Burning Daylight

by Jack London

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Three days later, Daylight rode to Berkeley in his red car. It was forthe last time, for on the morrow the big machine passed into another'spossession. It had been a strenuous three days, for his smash had beenthe biggest the panic had precipitated in California. The papers hadbeen filled with it, and a great cry of indignation had gone up fromthe very men who later found that Daylight had fully protected theirinterests. It was these facts, coming slowly to light, that gave riseto the widely repeated charge that Daylight had gone insane. It wasthe unanimous conviction among business men that no sane man couldpossibly behave in such fashion. On the other hand, neither hisprolonged steady drinking nor his affair with Dede became public, sothe only conclusion attainable was that the wild financier from Alaskahad gone lunatic. And Daylight had grinned and confirmed the suspicionby refusing to see the reporters.

  He halted the automobile before Dede's door, and met her with his samerushing tactics, enclosing her in his arms before a word could beuttered. Not until afterward, when she had recovered herself from himand got him seated, did he begin to speak.

  "I've done it," he announced. "You've seen the newspapers, of course.I'm plumb cleaned out, and I've just called around to find out what dayyou feel like starting for Glen Ellen. It'll have to be soon, for it'sreal expensive living in Oakland these days. My board at the hotel isonly paid to the end of the week, and I can't afford to stay afterthat. And beginning with to-morrow I've got to use the street cars,and they sure eat up the nickels."

  He paused, and waited, and looked at her. Indecision and troubleshowed on her face. Then the smile he knew so well began to grow onher lips and in her eyes, until she threw back her head and laughed inthe old forthright boyish way.

  "When are those men coming to pack for me?" she asked.

  And again she laughed and simulated a vain attempt to escape hisbearlike arms.

  "Dear Elam," she whispered; "dear Elam." And of herself, for the firsttime, she kissed him.

  She ran her hand caressingly through his hair.

  "Your eyes are all gold right now," he said. "I can look in them andtell just how much you love me."

  "They have been all gold for you, Elam, for a long time. I think, onour little ranch, they will always be all gold."

  "Your hair has gold in it, too, a sort of fiery gold." He turned herface suddenly and held it between his hands and looked long into hereyes. "And your eyes were full of gold only the other day, when yousaid you wouldn't marry me."

  She nodded and laughed.

  "You would have your will," she confessed. "But I couldn't be a partyto such madness. All that money was yours, not mine. But I was lovingyou all the time, Elam, for the great big boy you are, breaking thethirty-million toy with which you had grown tired of playing. And whenI said no, I knew all the time it was yes. And I am sure that my eyeswere golden all the time. I had only one fear, and that was that youwould fail to lose everything. Because, dear, I knew I should marryyou anyway, and I did so want just you and the ranch and Bob and Wolfand those horse-hair bridles. Shall I tell you a secret? As soon asyou left, I telephoned the man to whom I sold Mab."

  She hid her face against his breast for an instant, and then looked athim again, gladly radiant.

  "You see, Elam, in spite of what my lips said, my mind was made upthen. I--I simply had to marry you. But I was praying you wouldsucceed in losing everything. And so I tried to find what had becomeof Mab. But the man had sold her and did not know what had become ofher. You see, I wanted to ride with you over the Glen Ellen hills, onMab and you on Bob, just as I had ridden with you through the Piedmonthills."

  The disclosure of Mab's whereabouts trembled on Daylight's lips, but heforbore.

  "I'll promise you a mare that you'll like just as much as Mab," he said.

  But Dede shook her head, and on that one point refused to be comforted.

  "Now, I've got an idea," Daylight said, hastening to get theconversation on less perilous ground. "We're running away from cities,and you have no kith nor kin, so it don't seem exactly right that weshould start off by getting married in a city. So here's the idea:I'll run up to the ranch and get things in shape around the house andgive the caretaker his walking-papers. You follow me in a couple ofdays, coming on the morning train. I'll have the preacher fixed andwaiting. And here's another idea. You bring your riding togs in a suitcase. And as soon as the ceremony's over, you can go to the hotel andchange. Then out you come, and you find me waiting with a couple ofhorses, and we'll ride over the landscape so as you can see theprettiest parts of the ranch the first thing. And she's sure pretty,that ranch. And now that it's settled, I'll be waiting for you at themorning train day after to-morrow."

  Dede blushed as she spoke.

  "You are such a hurricane."

  "Well, ma'am," he drawled, "I sure hate to burn daylight. And you and Ihave burned a heap of daylight. We've been scandalously extravagant.We might have been married years ago."

  Two days later, Daylight stood waiting outside the little Glen Ellenhotel. The ceremony was over, and he had left Dede to go inside andchange into her riding-habit while he brought the horses. He held themnow, Bob and Mab, and in the shadow of the watering-trough Wolf lay andlooked on. Already two days of ardent California sun had touched withnew fires the ancient bronze in Daylight's face. But warmer still wasthe glow that came into his cheeks and burned in his eyes as he sawDede coming out the door, riding-whip in hand, clad in the familiarcorduroy skirt and leggings of the old Piedmont days. There was warmthand glow in her own face as she answered his gaze and glanced on pasthim to the horses. Then she saw Mab. But her gaze leaped back to theman.

  "Oh, Elam!" she breathed.

  It was almost a prayer, but a prayer that included a thousand meaningsDaylight strove to feign sheepishness, but his heart was singing toowild a song for mere playfulness. All things had been in the naming ofhis name--reproach, refined away by gratitude, and all compounded ofjoy and love.

  She stepped forward and caressed the mare, and again turned and lookedat the man, and breathed:--

  "Oh, Elam!"

  And all that was in her voice was in her eyes, and in them Daylightglimpsed a profundity deeper and wider than any speech or thought--thewhole vast inarticulate mystery and wonder of sex and love.

  Again he strove for playfulness of speech, but it was too great amoment for even love fractiousness to enter in. Neither spoke. Shegathered the reins, and, bending, Daylight received her foot in hishand. She sprang, as he lifted and gained the saddle. The next momenthe was mounted and beside her, and, with Wolf sliding along ahead inhis typical wolf-trot, they went up the hill that led out of town--twolovers on two chestnut sorrel steeds, riding out and away to honeymoonthrough the warm summer day. Daylight felt himself drunken as withwine. He was at the topmost pinnacle of life. Higher than this no mancould climb nor had ever climbed. It was his day of days, hislove-time and his mating-time, and all crowned by this virginalpossession of a mate who had said "Oh, Elam," as she had said it, andlooked at him out of her soul as she had looked.

  They cleared the crest of the hill, and he watched the joy mount in herface as she gazed on the sweet, fresh land. He pointed out the groupof heavily wooded knolls across the rolling stretches of ripe grain.

  "They're ours," he said. "And they're only a sample of the ranch.Wait till you see the big canon. There are 'coons down there, and backhere on the Sonoma there are mink. And deer!--why, that mountain'ssure thick with them, and I reckon we can scare up a mountain-lion ifwe want to real hard. And, say, there's a little meadow--well, I ain'tgoing to tell you another word. You wait and see for yourself."

  They turned in at the gate, where the road to the clay-pit crossed thefields, and both sniffed with delight as the warm aroma of the ripe hayrose in their nostrils. As on his first visit, the larks were utteringtheir rich notes and fluttering up before the horses until the woodsand the flower-scattered glades
were reached, when the larks gave wayto blue jays and woodpeckers.

  "We're on our land now," he said, as they left the hayfield behind."It runs right across country over the roughest parts. Just you waitand see."

  As on the first day, he turned aside from the clay-pit and workedthrough the woods to the left, passing the first spring and jumping thehorses over the ruined remnants of the stake-and-rider fence. Fromhere on, Dede was in an unending ecstasy. By the spring that gurgledamong the redwoods grew another great wild lily, bearing on its slenderstalk the prodigious outburst of white waxen bells. This time he didnot dismount, but led the way to the deep canon where the stream hadcut a passage among the knolls. He had been at work here, and a steepand slippery horse trail now crossed the creek, so they rode up beyond,through the somber redwood twilight, and, farther on, through a tangledwood of oak and madrono. They came to a small clearing of severalacres, where the grain stood waist high.

  "Ours," Daylight said.

  She bent in her saddle, plucked a stalk of the ripe grain, and nibbledit between her teeth.

  "Sweet mountain hay," she cried. "The kind Mab likes."

  And throughout the ride she continued to utter cries and ejaculationsof surprise and delight.

  "And you never told me all this!" she reproached him, as they lookedacross the little clearing and over the descending slopes of woods tothe great curving sweep of Sonoma Valley.

  "Come," he said; and they turned and went back through the forestshade, crossed the stream and came to the lily by the spring.

  Here, also, where the way led up the tangle of the steep hill, he hadcut a rough horse trail. As they forced their way up the zigzags, theycaught glimpses out and down through the sea of foliage. Yet alwayswere their farthest glimpses stopped by the closing vistas of green,and, yet always, as they climbed, did the forest roof arch overhead,with only here and there rifts that permitted shattered shafts ofsunlight to penetrate. And all about them were ferns, a score ofvarieties, from the tiny gold-backs and maidenhair to huge brakes sixand eight feet tall.

  Below them, as they mounted, they glimpsed great gnarled trunks andbranches of ancient trees, and above them were similar great gnarledbranches.

  Dede stopped her horse and sighed with the beauty of it all.

  "It is as if we are swimmers," she said, "rising out of a deep pool ofgreen tranquillity. Up above is the sky and the sun, but this is apool, and we are fathoms deep."

  They started their horses, but a dog-tooth violet, shouldering amongstthe maidenhair, caught her eye and made her rein in again.

  They cleared the crest and emerged from the pool as if into anotherworld, for now they were in the thicket of velvet-trunked youngmadronos and looking down the open, sun-washed hillside, across thenodding grasses, to the drifts of blue and white nemophilae thatcarpeted the tiny meadow on either side the tiny stream. Dede clappedher hands.

  "It's sure prettier than office furniture," Daylight remarked.

  "It sure is," she answered.

  And Daylight, who knew his weakness in the use of the particular wordsure, knew that she had repeated it deliberately and with love.

  They crossed the stream and took the cattle track over the low rockyhill and through the scrub forest of manzanita, till they emerged onthe next tiny valley with its meadow-bordered streamlet.

  "If we don't run into some quail pretty soon, I'll be surprised some,"Daylight said.

  And as the words left his lips there was a wild series of explosivethrumming as the old quail arose from all about Wolf, while the youngones scuttled for safety and disappeared miraculously before thespectators' very eyes.

  He showed her the hawk's nest he had found in the lightning-shatteredtop of the redwood, and she discovered a wood-rat's nest which he hadnot seen before. Next they took the old wood-road and came out on thedozen acres of clearing where the wine grapes grew in the wine-coloredvolcanic soil. Then they followed the cow-path through more woods andthickets and scattered glades, and dropped down the hillside to wherethe farm-house, poised on the lip of the big canon, came into view onlywhen they were right upon it.

  Dede stood on the wide porch that ran the length of the house whileDaylight tied the horses. To Dede it was very quiet. It was the dry,warm, breathless calm of California midday. All the world seemeddozing. From somewhere pigeons were cooing lazily. With a deep sigh ofsatisfaction, Wolf, who had drunk his fill at all the streams along theway, dropped down in the cool shadow of the porch. She heard thefootsteps of Daylight returning, and caught her breath with a quickintake. He took her hand in his, and, as he turned the door-knob, felther hesitate. Then he put his arm around her; the door swung open, andtogether they passed in.