; when he has those accesses he’s like a young god, or a faun. But he doesn’t know his own power. At those times he might do anything.”
She shivered a little and her lids drooped over the luster of her dreaming eyes.
“And you want to tempt him out of this to a world where he would be a wretched misfit,” accused the older woman.
“Do I? No; I think I don’t. I think I’d rather hold him in my mind as he is here: a happy eremite; no, a restrained pagan. Oh, it’s foolish to seek definitions for him. He isn’t definable. He’s Ban....”
“And when you get back into the world, what will you do, I wonder?”
“I won’t send for him, if that’s what you mean.”
“But what will you do, I wonder?”
“I wonder,” repeated Io somberly.