Life seemed to have moved sluggishly in the basin, save in the increase of the tribe. Six young Cramers now walked upright, though the smallest walked insecurely and frequently fell down and lay squalling with its eyes shut and its nose wrinkled until one of the older children picked it up and dusted it off, remonstrating the while in Pahute. The seventh was not yet old enough to ride the well-upholstered hip of Gladys, but wailed in a cradle which some one must be incessantly rocking.
Gladys was more slatternly than ever she had been, and her vacuous grin had lost a tooth. Anita had aged terribly, Rawley thought. She moved slowly, with a long stick for a staff, and her eyes held a dumb misery he could not face. Nevada informed him that Grandmother had not been very well, lately, although there was nothing wrong, particularly.
“She doesn’t sleep at all, it seems to me,” Nevada detailed. “Often she’s up and prowling along the river bank in the middle of the night, and I have to go and lead her back. I think she’s getting childish. She will sit and watch me by the hour, when I’m working, but she doesn’t seem to want me to talk to her. She just sits and looks, the way she’s been looking at you.”
Nevada went away then to some work which she said was important, and Rawley wandered down to the river bank. In a few minutes he heard a sound behind him and turned, hoping that Nevada had yielded to his unspoken desire and was coming to join him.
But it was Anita, walking slowly down the uneven pathway, planting her crude staff ahead of her in the trail and pulling herself to it with a weary, laborious movement. Her gray bangs hung straight down to her eyelids. Her wrinkled old face was impassive, her eyes dumb. Rawley bit his lip suddenly, thinking of his Grandfather King sitting, “a hunk of meat in the wheel chair.” Life, it seemed to him, had dealt very harshly with these two. He was no longer swayed by the stern prejudice of Johnny Buffalo. He did not believe that Anita, in her lovely youth, had been merely a whimsy of love. His grandfather had loved her, had meant to return to her. He did not believe that King, of the Mounted, would have loved one who loved many. The King pride would not have permitted that.
Anita came up to him and leaned hard upon her stick, her eyes turned dully upon the river. Never before had she sought him out; rather had she avoided him, staring at him with a look he interpreted as resentment. She looked so old, so infinitely tired with life, and her eyes went to the river as if it alone could know the things she had buried in her heart, long ago when she was a slim young thing, all fire and life.
With a sudden impulse of tenderness he put his arm around her, leading her to the flat rock and seating her there as gallantly as if she were Nevada, whom he loved. It was what his grandfather would have done. Rawley felt suddenly convicted of a fault, almost of a sin; the sin of omission. Here was the love of his grandfather’s youth, the mother of his grandfather’s first-born. And because she was old and fat, because the primitive blood had triumphed and she had yielded to environment and slipped back into Indian ways, he had snobbishly held himself aloof. He had ignored her claim upon his kindness. Had her beauty remained with her, he told himself harshly, his attitude had been altogether different. Now he wanted to make up to her, somehow, for his selfish oversight. He sat down beside her and patted her hand,—for the Anita who had been beautiful, the Anita whom King, of the Mounted, had loved.
“You love—my girl—Nevada?” The old squaw spoke abruptly, though her voice held to a dead level of impassivity.
“How did you know?” Rawley took away his hand.
“I know. I have seen love—in eyes—blue. Eyes like your eyes.”
“Nevada doesn’t care anything about me, Anita.”
At the word, the old squaw turned her head and stared at him fixedly. “You call that name. Where you know that name? Jess, he call me Annie.”
Rawley flushed, but there was no help for it now—or, yes, there was Johnny—
“Johnny Buffalo called you Anita,” he parried.
Anita shook her head slowly. “Jawge—your gran’fadder—he call me Anita too,” she said wistfully. “You ver’ much—like Jawge. I firs’ think—you are ghos’ of Jawge, when you come.”
“Grandfather was crazy about you,” slipped off Rawley’s tongue. “He spoke of you in his diary—a book where he wrote down things he did—things he thought.”
Anita stared down at the river.
“You tell me,” she commanded tersely. “All those things—Jawge think—about—Anita.”
Rawley’s hand went out and closed again over her wrinkled, work-hardened knuckles.
“The first was when he came up to El Dorado on the Esmeralda in ’66. He was leaning over the rail, watching the miners crowd down to the landing. He wrote, ‘I saw a young girl—I think she is Spanish. She has the velvet eyes and the rose blooming in her cheeks. She’s beautiful. Not more than sixteen and graceful as a fairy.’ What more he wrote of you I don’t know. He cut the pages from the book so no one could read it.”
Anita raised a knotted, brown hand and smoothed her bangs, tucking them neatly under her red kerchief.
“I was little,” she said complacently. “Ver’ beautiful. Every-body was—crazy—about—me.” She halted, choosing the best English words she knew. “I was—good girl. I love—nobody. I jus’ laugh all time—when them so’jers make the love. Then I see—Jawge—my Sah-geant King. He is king to me. Tall—big—strong—all time laughing—making love with blue eyes—like you—all time make love—with eyes—to Nevada. I know them eyes—I have lived—to look—in them eyes.”
“I don’t do anything of the kind,” Rawley protested, confusion crimsoning his face. “I’ve always tried—”
“Eyes like them eyes—no tell lies. Woman eyes see—things they tell. Jawge—he write more?”
“Most of it was cut from the book. He called you ‘el gusto de mi corazon,’ and his ‘dulce corazon.’ Do you know—?”
Beneath his palm Anita’s hand was trembling. She pulled it free and lifted it to her face, her withered fingers wiping the tears that were slipping down her wrinkled cheeks. Rawley could have bitten his tongue in two. Awkwardly he patted her on one huge, rounded shoulder.
Like a lonesome dog, the old woman whimpered behind her brown palm, from beneath which a tear sometimes escaped and splashed upon her calico wrapper. Rawley sat silent, abashed before this forlorn grief over a romance fifty years dead.
“Now I love Nevada, Peter.” She mastered her tears and became again impassive. “You leave me—Nevada? Lil time—I want Nevada. I die—then you can love—many years. You do that?”
“Of course. I promised Peter, a long time ago. But it doesn’t matter, anyway. Nevada doesn’t care a rap about me.”
The old woman looked at him stolidly.
“You not tell Nevada—you not Peter’s boy,” she said. “Nevada think that. You not tell Nevada—that’s a lie. You tell Nevada, I kill myself.”
“I’ve no intention of telling Nevada,” Rawley said, chilled by her manner. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“You not come—for Nevada? You not think, marry Nevada—take Nevada ’way off, I no see any more?” Anita peered into his face.
“No. I came to see Peter. About the dam.”
Anita took some time over this statement. Then she rose stiffly and hobbled away, leaving Rawley to stare morosely into the river.