by Zane Grey
“Where’d you go to school?”
“I didn’t go,” laughed Beryl. “My school was the woods.”
“Beryl, you had some schoolin’ those days,” corrected Aard. “Your mother was well educated. An’ I hope you don’t think your dad is an ignoramus.”
“But it was the four years at Roseburg,” explained Beryl. “I just ate up books alive. I didn’t get on well with the boys and girls. I was so homesick for Solitude that I nearly went crazy. So I studied.”
“You must have. I don’t think there’s anything I could teach you, unless of course how to fly-fish for steelhead,” said Keven teasingly.
“Why, Kev Bell, I could fish rings around you,” she replied vehemently. “Four years ago, too. You haven’t had any trout fishing all that while. I have—every summer. Don’t you think I haven’t learned a lot. But it’s to know where steelhead lie. That’s the secret. You never knew. You’d wade in like a cow drinking and scare all the trout out of their wits. That’s why I never would fish downstream behind you.”
“Wouldn’t you?” replied Keven feebly.
“No, I wouldn’t. You used to make me—till I just quit. Oh, you were a high-and-mighty fellow, Keven Bell. You wanted all the river to yourself. For three whole days I tagged after you, carrying your trout, and trying to raise one for myself. Then I rebelled and the fourth day we quarreled.”
“What day was it you showed me where the big trout lay, and I hooked him, and he dragged me a mile down the river?”
“That was that fourth day,” she replied demurely. And Keven, realizing this frank girl would tell anything and everything, desisted from further teasing. But it had come back to him—the memory of the delicious pleasure he had derived in that way. She spoke lingeringly of days as if they embodied whole endless, unforgettable summer months. And as such they began vaguely to return to Keven, engendering a pensive sadness.
“Aard, I can’t earn my keep by fishing,” said Keven. “Lord knows I’d love to fish the rest of my life away, with Beryl, along the river. But I must work. Have you work I can do or learn to do?”
“Wal, now, let me see,” replied Aard, puffing his pipe. He seemed never to hurry, to be disrupted out of his tranquillity. That was what the river and the forest had done for him. “You mustn’t pitch in too hard. I take it you’re not a well man. Let’s give nature a chance…. Kev, if you don’t mind my bein’ personal, haven’t you drunk pretty hard?”
“Not hard, as drinkers go. But too much for me,” admitted Keven. “I got in the habit not through love of liquor—for I really hate it—but to dull pain…. Never again, Aard. I am through with that forever.”
“Good. I was just goin’ to say you wouldn’t be welcome here at Solitude if you drank. An’ I reckon my daughter stands by that. How about it, Beryl?”
“Oh, Dad, don’t—don’t be hard upon Kev,” she replied. “I’d not say he wouldn’t be welcome under any circumstances. But we don’t need to speak of it. Kev has had a horrible ordeal. He is ill yet. He will get well here with us. Solitude needs no false stimulation.”
“Wal, I reckon Kev has got it in him, an’ if you can’t fetch it out, your Indian blood isn’t red any more.”
“Indian blood!” ejaculated Keven, astounded. “Has Beryl really Indian in her?”
“I’d say sometimes she’s all Indian,” rejoined the father. “But for real Indian blood, yes. Beryl’s mother’s mother was a half-breed. She had a child by an Englishman, a gold-huntin’ wanderer. So Beryl’s about one-eighth redskin, an’ sure comes honestly by her love of the wild. Kev, I was proud of that drop of blood in her mother. She was a woman. If I’d fetched her here to Solitude years sooner she’d be alive today…. Wal, Kev, to get back to talk of work,” resumed Aard. “Now, let’s see. The garden an’ the orchards—a man’s job all by themselves. There’s fence to repair an’ fence to build. These pesky deer can jump over the moon. One big buck comes down ’most every mornin’. He plays hell with my garden. I’d have shot him long ago but for Beryl. She says he knows her. Wal, I reckon you’d better knock him over one of these fine mornin’s an’ we’ll have some deer meat. We’ve got to kill pigs this fall. We’ve got a lot of shakes to split. There’s the winter firewood. An’ with you an’ Beryl sittin’ up at nights before the burnin’ logs—wal, it’ll take ten cords or more. An’ from now on to November we’ve got to ketch steelhead to smoke for winter use. That job of course you won’t like. Haw! Haw! … All of which is outside the big job. An’ that’s trappin’ fur.”
“By cracky, I don’t have to worry about plenty of work, but whether or not I can make good,” exclaimed Kev.
“Take things easy, Kev, We’re in no hurry here at Solitude,” said Aard.
“Dad, it’s good you added that. Kev might get a wrong idea. You should also have told him how from November till spring we are shut in.”
“Is the winter hard here?” asked Keven.
“Not down in the valley. The snow melts off the south slopes. But up on top it’s sure winter for a few months.”
“Kev, sometime soon I want you to help me order books for winter reading,” said Beryl. “We mustn’t tie trout flies all the time. Or sit before the blazing logs, holding hands, as Dad hinted.”
“I didn’t hint no such thing,” vowed Aard stoutly.
Keven caught the reiterated sense of long-past acceptance of him, in a close regard that was indeed thought-provoking, not to say agitating. What would Aard say if someone proved to him that Keven Bell had made love to his young daughter, had won her, and then had gone away to espouse another girl and to forget Solitude? That was a bitter, sickening pill for Keven to swallow.
He managed a laugh that was not wholly sincere. “Now if you’re going to poke fun at me I’d better say good night…. But, Aard, you and Beryl make me feel so deeply that I can’t even try to thank you. God knows I do. I was at the jumping-off place…. I hope I can come somewhere near your expectations.”
“Kev, I reckon you’ll pull out by the skin of your teeth,” replied Aard enigmatically.
Presently Keven leaned out of the window of his cabin to take a last look at the splendid black slopes, so still and wild, at the winding river, half in shadow and the other half shimmering under the stars. The river song seemed sadder. From the depths of the ravine came the soft flow of running water.
“I ought to want to fall in love with this strange girl,” he mused broodingly. “My God, I know I shall—if there’s man enough left in me.”
He shrunk from the thought because he had nothing to give, except gratitude, and like attributes of spirit. Materially perhaps no half-breed along the river was so poor as he. He must henceforth be dependent upon some kindly man like Aard, or else return to one of those hideous army hospitals. Anything, even death, would be preferable to that last. But to love this Beryl Aard—as only a ruined, broken, hopeless man, still young, could love—that would be the culmination of all his sorrows. Yet how could he help it? When in her presence, this mocking, introspective, moody Keven Bell turned into a shadow. And it was only when he left her that he came back to the one self he acknowledged as true. Then the pang seemed keener. Night was cruel to him. And that serpent of fire within coiled and gnawed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
KEVEN slept only after long hours that exhausted, and then specters visited his bedside. But daybreak at Solitude, the slow coloring of rose and blue, the gold creeping down, the changing, speaking river—these made the night with its horrors as if it had been naught.
That fought the demon of his unrest, gave him courage to undertake the one thing instinct told him was best. To move, to see, to feel, to smell, to hear, to eat—these faculties that had to do with his physical being, these senses that were opposed to thought and remembrance, to intellect and realism, to all that was not primitive, these pointed the only way. That morning Keven gasped for whisky. His mouth, his throat, his esophagus, his stomach, his intestines burned for the cooling draught that was an
infernal lie.
Beryl never guessed it. She was blind and feminine enough to pivot before him in her riding jeans and to ask gayly: “Do you like me—this way?”
Keven had a gay compliment ready, but though he saw her lithe and supple, sturdy as a boy, though with feminine contours, he could not thrill at her beauty or feel her appeal.
“Sam isn’t a stubborn mule,” said Beryl, when she led Keven out to the barn, where Aard had saddled the mule and a white horse. “But he falls asleep on the trail. And when he does he stops. So just give him a dig.”
They mounted and rode out of the clearing into the trail, with Beryl leading. At once it struck Keven that with the silence and shadow she changed from the lighthearted girl who had greeted him that morning into one indefinitely different. She talked no more. She seldom looked back. She touched the leaves, the pine needles, the mossy trunks, the lichened rocks, the ferns, with slow lingering, loving hand that was careful not to destroy. Her dark head had the poise of a listening deer.
Keven was grateful for this, while he wondered at it. For he was having a bad time of it. He saw all that Beryl touched. He saw the shadow-barred trail and the gold-splashed glade, the thick amber moss that covered the trees, the ferny, cool dell down which a sparkling streamlet leaped. And when they emerged where the trail ran along the open shore he saw Solitude in all its sublimity. The dark green slopes, the darker green river, sliding, whirling, foaming around the shaded bend, the grand bronze and fern-festooned cliffs, the black rocks that were sections of a splintered mountain—these seemed alive under the purple mantle of the lifting mist, gleaming in that subdued and supernatural light like the strange glow of low clouds before a storm. He saw all this spell of Solitude, but without delight or gladness.
Some few miles down the trail Keven made a twofold discovery: first that he was perceptibly tiring, and secondly that it would be wise not to risk going on to any place where drink was procurable. This was confessing a grave possibility. He hoped he would not utterly fail to be a man, but he did not wholly trust himself. Why should he imperil the resolve he had made? If he fell on this occasion he would never be quite the same again. He had the spirit to do anything for Beryl Aard, but he was now concerned with the physical man’s abnormal demands. So he planned an innocent ruse to deceive Beryl, without betraying his susceptible state.
Coming to an open glade in the forest, he called to Beryl and then slipped out of his saddle, to sit down upon the ground. She cried out in alarm, and leaping from her horse, she flew back to kneel beside him.
“Kev! Kev!” she cried, putting her arms about him.
It was all he could do to meet those eyes, wonderful with sudden betraying fear and love.
“Beryl, I’d better not try to go farther,” he said, smiling.
“Oh, is there anything the matter? You said you had not ridden for years…. A stitch in your side, maybe? That is terrible, I know. Or have the stirrups twisted your feet under too far? They’re heavy, and I was afraid they’d tire you.”
“Yes, I guess I’ve the stitch, all right, and the paralyzed feet, also a knee or two, and one hip. But that’s not all,” he said jokingly.
She studied him with most earnest gaze, and spoke with red lips quivering.
“Kev, you wouldn’t deceive me?”
“How—how do you mean?” he queried.
“You haven’t any organic trouble? Heart disease—or anything like?”
“No, I’m not as bad off as that,” replied Keven, glad he could tell the truth.
Suddenly she drew his face close against her breast and held it there tight. He felt the swell of her bosom, the throb of her heart.
“Oh, if anything happened—to you!”
She let go of him then, still pale of cheek and dark of eye, unaware of the betrayal in action and word, or utterly disregarding them.
“You rest, then we’ll go back,” she said.
“Is it all right for you to go on alone?”
“Yes. I often ride to Illahe.”
“Well, then, I’ll stay here and rest. You go. I’ll be okay when you get back. Will you buy me the things I need? Here is my list.”
She scanned it carefully. Then: “Kev, there are no shoes here. Have you any but those awful things your feet are falling out of?” she asked, in most practical solicitude.
“Beryl, I told you I had only what I wore on my back,” he replied, trying not to be stiff.
She was too earnest, too honestly practical to catch any hint of pride in his voice. She was concerned only with his needs.
“You’ll need hunting boots, as well as moccasins. What size?”
“Number eights.”
“And size of hat?”
“Seven. You see I have a big foot and small head, instead of the other way round.”
“Likely they won’t have anything that’ll fit,” said Beryl. “I send to Portland for what I want. It comes parcel post. But that takes two weeks and more. We can’t wait…. You’ll need gloves, too. And, well, I’ll buy what I think you need.”
“Thanks. You’re very kind,” replied Keven meekly. “Only don’t make it so much I can’t pay back.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” she concluded dubiously, as she turned to mount her horse. “Sam will not stray far. I won’t be long.”
Then she went clattering down the trail to disappear in the green forest. Keven felt relieved, yet somehow resentful with himself.
“By thunder, have I come to this? A liar and a beggar! Yet a blind man could see she—she cares for me.”
His first impulse was to crawl into a pine thicket near by and hide. Not that there was anything or anyone to hide from, except himself! He composed himself finally and found a comfortable posture, with his head on a mossy mound. He then applied himself grimly to enduring his ordeal. It was there, the damnable desire, but he could stand it. He found that he could. As moments dragged on into an hour he became conscious that it grew no worse. He got used to enduring it, with stoicism, with defiance, and then it strangely seemed to diminish. Presently he fell asleep.
Something startled him back to consciousness. The lacy foliage of a fir tree filled his gaze.
“Kev! Kev! Wake up!” called Beryl gayly. “Oh, I’m so glad. You were sound asleep…. Behold me—packer for one Keven Bell!”
Keven stared at her, where she appeared to rise head and shoulders out of innumerable bundles. “What’d you do, child? Buy out that store?” he queried, aghast.
“’Most did. Come, Sleepy-eyes. Sam’s right there. Get on him. We’ve got to walk the horse home.”
“I think I’ll walk a little myself, and lead Sam. So go ahead, Bright-eyes.”
A mile or so was about all Keven cared to accomplish before mounting again. Beryl forged ahead. The mule, however, when he was no longer led, soon caught up with the horse. Early afternoon found them turning the bend into Solitude.
Beryl rode her horse up to Keven’s cabin and, dismounting, she began to untie the bundles and deposit them upon the porch. Keven got off to help her, not unaware of her blushes and giggles. She was a most bewildering girl.
“There, Kev. You carry the things in and unwrap them. I don’t want to be around,” she said, with a kind of repressed glee, and led the horse and mule toward the barn.
It took half a dozen trips for Kev to carry all the bundles inside, and not once did he go unburdened. “I’ll be jiggered!” he muttered. But it was impossible not to feel a curious pleasure. Slowly he began to open the parcels, to lay each article on the bed, and after that was covered, the rest on the floor. What an assortment! She had bought out the country store. Those particular things he had listed were only a small part of this purpose. She had not lived in the Rogue River wilderness for nothing. The embarrassing feature of this deluge, however, was the fact that she might have been the wife or nurse of a sick man, and mighty keen as to his needs. Nor had she neglected the things most useful and dear to the man of the open: a hand ax and
a flashlight, a buckskin shirt embroidered in beads, a cap and a sombrero, and last, but indeed not least, a tin box full of native-tied steelhead flies. Then more necessary, perhaps, certainly more commonly practical, a wash basin and pitcher, towels and soap, clothesbrush and a small mirror.
All this array delighted him, in spite of his silly pride. “Darn it, she’s a thoroughbred and a sport…. Who ever thought of me, like this, except my mother? … No use, I’m going to love her. I’ve got to.”
He made this speech with dimming eyes. He tried to deceive himself. But he had no illusions. His gratitude, his realization of the simple goodness of this woodland girl, were not love. Was his heart dead? He thought he had loved Rosamond Brandeth. But he had been only a boy just smitten with a pretty face. He realized that he had never loved her—that now he despised her. As a woman she was a candle to the sun, compared to Beryl Aard.
Keven then applied himself to the task of practical application. He shaved, he donned clean new clothes. One of the several flannel shirts was a gorgeous one, barred in black-and-white check, with dots of red, and this one he chose. The boots fitted fairly well, and would do when his blistered feet got well. He buckled on the gun belt. Thus arrayed, he went out to find Beryl, uncertain whether he would scold her or hug her. But she could not be found. Aard, however, was at work in the orchard, where Keven joined him, eager to work, if not strenuously capable.
When hours later Beryl called them to supper it was none too soon for Keven. He again felt ready to drop.
When he stepped into Aards’ living room, the sun, shining its last that day from the river gap, flooded through the window. Keven encountered Beryl, quite unprepared to see her in a white dress, which, simple and modest as it was, completely changed her. Keven stared in undisguised admiration.
Beryl clapped her hands at sight of him. “Dad, look at him. Kev Bell, you handsome backwoods riverman!”
“You—you’re not so bad yourself,” replied Keven confusedly.
