by Zane Grey
“Why should we move down? With a good cabin we can be comfortable here. The snow won’t be heavy this far up. They told Daddy John all about it at the Fort. And you and he can ride in there sometimes when we want things.”
These simple words gratified him more than she guessed. It was as if she had seen into the secret springs of his thought and said what he was fearful she would not say. That was why—in a spirit of testing a granted boon to prove its genuineness—he asked with tentative questioning:
“You won’t be lonely? There are no people here.”
She made the bride’s answer and his contentment increased, for again it was what he would have wished her to say. When he answered he spoke almost sheepishly, with something of uneasy confession in his look:
“I’d like to live in places like this always. I feel choked and stifled where there are walls shutting out the air and streets full of people. Even in the Fort I felt like a trapped animal. I want to be where there’s room to move about and nobody bothering with different kinds of ideas. It’s only in the open, in places without men, that I’m myself.”
For the first time he had dared to give expression to the mood of the wakeful night. Though it was dim in the busy brightness of the present—a black spot on the luster of cheerful days—he dreaded that it might come again with its scaring suggestions. With a nerve that had never known a tremor at any menace from man, he was frightened of a thought, a temporary mental state. In speaking thus to her, he recognized her as a help-meet to whom he could make a shamed admission of weakness and fear no condemnation or diminution of love. This time, however, she made the wrong reply:
“But we’ll go down to the coast after a while, if our claim’s good and we get enough dust out of it. I think of it often. It will be so nice to live in a house again, and have some one to do the cooking, and wear pretty clothes. It will be such fun living where there are people and going about among them, going to parties and maybe having parties of our own.”
He withdrew his hand from hers and pushed the hair back from his forehead. Though he said nothing she was conscious of a drop in his mood. She bent forward to peer into his face and queried with bright, observing eyes:
“You don’t seem to like the thought of it.”
“Oh, it’s not me,” he answered. “I was just wondering at the queer way women talk. A few minutes ago you said you’d be content anywhere with me. Now you say you think it would be such fun living in a city and going to parties.”
“With you, too,” she laughed, pressing against his shoulder. “I don’t want to go to the parties alone.”
“Well, I guess if you ever go it’ll have to be alone,” he said roughly.
She understood now that she had said something that annoyed him, and not knowing how she had come to do it, felt aggrieved and sought to justify herself:
“But we can’t live here always. If we make money we’ll want to go back some day where there are people, and comforts and things going on. We’ll want friends, everybody has friends. You don’t mean for us always to stay far away from everything in these wild, uncivilized places?”
“Why not?” he said, not looking at her, noting her rueful tone and resenting it.
“But we’re not that kind of people. You’re not a real mountain man. You’re not like Zavier or the men at Fort Laramie. You’re Napoleon Duchesney just as I’m Susan Gillespie. Your people in St. Louis and New Orleans were ladies and gentlemen. It was just a wild freak that made you run off into the mountains. You don’t want to go on living that way. That part of your life’s over. The rest will be with me.”
“And you’ll want the cities and the parties?”
“I’ll want to live the way Mrs. Duchesney should live, and you’ll want to, too.” He did not answer, and she gave his arm a little shake and said, “Won’t you?”
“I’m more Low Courant than I am Napoleon Duchesney,” was his answer.
“Well, maybe so, but whichever you are, you’ve got a wife now and that makes a great difference.”
She tried to infuse some of her old coquetry into the words, but the eyes, looking sideways at him, were troubled, for she did not yet see where she had erred.
“I guess it does,” he said low, more as if speaking to himself than her.
This time she said nothing, feeling dashed and repulsed. They continued to sit close together on the rock, the man lost in morose reverie, the girl afraid to move or touch him lest he should show further annoyance.
The voice of Daddy John calling them to supper came to both with relief. They walked to the camp side by side, Low with head drooped, the girl at his elbow stealing furtive looks at him. As they approached the fire she slid her hand inside his arm and, glancing down, he saw the timid questioning of her face and was immediately contrite. He laid his hand on hers and smiled, and she caught her breath in a deep sigh and felt happiness come rushing back. Whatever it was she had said that displeased him she would be careful not to say it again, for she had already learned that the lion in love is still the lion.
CHAPTER II
Their claim was rich and they buckled down to work, the old man constructing a rocker after a model of his own, and Courant digging in the pits. Everything was with them, rivals were few, the ground uncrowded, the season dry. It was the American River before the Forty-niners swarmed along its edges, and there was gold in its sands, sunk in a sediment below its muddy deposit, caked in cracks through the rocks round which its currents had swept for undisturbed ages.
They worked feverishly, the threat of the winter rains urging them on. The girl helped, leaving her kettle settled firm on a bed of embers while the water heated for dish washing, to join them on the shore, heaped with their earth piles. She kept the rocker in motion while the old man dipped up the water in a tin ladle and sent it running over the sifting bed of sand and pebbles. The heavier labor of digging was Courant’s. Before September was over the shore was honeycombed with his excavations, driven down to the rock bed. The diminishing stream shrunk with each day and he stood in it knee high, the sun beating on his head, his clothes pasted to his skin by perspiration, and the thud of his pick falling with regular stroke on the monotonous rattle of the rocker.
Sometimes she was tired and they ordered her to leave them and rest in the shade of the camp. She loitered about under the spread of the pine boughs, cleaning and tidying up, and patching the ragged remnants of their clothes. Often, as she sat propped against the trunk, her sewing fell to her lap and she looked out with shining, spell-bound eyes. The men were shapes of dark importance against the glancing veil of water, the soaked sands and the low brushwood yellowing in the autumn’s soft, transforming breath. Far away the film of whitened summits dreamed against the blue. In the midwash of air, aloft and dreaming, too, the hawk’s winged form poised, its shadow moving below it across the sea of tree tops.
She would sit thus, motionless and idle, as the long afternoon wore away, and deep-colored veils of twilight gathered in the cañon. She told the men the continuous sounds of their toil made her drowsy. But her stillness was the outward sign of an inner concentration. If delight in rest had replaced her old bodily energy, her mind had gained a new activity. She wondered a little at it, not yet at the heart of her own mystery. Her thoughts reached forward into the future, busied themselves with details of the next twelve months, dwelt anxiously on questions of finance. The nest-building instinct was astir in her and she pondered on the house they were to build, how they must arrange something for a table, and maybe fashion armchairs of barrels and red flannel. Finally, in a last voluptuous flight of ecstasy, she saw herself riding into Sacramento with a sack of dust and abandoning herself to an orgie of bartering.
One afternoon three men, two Mexicans and an Australian sailor from a ship in San Francisco cove, stopped at the camp for food. The Australian was a loquacious fellow
, with faculties sharpened by glimpses of life in many ports. He told them of the two emigrant convoys he had just seen arrive in Sacramento, worn and wasted by the last forced marches over the mountains. Susan, who had been busy over her cooking, according him scant attention, at his description of the trains, suddenly lifted intent eyes and leaned toward him:
“Did you see a man among them, a young man, tall and thin, with black hair and beard?”
“All the men were tall and thin, or any ways thin,” said the sailor, laughing. “How tall was he?”
“Six feet,” she replied, her face devoid of any answering smile, “with high shoulders and walking with a stoop. He had a fine, handsome face, and long black hair to his shoulders and gray eyes.”
“Have you lost your sweetheart?” said the man, who did not know the relations of the party.
“No,” she said gravely, “my friend.”
Courant explained:
“She’s my wife. The man she’s speaking of was a member of our company that we lost on the desert. We thought Indians had got him and hoped he’d get away and join with a later westbound train. His name was David.”
The sailor shook his head.
“Ain’t seen no one answering to that name, nor to that description. There wasn’t a handsome-featured one in the lot, nor a David. But if you’re expecting him along, why don’t you take her in and let her look ’em over? They told me at the Fort the trains was mostly all in or ought to be. Any time now the snow on the summit will be too deep for ’em. If they get caught up there they can’t be got out, so they’re coming over hot foot and are dumped down round Hock Farm. Not much to see, but if you’re looking for a friend it’s worth trying.”
That night Courant was again wakeful. Susan’s face, as she had questioned the sailor, floated before him on the darkness. With it came the thought of the dead man. In the silence David called upon him from the sepulcher beneath the rock, sent a message through the night which said that, though he was hidden from mortal vision, the memory of him was still alive, imbued with an unquenchable vitality. His unwinking eyes, with the rock crumbs sifting on them, looked at those of his triumphant enemy and spoke through their dusted films. In the moment of death they had said nothing to him, now they shone—not angrily accusing as they had been in life—but stern with a vindictive purpose.
Courant began to have a fearful understanding of their meaning. Though dead to the rest of the world, David would maintain an intense and secret life in his murderer’s conscience. He had never fought such a subtle and implacable foe, and he lay thinking of how he could create conditions that would give him escape, push the phantom from him, make him forget, and be as he had been when no one had disputed his sovereignty over himself. He tried to think that time would mitigate this haunting discomfort. His sense of guilt, his fear of his wife, would die when the novelty of once again being one with the crowd had worn away. It was not possible that he, defiant of man and God, could languish under this dread of a midnight visitation or a discovery that never would be made. It was the reentering into the communal life that had upset his poise—or was it the influence of the woman, the softly pervasive, enervating influence? He came up against this thought with a dizzying impact and felt himself droop and sicken as one who is faced with a task for which his strength is inadequate.
He turned stealthily and lay on his back, his face beaded with sweat. The girl beside him waked and sat up casting a side glance at him. By the starlight, slanting in through the raised tent door, she saw his opened eyes and, leaning toward him, a black shape against the faintly blue triangle, said:
“Low, are you awake?”
He answered without moving, glad to hear her speak, to know that sleep had left her and her voice might conjure away his black imaginings.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asked. “You must be half dead after such work as you did today.”
“I was thinking—” then hastily, for he was afraid that she might sense his mood and ply him with sympathetic queries: “Sometimes people are too tired to sleep. I am, and so I was lying here just thinking of nothing.”
His fears were unnecessary. She was as healthily oblivious of his disturbance as he was morbidly conscious of it. She sat still, her hands clasped round her knees, about which the blanket draped blackly.
“I was thinking, too,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Of what that man was saying of David.”
There was a silence. He lay motionless, his trouble coming back upon him. He wished that he might dare to impose upon her a silence on that one subject. David, given a place in her mind, would sit at every feast, walk beside them, lie between them in their marriage bed.
“Why do you think of him?” he asked.
“Because—” her tone showed surprise. “It’s natural, isn’t it? Don’t you? I’m sure you do. I do often, much oftener than you think. I’m always hoping that he’ll come.”
“You never loved him,” he said, in a voice from which all spring was gone.
“No, but he was my friend, and I would like to keep him so for always. I think of his kindness, his gentleness, all the good part of him before the trail broke him down. And, I think, too, how cruel I was to him.”
The darkness hid her face, but her voice told that she, too, had her little load of guilt where David was concerned.
The man moved uneasily.
“That’s foolishness. You only told the truth. If it was cruel, that’s not your affair.”
“He loved me. A woman doesn’t forget that.”
“That’s over and done with. He’s probably here somewhere, come through with a train that’s scattered. And, anyway, you can’t do any good by thinking about him.”
This time the false reassurances came with the pang that the dead man was rousing in tardy retribution.
“I should like to know it,” she said wistfully, “to feel sure. It’s the only thing that mars our happiness. If I knew he was safe and well somewhere there’d be nothing in the world for me but perfect joy.”
Her egotism of satisfied body and spirit jarred upon him. The passion she had evoked had found no peace in its fulfillment. She had got what he had hoped for. All that he had anticipated was destroyed by the unexpected intrusion of a part of himself that had lain dead till she had quickened it, and quickening it she had killed his joy. In a flash of divination he saw that, if she persisted in her worry over David, she would rouse in him an antagonism that would eventually drive him from her. He spoke with irritation:
“Put him out of your mind. Don’t worry about him. You can’t do any good, and it spoils our love.”
After a pause, she said with a hesitating attempt at cajolery:
“Let me and Daddy John drive into the valley and try and get news of him. We need supplies and we’ll be gone only two or three days. We can inquire at the Fort and maybe go on to Sacramento, and if he’s been there we’ll hear of it. If we could only hear, just hear, he was safe, it would be such a relief. It would take away this dreary feeling of anxiety, and guilt too, Low. For I feel guilty when I think of how we left him.”
“Where was the guilt? You’ve no right to say that. You understood we had to go. I could take no risks with you and the old man.”
“Yes,” she said, slowly, tempering her agreement with a self-soothing reluctance, “but even so, it seemed terrible. I often tell myself we couldn’t have done anything else, but——”
Her voice dropped to silence and she sat staring out at the quiet night, her head blurred with the filaments of loosened hair.
He did not speak, gripped by his internal torment, aggravated now by torment from without. He wondered, if he told her the truth, would she understand and help him to peace. But he knew that such knowledge would set her in a new attitude toward him, an attitude of sec
ret judgment, of distracted pity, of an agonized partisanship built on loyalty and the despairing passion of the disillusioned. He could never tell her, for he could never support the loss of her devoted belief, which was now the food of his life.
“Can I go?” she said, turning to look at him, smiling confidently as one who knows the formal demand unnecessary.
“If you want,” he answered.
“Then we’ll start to-morrow,” she said, and, leaning down, kissed him.
He was unresponsive to the touch of her lips, lay inert as she nestled down into soft-breathing, child-like sleep. He watched the tent opening pale into a glimmering triangle wondering what their life would be with the specter of David standing in the path, an angel with a flaming sword barring the way to Paradise.
Two days later she and Daddy John, sitting on the front seat of the wagon, saw the low drab outlines of the Fort rising from the plain. Under their tree was a new encampment, one tent with the hood of a wagon behind it, and oxen grazing in the sun. As they drew near they could see the crouched forms of two children, the light filtering through the leafage on the silky flax of their heads. They were occupied over a game, evidently a serious business, its floor of operations the smooth ground worn bare about the camp fire. One of them lay flat with a careful hand patting the dust into mounds, the other squatted near by watching, a slant of white hair falling across a rounded cheek. They did not heed the creak of the wagon wheels, but as a woman’s voice called from the tent, raised their heads listening, but not answering, evidently deeming silence the best safeguard against interruption.
Susan laid a clutching hand on Daddy John’s arm.
“It’s the children,” she cried in a choked voice. “Stop, stop!” and before he could rein the mules to order she was out and running toward them, calling their names.
