The Rim of the Desert

by Ada Woodruff Anderson

  There was another pause. Mrs. Weatherbee sighed and leaned back in her chair; then Mrs. Feversham said: “And they refused to let your substitute go?”

  Tisdale nodded. “He was brought with Sandy along to the Lilliwaup. The Indians were traveling home, and no doubt the reservation influence had restrained them; still, they were staying a second night on the Lilliwaup, and when Robert spoke to them they were sullen and ugly. That was why he had hurried away to bring the superintendent down. He had started in his Peterboro but expected to find a man on the way who would take him on in his motor-boat. Once during the night John had drifted close to the camp to listen, but things were quiet, and they had bridged the morning with a little fishing and sketching up-stream.

  “'Suppose,' I said at last, 'suppose you had been afraid of me. I should be doubling back to the Duckabush now. As it is, I wouldn't give much for their opinion of me.'

  “'I wish you could have heard that man Sandy,' she said, and—did I tell you she had a very nice smile? 'He called you true gold.' And while she went on to repeat the rest he had told her, it struck me pleasantly I was listening to my own obituary. But the steamer was drawing close. She whistled the landing, and the girl dipped her oars again, pulling her long, even strokes. I threw off the rug and sat erect, ready to ease the boat off as we came alongside. And there on the lower deck watching us stood a young fellow whom, from his resemblance to her, I knew as brother Robert, with the superintendent from the reservation, backed by the whole patrol. Then my old friend Doctor Wise, the new coroner at Hoodsport, came edging through the crowd to take my hand. 'Well, well, Tisdale, old man,' he said, 'this is good. Do you know they had you drowned—or worse?'“

  Tisdale settled back in his chair and, turning his face, looked off the port bow. The Narrows had dropped behind, and for a moment the deck of the Aquila slanted to the tide rip off Port Orchard; then she righted and raced lightly across the broad channel. Ahead, off Bremerton Navy Yard, some anchored cruisers rose in black silhouette against a brilliant sea.

  “And,” said Marcia Feversham, “of course you went to the camp in a body and released the prisoners.”

  “Yes, we used the mail steamer's boats, and she waited for us until the inquest was over, then brought us on to Seattle. The motor-boat took the doctor and superintendent home.”

  “And the girl,” said Elizabeth after a moment, “did you never see her again?”

  “Oh, yes.” The genial lines deepened, and Hollis rose from his chair. “Often. I always look them up when I am in Seattle.”

  “But who was John?”

  “John? Why, he was her husband.”

  The Olympics had reappeared; the sun dropped behind a cloud over a high crest; shafts of light silvered the gorges; the peaks caught an amethyst glow. Tisdale, tracing once more that far canyon across the front of Constance, walked slowly forward into the bows.

  The yacht touched the Bremerton dock to take on the lieutenant who was expected aboard, and at the same time Jimmie Daniels swung lightly over the side aft. The Seattle steamer whistled from her slip on the farther side of the wharf, and he hurried to the gang-plank. There he sent a glance behind and saw Tisdale still standing with his back squared to the landing, looking off over the harbor. And the Press representative smiled. He had gathered little information in regard to the coal question, but in that notebook, buttoned snugly away in his coat, he had set down the papoose story, word for word.

  CHAPTER XVI. THE ALTERNATIVE

  Tisdale did not follow the lieutenant aft. When the Aquila turned into Port Orchard, he still remained looking off her bows. The sun had set, a soft breeze was in his face, and the Sound was no longer a mirror; it fluted, broke in racy waves; the cutwater struck from them an intricate melody. Northward a few thin streamers of cloud warmed like painted flames, and their reflection changed the sea to running fire. Then he was conscious that some one approached behind him; she stopped at his elbow to watch the brilliant scene. And instantly the spirit of combat in him stirred; his muscles tightened like those of a man on guard.

  After a moment she commenced to sing very softly, in unison with the music of the waves along the keel,

  “How dear to me the hour when daylight dies.”

  Even subdued, her voice was beautiful. It began surely, insistently, to undermine all that stout breastwork he had reared against her these twenty-four hours. But he thrust his hands in his pockets and turned to her with that upward look of probing, upbraiding eyes.

  The song died. A flush rose over her face, but she met the look bravely. “I came to explain,” she said. “I thought at the beginning, when we started on that drive through the mountains, you knew my identity. Afterwards I tried repeatedly to tell you, but when I saw how bitterly you—hated—me, my courage failed.”

  Her lip trembled over a sighing breath, and she looked, away up the brilliant sea. Tisdale could not doubt her. His mind raced back to incident on incident of that journey; in flashes it was all made clear to him. Even during that supreme hour of the electrical storm had she not tried to undeceive him? He forgave her her transgressions against him; he forgave her so completely that, at the recollection of the one moment in the basin, his pulses sang. Then, inside his pockets, his hands clenched, and he scourged himself for the lapse.

  “I was in desperate need,” she went on quickly. “There was a debt—a debt of honor—I wished to pay. And Mr. Foster told me you were interested in that desert land; that you were going to look it over. He caught me by long distance telephone the night he sailed for Alaska, to let me know. Oh, it all sounds sordid, but if you have ever come to the ragged edge of things—”

  She stopped, with a little outward, deprecating movement of her hands, and turned again to meet Tisdale's look. But he was still silent. “I believed when you knew me,” she went on, “you would see I am not the kind of woman you imagined; I even hoped, for David's sake, you would forgive me. But I did not know there was such friendship as yours in the world. I thought only mothers loved so,—the great ones, the Hagars, the Marys. It is more than that; it is the best and deepest of every kind of love in one. I can't fathom it—unless—men sometimes are born with twin souls.”

  It was not the influence of her personality now; it was not any magnetism. Something far down in the depths of him responded to that something in her. It was as though he felt the white soul of her rising transcendent over her body. It spoke in her pose, her eloquent face, and it filled the brief silence with an insistent, almost vibrant appeal.

  “They are,” he answered, and the emotion in his own face played softly through his voice, “I am sure that they are. Weatherbee had other friends, plenty of them, scattered from the Yukon territory to Nome; men who would have been glad to go out of their way to serve him, if they had known; but he never asked anything of them; he saved the right to call on me. Neither of us ever came as near that 'ragged edge of things' as he did, toppled on it as he did, for so long. There never was a braver fight, against greater odds, single-handed, yet I failed him.” He paused while his eyes again sought that high gorge of the Olympic Mountains, then added: “The most I can do now is to see that his work is carried on.”

  “You mean,” she said not quite steadily, “you are going to buy that land?”

  “I mean”—he frowned a little—“I am going to renew my offer to finance the project for you. You owe it to David Weatherbee even more than I do. Go back to that pocket; set his desert blossoming. It's your only salvation.”

  She groped for the bulwark behind her and moved back to its support. “I could not. I could not. I should go mad in that terrible place.”

  “Listen, madam.” He said this very gently, but his voice carried its vibrant undernote as though down beneath the surface a waiting reserve force stirred. “I did not tell all about that orchard of spruce twigs. It was planted along a bench, the miniature of the one we climbed in the Wenatchee Mountains, that was crossed with tiny, frozen, irrigating canals leading from a basin;
and midway stood a house. You must have known that trick he had of carving small things with his pocket-knife. Then imagine that delicately modeled house of snow. It was the nucleus of the whole, and before the door, fine as a cameo and holding a bundle in her arms, was set the image of a woman.”

  There was a silent moment. She waited, leaning a little forward, watching Tisdale's face, while a sort of incredulous surprise rose through the despair in her eyes. “There were women at Fairbanks and Seward after the first year,” he went on. “Bright, refined women who would have counted it a privilege to share things, his hardest luck, with David Weatherbee. But the best of them in his eyes was nothing more than a shadow. There was just one woman in the world for him. That image stood for you. The whole project revolved around you. It would be incomplete now without you.”

  She shrank closer against the bulwark, glancing about her with the swift look of a creature trapped, then for a moment dropped her face in her hands. When she tried to say something, the words would not come. Her lips, her whole face quivered, but she could only shake her head in protest again and again.

  Tisdale waited, watching her with his upward look from under contracted brows. “What else can you do?” he asked at last. “Your tract is too small to be handled by a syndicate, and now that the levels of the Columbia desert are to be brought under a big irrigation project, which means a nominal expense to the grower, your high pocket, unimproved, will hardly attract the single buyer. Will you, then, plat it in five-acre tracts for the Seattle market and invite the—interest of your friends?”

  She drew erect; the danger signals flamed briefly in her eyes. “My friends can be dis-interested, Mr. Tisdale. It has only been through them, for a long time, I have been able to keep my hold.”

  “There's where you made your mistake at the start; in gaining that hold. When you conformed to their standards, your own were overthrown.”

  “That is not true.” She did not raise her voice any; it dropped rather to a minor note? but a tremor ran over her body, and her face for an instant betrayed how deep the shaft had struck. “And, always, when I have accepted a favor, I have given full measure in exchange. But there is an alternative you seem to have overlooked.”

  “I understand,” he said slowly, and his color rose. “You may marry again.” Then he asked, without protest: “Is it Foster?”

  On occasion, during that long drive through the mountains, he had felt the varying height and thickness of an invisible barrier, but never, until that moment, its chill. Then Marcia Feversham called her, and she turned to go down the deck. “I'm coming!” she answered and stopped to look back. “You need not trouble about Mr. Foster,” she said. “He—is safe.”

  CHAPTER XVII. “ALL THESE THINGS WILL I GIVE THEE”

  Frederic had suggested a rubber at auction bridge.

  Elizabeth fixed another pillow under his shoulders and moved the card table to his satisfaction, then took a chair near the players and unfolded her crochet, while Tisdale, whose injured hand excluded him from the game, seated himself beside her. He asked whimsically if she was manufacturing a cloud like the one in the west where the sun had set; but she lacked her sister's ready repartee, and, arresting her needle long enough to glance at him and back to the woolly, peach-pink pile in her lap, answered seriously: “It's going to be a hug-me-tight.”

  The lieutenant laughed. “Sounds interesting, does it not?” he said, shuffling the cards. “But calm yourself, sir; a hug-me-tight is merely a kind of sweater built on the lines of a vest.”

  He dealt, and Mrs. Feversham bid a lily. From his position Tisdale was able to watch Mrs. Weatherbee's face and her cards. She held herself erect in a subdued excitement as the game progressed; the pink flush deepened and went and came in her cheek; the blue lights danced in her eyes. Repeatedly she flashed intelligence to her partner across the board. And the lieutenant began to wait in critical moments for the glance. They won the first hand. Then it became apparent that he and Morganstein were betting on the side, and Marcia remonstrated. “It isn't that we are scrupulous alone,” she said, “but we lose inspiration playing second fiddle.”

  “Come in then,” suggested Frederic and explained to the lieutenant: “She can put up a hundred dollars and lose 'em like a soldier.”

  “The money stayed in the family,” she said quickly. “Beatriz, it is your bid.”

  Mrs. Weatherbee was calculating the possibilities of her hand. Her suit was diamonds; seven in sequence from the jack. She held also the three highest in clubs and the other black king. She was weak in hearts. “I bid two diamonds,” she said slowly, “and, Marcia, it's my ruby against your check for three hundred dollars.”

  There was a flutter of surprise. “No,” remonstrated Elizabeth sharply. “No, Marcia can buy the ring for what it is worth.”

  “Then I should lose the chance to keep it. Three hundred will be enough to lose.” And she added, less confidently: “But if you should win, Marcia, it is understood you will not let the ring go out of your hands.”

  “I bear witness,” cried the lieutenant gallantly, “and we are proud to play second when a Studevaris leads.”

  But Morganstein stared at her in open admiration. “You thoroughbred!” he said.

  “It shall stay in the family,” confirmed Marcia.

  Then Frederic bid two lilies, the lieutenant passed and Mrs. Feversham raised to three hearts. She wavered, and Tisdale saw the cards tremble in her hand. “Four diamonds,” she said at last. The men passed, and Marcia doubled. Then Morganstein led a lily, and the lieutenant spread his hand on the table. There were six clubs; in diamonds a single trey.

  But Mrs. Weatherbee was radiant. She moved a little and glanced back at Elizabeth, inviting her to look at her hand. She might as well have said: “You see, I have only to lead out trumps and establish clubs.”

  Marcia played a diamond on her partner's second lead of spades, and led the ace of hearts, following with the king; the fourth round Frederic trumped over Mrs. Weatherbee and led another lily. Mrs. Feversham used her second diamond and, returning with a heart, saw her partner trump again over Mrs. Weatherbee. It was miserable. They gathered in the book before the lead fell to her. The next deal the cards deserted her, and after that the lieutenant blundered. But even though the ruby was inevitably lost, she finished the rubber pluckily; the flush deepened in her cheek; the blue fires flamed in her eyes. “You thoroughbred!” Morganstein repeated thickly. “You thoroughbred!”

  To Tisdale it was unendurable. He rose and crossed to the farther side of the desk. The Aquila, rounding the northern end of Bainbridge Island, had come into Agate Pass; the tide ran swift in rips and eddies between close wooded shores, but these things no longer caught his attention. The scene he saw was the one he had put behind him, and in the calcium light of his mind, one figure stood out clearly from the rest. Had he not known this woman was a spendthrift? Had he not suspected she inherited this vice from her father, that old gambler of the stock exchange. Was it not for this reason he had determined to hold that last half interest in the Aurora mine? Still, still, she had not shown the skill of long practice; she had not played with ordinary caution. And had not Elizabeth remonstrated, as though her loss was inevitable? Every one had been undeniably surprised. Why, then, had she done this? She had told him she was in “desperate need.” Could this have been the alternative to which she had referred?

  The Aquila's whistle blew, and she came around, close under a bluff, into a small cove, on the rim of which rose the new villa. The group behind Tisdale began to push back chairs. He turned. The game was over, and Mrs. Feversham stood moving her hand slowly to catch the changing lights of the ring on her finger. Then she looked at the loser. “It seems like robbery,” she exclaimed, “to take this old family talisman from you, Beatriz. I shall make out a check to ease my conscience.”

  “Oh, no.” She lifted her head bravely like his Alaska flower in the bitter wind. “I shall not accept it. My grandfather believed in the ruby d
evoutly,” she went on evenly. “It was his birthstone. And since it is yours too, Marcia, it should bring you better fortune than it has brought me. But see! The villa roof is finished and stained moss-green as it should be, against that background of firs. And isn't the big veranda delightful, with those Venetian blinds?”

  The yacht nosed alongside the little stone quay, and preceded by the host, who was carried ashore in his chair, not without difficulty, by relays of his crew, the party made the landing.

  Tisdale's first impression when he stepped over the threshold of the villa was of magnitude. A great fireplace built of granite blocks faced the hospitable entrance, and the interior lifted to the beamed roof, with a gallery midway, on which opened the upper rooms. The stairs rose easily in two landings, and the curving balustrade formed a recess in which was constructed a stage. Near this a pipe organ was being installed. It was all luxurious, created for entertainment and pleasure, but it lacked the ostentatious element for which he was prepared.

  It had been understood that the visit was made at this time to allow Mrs. Feversham an opportunity to go through the house. She was to decide on certain furnishings which she was to purchase in New York, but it was evident to Tisdale that the items she listed followed the suggestions of the woman who stood beside her, weighing with subdued enthusiasm the possibilities of the room. “Imagine a splendid polar-bear rug here,” she said, “with a yellowish lynx at the foot of the stairs, and one of those fine Kodiak skins in front of the hearth. A couch there in the chimney corner, with a Navajo blanket and pillows would be color enough.”