On a certain day in June, Rawley left his car at Nelson and started afoot down the trail to Cramers. Although the war was over he was still in the service of the government. A bit leaner, a bit harder-muscled, steadier of eye and of purpose, with a broader vision, too. Rawley had been making good.
After more than two years away from this particular point on the Colorado, old emotions came sweeping back upon him as he caught sight of this bold peak or that wild gorge, familiar landmarks along the trail. Halfway to Cramers, he turned aside and followed a dim trail that went climbing tortuously up a narrow canyon and so reached a bold hillside where the cabin of Johnny Buffalo squatted snugly beside the spring.
Johnny was absent,—probably still hunting for the gold, Rawley thought, as he grinned to himself. After so long a time spent wholly in service to others, with the weal of his country always in the front of his mind, the search for his grandfather’s gold mine seemed a shade less important than it had been two years ago. He had the Bible and the old diary with him, but that was partly to please Johnny Buffalo and because he thought the books might be interesting to Peter. For himself he had not much hope of finding the cleft in the rocks; for Johnny Buffalo the quest would be a wholesome object in life. Johnny Buffalo would continue the search from no selfish motive, but in a zeal for Rawley’s welfare. There was a difference, Rawley thought, in the way you go at a thing.
He left a note for Johnny on the table and went on down the hill and back into the trail to the river. At the edge of the basin he stopped and surveyed the somewhat squalid huddle of buildings, wondering why it was he felt almost as if this were a home-coming. Perhaps it was a fondness for his Uncle Peter, and because Nevada had kept the place fresh in his mind with the letters she had written him.
Two strange dogs were added to the hysterically barking pack that rushed out at him as he drew near. Five children instead of four grouped themselves and stared. Gladys appeared in the open doorway of her cabin; a fatter Gladys, with another baby riding astride her hip. The tribe of Cramer was waxing strong.
He was sure that Gladys recognized him, but with the stolidity of the race which dominated her nature, she merely stared and gave no sign of welcome. Rawley kicked a dog or two that seemed over-serious in their intentions and kept straight on. When he reached the hard-trodden zone immediately before the cabin, he lifted his hat and spoke to Gladys.
“Hullo,” she grinned fatuously. “We don’t see you for a long time.”
Anita came to the door, looked out and nodded with an imperturbable gravity that always disconcerted Rawley. He asked for Peter and Nevada. Peter was at work, Gladys told him vaguely. And the clicking of a typewriter in the rock dugout told him where Nevada might be found.
Rawley was amazed, almost appalled at the agitation with which he faced her. In the press of his work, of meeting strange people and seeing strange places, he had thought the image of Nevada was blurred; a charming personality dimmed by distance and the urge of other thoughts, other interests. But when he held her hand, looked up into her eyes as she stood on the step of the porch, he had a curious sensation of having been poignantly hungry for her all this while. He found himself fighting a desire to take her in his arms and kiss her red mouth that was smiling down at him. He had to remind himself that he hadn’t the right to do that; that Nevada had never given him the faintest excuse to believe that he would ever be privileged to kiss her.
He sat in the homemade chair on the porch and, because looking at Nevada disturbed him unaccountably, he stared down at the river while they talked. He wondered if Nevada really felt as unconcerned over his coming as she sounded and looked. She was friendly, frankly pleased to see him,—and he resented the fact that she could speak so openly of her pleasure. She could have said to any acquaintance the things she said to him, he told himself savagely; she was like all her letters, friendly, unconstrained, impersonal. It amazed him now to remember that he had been delighted with her letters. If at first he had wished them more diffident, as if she felt the sweet possibilities of their friendship, he had come to thank the good Lord for one sensible girl in the world. Nevada had no nonsense, he frequently reminded himself. She didn’t expect the mushy love-making flavor in their correspondence. He could feel sure of Nevada.
Now it maddened him to feel so sure of her; so sure of her composed friendliness that left no little cranny for love to creep in. She liked him,—in the same way that she liked Peter. He could even believe that she liked him almost as well as she liked Peter; that he stood second in her affections before all the world. Covertly he studied her whenever the conversation made a glance into her eyes quite natural and expected. She met each glance with smiling unconcern,—the most disheartening manner a lover can face.
“You’ve grown, Cousin Rawley,” she said. “Yes, I’ve got your home name on my tongue—from Johnny Buffalo, I suppose. Well, you have grown. I don’t mean your body alone, though you have filled out and your shoulders look broader and stronger, somehow, even though you may not weigh a pound more. But you’ve grown mentally. There’s a strength in your face—an added strength. And your eyes are so much different. You keep me wondering, in between our talk, what is in your mind—back of those eyes. That’s a sure sign that a great, strong soul is looking out. It’s been an awful two years, hasn’t it?”
“It has,” Rawley answered quietly, his mind reverting swiftly to several close squeaks from the enemy at home.
“Two years ago you’d have said ‘You bet!’ just like that. ‘It has’ wouldn’t have seemed expressive enough. That’s what I’m driving at. Now you can just say ‘It has’, and something back of your eyes and your voice gives the punch. Cousin Rawley, you can cut out all exclamatory phrases from now on, if you like. The punch is there. I’ve seen other men back from service. One or two had that same reserve power. The others were merely full of talk about how they won the war. It’s funny.”
Rawley did not think it was funny. She had lifted his heart to his throat with her flattering analysis and had dropped it as a child drops a toy for some fresher interest. He was all this and all that,—and she had seen other men return with the same look. Right there Rawley silently indulged himself in his strongest exclamatory phrase in his vocabulary.
Nevada had turned her head to call something in Indian, replying to her grandmother’s shrill voice. She did not see what lay back of Rawley’s eyes at that moment,—worse luck.
“Well, I wanted to get in and help. Gladys and Grandmother knitted sweaters and socks, and so did I. I wanted to be a Red Cross nurse—was there a girl in America who didn’t?—but Uncle Peter wouldn’t let me go. He said I was needed here, to help hold things together. But I’ll tell you what I did do. I went into the old diggings and mined. I found a stringer or two they hadn’t bothered with, and I mined for dear life and sent every last color to the Red Cross. Uncle Peter was helping, too—I mean giving all he could—but I wanted to do something my own self. And do you know, Cousin Rawley, Grandmother got right in with me and shoveled gravel to beat the cars! I didn’t write you about it—it seemed so little to do. And besides, I didn’t realize then the importance of living up to you. But with that—that Sphinxlike strength you’ve acquired, I’ll just inform you that your Injuns were on the job.”
“I knew it, anyway. And you did more good than your personal service in hospital could have done. It took money to keep the nurses going that were on the job, remember.”
“Two years ago,” mused Nevada, “you’d have called me on that Sphinx remark and for calling myself Injun. Yes, you have grown. You can keep to the essential point much better than before. Well, and how is Johnny Buffalo? I haven’t seen him for a week.”
“Nor I for over two years. I left a note on his table. Nevada, how long has he had that wheel chair of Grandfather’s standing across the table from his own?”
Nevada looked at him studyingly until Rawley, for all his vaunted strength, found his eyes sliding away from the directness of her gaze.
“Cousin Rawley, if you have grown hard, you won’t sympathize with Johnny Buffalo, or understand. For more than a year, now, he has believed that his sergeant comes and sits in that chair to keep him company. He really believes it. You mustn’t laugh at him, will you?”
Rawley was staring down at the always hurrying river. He said nothing.
“Just don’t laugh at Johnny,” Nevada urged. “And don’t argue with him. It’s a comfort to him to believe that. He doesn’t always keep the chair at the table. Sometimes it is by the window, or close to the fire when I go there. I think he moves it just as he would if your grandfather were living there with him.”
“That’s nonsense!” Rawley spoke sharply.
“It’s a comfort to Johnny Buffalo,” Nevada observed calmly. “I’m glad I saw you first, if that is your attitude. Johnny Buffalo has been brighter and happier, ever since he first thought he saw your grandfather walk in at the door and stand smiling down at him. He insists that his sergeant has his legs back, and that not a day passes but he comes and sits awhile with him. He—there’s something he won’t tell me, but he’s very anxious to see you, especially. I think it is something concerning your grandfather.”
“Oh, well, if it’s any comfort to the old man—” Rawley frowned, but his tone was yielding.
“Then do, please, act as if you believed your grandfather is there when Johnny says he is there! You needn’t pretend to see him. I never do. I always say I can’t see him; and then Johnny Buffalo tells me just how he looks, and what he says. It pleases him so! He will be sure to have his sergeant meet you, Cousin Rawley. And you must pretend to believe. He’s just waiting for you to come, so that something important can take place. He wouldn’t even tell Uncle Peter what it is.” Nevada leaned dangerously toward Rawley and laid a hand on his, apparently as unconscious of the possible results as is a child who picks up an explosive.
“Promise me, Cousin Rawley, that you’ll be careful not to hurt Johnny’s feelings.” Her hand closed warmly over his.
Rawley’s silence was not the stubbornness she seemed to think it. He was holding his teeth clamped together, trying to reach that quiet strength of soul she had naïvely credited him with possessing. He had tried to hold himself together, to refrain from making a fool of himself, and she had mistaken the effort for strength of soul, he thought with secret chagrin. Oh, as to Johnny Buffalo—
“I should feel very badly if I knew that I had hurt any one’s feelings,” he said. “Least of all, Johnny Buffalo. If he can be happy with an hallucination, I shall not disturb his happiness. But that means a mental letting go, according to my way of thinking. When he takes to having delusions, he’s weakening. I don’t like that. I can’t be with him, you see. I have a few days to myself, and then I must be on the job again.”
“Oh. I thought you would be here for awhile, anyway.”
Rawley tried to extract some comfort from Nevada’s tone of regret. But her regret was, after all, too candid to mean anything especial, he feared. He did not make the mistake of asking her if she really minded his going again so soon.
“How is the dam coming along?” That, at least, would be a sane subject, he hoped.
“Oh—it’s coming along. I believe they’re all across the river, to-day.”
She did not seem eager to pursue that subject, either. He began to wonder more than ever what was in her mind. Something she would not talk about, he knew. But presently she pulled herself out of her preoccupation.
“Can you imagine that sliding volume of water being halted in all its hurry and made to stop running to the gulf; thwarted in its whole purpose?” she asked dreamily. “I’ve watched it all my life. Sometimes it’s savage and boils along, with driftwood and débris of all kinds—I saw it at Needles, once, in flood time. It was awful. Then to think how three men have lived beside it and planned and worked for years and years, to stop all that tremendous movement and pen it up in the hills and—it seems to me that it’s like life. It goes hurrying along, too, for years and years, and its power is devastating and awful, sometimes. And then—after all, it’s so easy to stop it.”
“Yes,” said Rawley, his thoughts forced back again to things he would like to forget. “It’s easy to stop it. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “A man standing so close to me our shoulders rubbed was stopped in the middle of a sentence. We were talking. I asked him something about the mine. He was telling me. A cable broke, and the end of it snapped our way and caught him in the head. Life stopped right there, so far as he was concerned. He wasn’t given time to finish what he was saying.”
Nevada was staring at him, her lips parted, the easy flow of her thoughts halted by the horror of the picture he had drawn with a few quiet words. So few words—spoken so quietly, she thought fleetingly.
“I—didn’t know—right beside you! It might have—Weren’t you hurt?”
Rawley lifted a hand to his cheek, where a fine, white line was drawn.
“The tip of one strand flicked me there,” he said. “Made a nasty gash.”
The pallor in Nevada’s face deepened. She shivered as if a sudden chill had struck her skin.
“Well,” said Rawley, after a further five minutes of staring at the river. “I’ll be getting back. Tell Peter I’ll be down again. Or if he can take the time, have him come up, will you?”
“Why don’t you call him father?” Nevada asked him. “You aren’t ashamed of him, are you?”
Rawley looked at her, the truth on the tip of his tongue. But he closed his lips a bit more firmly, smiled down at her and shook his head.
“Peter and I understand each other,” he told her enigmatically and went away.
He quite agreed with Nevada. Even in times of peace, life could almost be called devastating.