A Breath of Prairie and other stories Part 21

"It was all a lie? You were drunk?" Ichabod crossed the line, standing over him.

A rustle and a great snort of contempt went around the room; but Duggin still felt those terrible eyes upon him.

"I was very drunk. It was all a lie."

Without another word Ichabod turned away, and almost immediately the other men followed, the door closing behind them. Only the bar-keeper stood impa.s.sive, watching.

That instant the red heat of the liquor returned to the big man's brain and he picked up the revolver. Muttering, he staggered over to the bar.

"D--n him--the hide-faced--" he cursed. "Gimme a drink, Barney.

Whiskey, straight."

"Not a drop."

"What?"

"Never another drop in my place so long as I live."

"Barney, d.a.m.n you!"

"Get out! You coward!"

"But, Barney--"

"Not another word. Go."

Again Duggin was sober as he stumbled out into the evening.

Ichabod moved slowly up the street, months aged in those last few minutes. Reaction was inevitable, and with it the future instead of the present, stared him in the face. He had crowded the lie down the man's throat, but well he knew it had been useless. The story was true, and it would spread; no power of his could prevent. He could not deceive himself, even. That name! Again the white anger born of memory, flooded him. Curses on the name and on the man who had spoken it! Why must the fellow have turned coward at the last moment? Had they but touched feet over the line--

Suddenly Ichabod stopped, his hands pressed to his head. Camilla, home--alone! And he had forgotten! He hurried back to the waiting Swede, an anathema that was not directed at another, hot on his lips.

"All ready, Ole," he announced, clambering to the seat.

The boy handed up the lines lingeringly.

"Here, sir." Then uncontrollable, long-repressed curiosity broke the bounds of deference. "You--heard him, sir?"

"Yes."

Ole edged toward his own wagon.

"It wasn't so?"

"Duggin swore it was a lie."

"He--"

"He swore it was false, I say."

They drove out into the prairie and the night; the stars looking down, smiling, as in the morning which was so long ago, the man had smiled,--looking upward.

"Tiny, tiny mortal," they twinkled, each to the other. "So small and hot, and rebellious. Tiny, tiny, mortal!"

But the man covered his face with his hands, shutting them out.

CHAPTER VI--BY A CANDLE'S FLAME

Asa Arnold sat in the small upstairs room at the hotel of Hans Becher.

It was the same room that Ichabod and Camilla had occupied when they first arrived; but he did not know that. Even had he known, however, it would have made slight difference; nothing could have kept them more constantly in his mind than they were at this time. He had not slept any the night before; a fact which would have spoken loudly to one who knew him well; and this morning he was very tired. He lounged low in the oak chair, his feet on the bed, the usual big cigar in his mouth.

This morning, the perspective of the little man was anything but normal. Worse than that, he could not reduce it to the normal, try as he might.

His meeting with Camilla yesterday had produced a deep and abiding shock; for either of them to have been so moved signified the stirring of dangerous forces. They--and especially himself--who had always accepted life, even crises, so calmly; who had heretofore laughed at all display of emotion--for them to have acted as they had, for them to have spoken to each other the things they had spoken, the things they could not forget, that he never could forgive--it was unbelievable! It upset all the established order of things!

His anger of yesterday against Camilla had died out. She was not to blame; she was a woman, and women were all alike. He had thought differently before; that she was an exception; but now he knew better.

One and all they were mere puppets of emotion, and fickle.

In a measure, though, as he had excused Camilla he had incriminated Ichabod. Ichabod was the guilty one, and a man. Ichabod had filched from him his possession of most value; and without even the form of a by-your-leave. The incident of last evening at the saloon (for he had heard of it in the hour, as had every one in the little town) had but served to make more implacable his resentment. By the satire of circ.u.mstances it had come about that he again, Asa Arnold, had been the cause of another's defending the honor of his own wife,--for she was his wife as yet,--and that other, the defender, was Ichabod Maurice!

The little man's face did not change at the thought. He only smoked harder, until the room was blue; but though he did not put the feeling in words even to himself, he knew in the depths of his own mind that the price of that last day was death. Whether it was his own death, or the death of Ichabod, he did not know; he did not care; but that one of them must die was inevitable. Horrible as was the thought, it had no terror for him, now. He wondered that it did not have; but, on the contrary, it seemed to him very ordinary, even logical--as one orders a dinner when he is hungry.

He lit another cigar, calmly. It was this very imperturbability of the little man which made him terrible. Like a great movement of Nature, it was awful from its very resistlessness; its imperviability to appeal. Steadily, as he had lit the cigar, he smoked until the air became bluer than before. In a ghastly way, he was trying to decide whose death it should be,--as one decides a winter's flitting, whether to Florida or California; only now the question was: should it be suicide, or,--as in the saloon yesterday,--leave the decision to Chance? For the time the personal equation was eliminated; the man weighed the evidence as impartially as though he were deciding the fate of another.

He sat long and very still; until even in the daylight the red cigar-end grew redder in the haze. Without being conscious of the fact, he was probably doing the most unselfish thinking of his life.

What the result of that thought would have been no man will ever know, for of a sudden, interrupting, Hans Becher's round face appeared in the doorway.

"Ichabod Maurice to see you," coughed the German, obscured in the cloud of smoke which pa.s.sed out like steam through the opening.

It cannot be said that Asa Arnold's face grew impa.s.sive; it was that already. Certain it was, though, that behind the mask there occurred, at that moment, a revolution. Born of it, the old mocking smile sprang to his lips.

"The devil fights for his own," he soliloquized. "I really believe I,"--again the smile,--"I was about to make a sacrifice."

"Sir?"

"Thank you, Hans."

The German's jaw dropped in inexpressible surprise.

"Sir?" he repeated.

"You made a decision for me, then. Thank you."

"I do not you understand."