Claim Number One
Page 19
From the door of her tent Agnes looked out upon the lantern, comparing herself with it, put down there as she was in that blank land, which was still in the night of its development. Over that place, which she had chosen to make a home and a refuge, her own weak flame would fall dimly, perhaps never able to light it all. Would it be worth the struggle, the heart-hunger for other places and things, the years of waiting, the toil and loneliness?
She went back to her supper, the cup which she had gone to fetch in her hand. The strength of night made her heart timid; the touch of food was dry and tasteless upon her lips. For the first time since coming to that country she felt the pain of discouragement. What could she do against such a great, rough thing? Would it ever be worth the labor it would cost?
Feeble as her light was against the night, it was enough to discover tears upon her cheeks as she sat there upon the ground. Her fair hair lay dark in the shadows, and light with that contrast which painters love, where it lifted in airy rise above her brow. And there were the pensive softness of her chin, the sweep of her round throat, the profile as sharp as a shadow against the mellow glow. Perhaps the lantern was content in its circumscribed endeavor against the night, when it could light to such good advantage so much loveliness.
* * *
“If I’d have put my hands over your eyes, who would you have named?” asked a voice near her ear, a voice familiar, and fitted in that moment with old associations.
“I’d have had no trouble in guessing, Jerry, for I was expecting you,” she answered, scarcely turning her head, although his silent manner of approach had startled her.
“Agnes, I don’t believe you’ve got any more nerves than an Indian,” he said, dropping down beside her.
“If one wanted to make a facetious rejoinder, the opening is excellent,” she said, fighting back her nervousness with a smile. “Will you have some supper?”
“I’d like it, if you don’t mind.”
She busied herself with the stove, but he peremptorily took away from her the office of feeding the fire, and watched her as she put bacon on to fry.
“Agnes, you ought to have been frying bacon for me these four years past–figuratively, I mean,” he remarked, musingly.
“If you don’t mind, we’ll not go back to that,” she said.
Boyle made no mention of the purpose of his visit. He made his supper with ambassadorial avoidance of the subject which lay so uneasily on her mind. When he had finished, he drew out his tobacco-sack and rolled a cigarette, and, as it dangled from his lip by a shred of its wrapping, he turned to her.
“Well?” he asked.
She was standing near the lantern, removing the few utensils–the bacon had been served to him in the pan–from her outdoor table. When she answered him she turned away until her face was hidden in the shadow.
“I didn’t carry your message to Dr. Slavens as you ordered, Jerry.”
“I know it,” said he. “What next?”
“I guess it’s ‘up to you,’ as you put it. I’m not going to try to save myself at the expense of any of my friends.”
Boyle got up. He took a little turn away from the box whereon the lantern stood, as if struggling to maintain the fair front he had worn when he appeared. After a little he turned and faced her, walking back slowly until only the length of the little stove was between them.
“Have you considered your own danger?” he asked.
“It wouldn’t help you a great deal here, among these rough, fair-minded people, to take an advantage like that of a woman, especially when her transgression is merely technical and not intentional,” she rejoined.
“I wouldn’t have to appear in it,” he assured her.
“Well, set the United States marshal after me as soon as you want to; I’ll be here,” she said, speaking with the even tone of resignation which one commands when the mind has arrived at a determined stand to face the last and worst.
“Agnes, I told you yesterday that I was all over the old feeling that I had for you.”
Boyle leaned forward as he spoke, his voice earnest and low.
“But that was a bluff. I’m just as big a fool as I ever was about it. If you want to walk over me, go ahead; if you want to–oh, rats! But I’ll tell you; if you’ll come away with me I’ll drop all of this. I’ll leave that tin-horn doctor where he is, and let him make what he can out of his claim.”
“I couldn’t marry you, Jerry; it’s impossible to think of that,” she told him gently.
“Oh, well, that’s a formality,” he returned, far more in his voice than his words. “I’ll say to you––”
“You’ve said too much!” she stopped him, feeling her cheeks burn under the outrage which he had offered to her chaste heart. “There’s no room for any more words between you and me–never! Go now–say no more!”
She walked across the bright ring of light toward the tent, making a little detour around him, as if afraid that his violent words might be followed by violent deeds.
Boyle turned where he stood, following her with his eyes. The light of the lantern struck him strongly up to the waist, leaving his head and shoulders in the gloom above its glare. His hands were in the pockets of his trousers, his shoulders drooping forward in that horseback stoop which years in the saddle had fastened on him.
Agnes had reached the tent, where she stood with her hand on the flap, turning a hasty look behind her, when a shot out of the dark from the direction of the river-bank struck her ears with a suddenness and a portent which seemed to carry the pain of death. She was facing that way; she saw the flash of it; she saw Jerry Boyle leap with lithe agility, as if springing from the scourge of flames, and sling his pistol from the hostler under his coat.
In his movement there was an admirable quickness, rising almost to the dignity of beauty in the rapidity with which he adjusted himself to meet this sudden exigency. In half the beat of a heart, it seemed, he had fired. Out of the dark came another leap of flame, another report. Boyle walked directly toward the point from which it came, firing as he went. No answer came after his second shot.
Agnes pressed her hand over her eyes to shut out the sight, fearing to see him fall, her heart rising up to accuse her. She had forgotten to warn him! She had forgotten!
Boyle’s voice roused her. There was a dry harshness in it, a hoarseness as of one who has gone long without water on the lips.
“Bring that lantern here!” he commanded.
She did not stand to debate it, but took up the light and hurried to the place where he stood. A man lay at his feet, his long hair tossed in disorder, his long coat spread out like a black blotch upon the ground. Boyle took the lantern and bent over the victim of his steady arm, growled in his throat, and bent lower. The man’s face was partly hidden by the rank grass in which he lay. Boyle turned it up to the light with his foot and straightened his back with a grunt of disdain.
“Huh! That rabbit!” said he, giving her back the light.
It did not require that gleam upon the white face to tell Agnes that the victim was the polemical sheep-herder, whose intention had been steadier than his aim.
Boyle hesitated a moment as if to speak to her, but said nothing before he turned and walked away.
“You’ve killed him!” she called after him sharply. “Don’t go away and leave him here like this!”
“He’s not dead,” said Boyle. “Don’t you hear him snort?”
The man’s breathing was indeed audible, and growing louder with each labored inspiration.
“Turn him over on his face,” directed Boyle. “There’s blood in his throat.”
“Will you go for Smith?” she asked, kneeling beside the wounded man.
“He’s coming; I can hear the sauerkraut jolt in him while he’s half a mile away. If anybody comes looking for me on account of this–coroner or–oh, anybody–I’ll be down the river about a quarter below the stage-ford. I’ll wait there a day longer to hear from you, and this is my last word.”
Smith believed there was life enough left in the sheep-herder to last until he could fetch a doctor from Meander.
“But that’s thirty miles,” said Agnes, “and Dr. Slavens is not more than twenty. You know where he’s located–down by Comanche?”
Smith knew, but he had forgotten for the minute, so accustomed to turning as he was to the center of civilization in that section for all the gentle ministrants of woe, such as doctors, preachers, and undertakers.
“I’ll have him here before morning,” said Smith, posting off to get his horse.
The poor sheep-herder was too sorely hurt to last the night out. Before Smith had been two hours on his way the shepherd was in the land of shades, having it out face to face with Epictetus–if he carried the memory of his contention across with him, to be sure.
The neighbors arranged him respectably upon a board, and covered him over with a blanket, keeping watch beside him in the open, with the clear stars shining undisturbed by this thing which made such a turmoil in their breasts. There he lay, waiting the doctor and the coroner, and all who might come, his earthly troubles locked up forever in his cold heart, his earthly argument forever at an end.
* * *
CHAPTER XVI
A PROMISE
Dr. Slavens rode in before dawn, more concerned about Agnes than about the person in whose behalf he had been summoned. On the way he asked Smith repeatedly how the tragedy affected her; whether she was frightened or greatly disturbed.
“She’s as steady as a compass,” said Smith; and so he found her.
Somewhat too steady, in fact. It was the steadiness of a deep and settled melancholy, through which his best efforts could do no more than strike a feeble, weary smile.
Immediately upon the death of the herder, one of the men had ridden to Meander and carried word to the coroner. That official arrived in the middle of the forenoon, bringing with him the undertaker and a wagon. After some perfunctory inquiries, the coroner concluded that an inquest was not necessary. He did not go to the trouble to find Boyle and question him, but he looked with a familiar understanding in his piggish eyes at Agnes when she related the circumstances of the tragedy.
Coroners, and others who knew the Governor’s son, had but one measure for a woman who entertained Jerry Boyle alone in her tent, or even outside it, at night. Boyle’s associations had set the standard of his own morality, as well as that of his consorts. The woman from up the river, and the little bride from across the ford, drew off together, whispering, after Agnes had told her story. Presently they slipped away without a word.
Even Dr. Slavens, cool and just-minded as he was, felt the hot stirring of jealous suspicion. It brought to his mind unpleasantly the ruminations of his solitary days in camp among the rocks, when he had turned over in his mind the belief that there was something of the past between Agnes and Boyle.
He had not convicted her in his own judgment of any wrong, for the sincerity of her eyes had stood between him and the possibility of any such conclusion. Now the thought that, after all his trust, she might be unworthy, smote painfully upon his heart.
When the others had gone away, after a little standing around, hitch-legged and wise, in close discussion of the event, the doctor sitting, meantime, with Agnes in front of the tent, he spoke of the necessity of getting back to his claim. She was pale after the night’s strain, although apparently unconscious of the obloquy of her neighbors. Nevertheless, she pressed him to remain for the midday meal.
“I’ve not been very hospitable, I’m afraid,” said she; “but this thing has stunned me. It seems like it has taken something away from the prospect of life here.”
“Yes, it has taken something away,” he responded, gravely thoughtful, his look bent upon the ground.
She sprang up quickly, a sharp little cry upon her lips as if from the shock of a blow from a hand beloved.
“I saw it in their eyes!” she cried. “But you–but you! Oh–oh–I trusted you to know!”
“Forgive me,” he begged. “I did not mean to hurt you. Perhaps I was thinking of the romance and the glamour which this had stripped away from things here. I think my mind was running on that.”
“No,” she denied. “You were thinking like that little woman across the river with the fright and horror in her big eyes. You were thinking that I am guilty, and that there can be but one answer to the presence of that man in my camp last night. His notorious name goes before him like a blight.”
“You’ll have to move your camp now,” as if seeking delicately to avoid the ghost that seemed to have risen between them; “this place will have unpleasant associations.”
“Yes; it cannot be reconsecrated and purified.”
He stood as if prepared to leave. Agnes placed her hand upon his shoulder, looking with grieved eyes into his face.
“Will you stay a little while,” she asked, “and hear me? I want to part from you with your friendship and respect, for I am entitled to both, I am worthy of both–if ever.”
“Let me move your stool out into the sun,” he suggested. “There’s a chill in the wind today. Of course I’ll stay, and we’ll have some more of that excellent coffee before I go. You must teach me how you make it; mine always turns out as muddy as a bucket of Missouri River water.”
His cheerfulness was like that which a healthy man displays at the bedside of a dying friend–assumed, but helpful in its way. He placed her folding canvas stool in the sun beyond the shadow of the tent and found a box for himself. Thus arranged, he waited for her to speak.
“Still, I am not sure of what I protested in regard to your friendship and respect,” said she after a little brooding silence. “I am a fraud, taken at the best, and perhaps a criminal.”
Dr. Slavens studied her face as she paused there and looked away, as if her thoughts concentrated beyond the blue hills in the west.
“My name is not Horton,” she resumed, facing him suddenly. “It is Gates, and my father is in the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth.”
“But there was no call for you to tell me this,” he protested softly.
“Yes, every reason for it,” she averred. “The fabric of all my troubles rests on that. He was president of a bank–you remember the scandal, don’t you? It was nation-wide.”
He nodded.
“I spoke to you once of the ghosts of money. They have worried me for four years and more, for nothing but the ghosts are left when one loses place and consequence before the world. It was a national bank, and the charge was misapplication of funds. He had money enough for all the sane uses of any man, but the pernicious ambition to be greater assailed him, even old as he was.
“He never said, and I never have held it so, that his punishment was unjust. Only it seemed to us unfair when so many greater evildoers escape or receive pardons. You will remember, perhaps, that none of the depositors lost anything. Wild as his schemes appeared, they turned out sound enough after a while, and everything was liquidated.
“We gave up everything of our own; mother and I have felt the rub of hardship before today. The hardest of all was the falling away of those whom we believed to be friends. We learned that the favors of society are as fickle as those of fortune, and that they walk hand in hand.
“No matter. Father’s term will expire in less than one month. He is an old, broken, disgraced man; he never will be able to lift up his face before the world again. That is why I am here. Mother and I concluded that we might make a refuge for him here, where he would be unknown. We planned for him to leave his name, and as much of his past as he could shake off, behind him at the prison door.
“It was no sacrifice for me. All that I had known in the old li
fe was gone. Sneers followed me; the ghosts of money rose up to accuse. I was a felon’s daughter; but, worse than that–I was poor! This country held out its arms to me, clean and undefiled. When I got my first sight of it, and the taste of its free air in my nostrils, my heart began to unfold again, and the cramped wrinkles fell out of my tired soul.”
The sunshine was around them, and the peace of the open places. They sat for the world to see them, and there was nothing to hide in the sympathy that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl’s hand. He caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her hoarded sorrow and unearned shame.
“There is that freedom about it,” said he, “when one sees it by day and sunlight.”
“But it has its nights, too,” she shuddered, the shadow of last night in her eyes.
“Yet they all pass–the longest of them and the most painful,” he comforted her.
“And leave their scars sometimes. How I came here, registered, drew a claim, and filed on it, you know. I did all that under the name of Horton, which is a family name on mother’s side, not thinking what the consequence might be. Now, in payment for this first breach of the law, I must at least give up all my schemes here and retreat. I may be prosecuted; I may even go to prison, like my father did.”
“Surely not!” he protested. “Who is there to know it, to lay a charge against you?”
“Such person is not wanting in the miserable plot of my life,” she answered. “I will reach him soon in my sorry tale.”
“Boyle!” Slavens said, as if thinking aloud. “He’s the man!”
“You take the name from my mouth,” she told him. “He has threatened me with prosecution. Perjury, he says it would be called, and prison would be the penalty.”