Ewing's Lady Part 9

During those last days Ewing brushed only the airy slopes of illusion, strive as he would to keep his feet to earth. Many were the tricks he used to this end: vain tricks to forget the miracle of his going, of going so soon, of going with her.

Ben Crider would not help him forget. When s.n.a.t.c.hes of warning from "Traps and Pitfalls" grew stale, Ben coined advice of a large and general character.

"Want to be an artist, hey? Ask me? Go down to Durango--let that professor learn you in ten lessons. Make yer five t' eight dollars a day canva.s.sin' fur enlargements. Gold frame throwed in. Yes, sir! Ask me?

Durango's fur enough. New York's too gosha-mighty fur!"

It was not possible to forget under the droppings of this counsel.

Wherefore his spirit tossed in tumult.

When Ben called him on the morning of the start it was still dark. He lay a moment, his nerves tightening. This was the last time he would lie in that bed--for how long? Well, on some unmarked night in the pregnant future, lying there again, he would look back to this moment and tell himself all the wonderful things that had come to him--tell his ignorant, puzzled, excited self, who would, somehow, be waiting and wondering there.

Juggling this conceit, he groped for matches and a candle. He could hear the singing of the kettle in the outer room. Through the window he saw a lantern swinging, and knew that Ben would be bringing around the horses. It was a time to be cool, a time to gird himself.

He had breakfast on the table when Ben came in, and they ate by the light of a smoky lamp, tacitly pretending that no miracle was afoot.

Saving the early hour, it was a scene they enacted whenever they drove to Pagosa for supplies, up to the point when, the meal finished, they carried two trunks from the studio out to the wagon. But they managed this carelessly enough, with only a casual, indignant word or two about the excessive weight of full trunks.

Only the faintest hint of light showed in the east as the chilled horses stumbled awkwardly down the hill. A half hour they rode in a silence broken but once, and then only by Ben's hoa.r.s.e threat to "learn" the off horse something needful but unspecified which it appeared not to know.

The light glowed from gray to rose and day was opened by the bark of a frantic squirrel that ran half-way down a tree trunk, threatening attack, in alarm for its store of spruce cones at the foot of the tree.

A crested jay at the same moment mocked them harshly from a higher branch of the tree.

Ewing exhaled with gusto a breath of the warming, pine-spiced air.

"It's sunning up, Ben." Ben grunted unamiably.

A little distance ahead of them a doe and a half-grown fawn bounded across the road.

"She seemed to be in a hurry," Ewing again ventured.

"She wanted t' git that child away from here, 'fore some one stuffed its head full o' fool talk about goin' off to New York. Can't tell what notions a young deer _might_ git." With this laborious surmise he shut his jaws together with repellent grimness.

Their road now wound down a hill and out of the woods to join the valley road.

"Yender's Beulah Pierce!" Ben snapped this out savagely. The wagon was half a mile ahead. Pierce was driving, and in the rear seat were two figures whom they knew to be Mrs. Laithe and her brother. As Ben had pointedly ignored these Ewing did not refer to them.

They came to a gate in a wire fence that stretched interminably away on either side, over brown, low-rolling hills. Pierce had left the gate open for them, and Ewing got out to close it after they had pa.s.sed through.

"Larabie is building a lot of fence," he said, as they drove on. "At this rate he'll have every school section in Hinsdale County wired in pretty soon."

On this impersonal ground Ben seemed willing to meet him.

"Me? Know what I'm going to do if Wes' Larabie cuts off any more o' this road with his barb wire? Stick a pair o' wire clippers in the whip socket an' drive through. _That's_ all! You'd think he owned all America, the way he makes people sidle along that fence till he gits good an' ready to make a gate. Me? Make my own gates. Yes, sir! Wire clippers!"

With this he was sufficiently cheered to insult vivaciously a couple of dull, incurious Mexicans whom they presently pa.s.sed, plodding behind a laden burro train. To his opprobrious burst of weirdly entangled Spanish and English he added the taunting bleat of a sheep and a merrily malign gesture eloquent of throats to be slit--the throats of unspeakable sheep herders. He observed with deep disgust that neither of the threatened ones gave any sign of interest in their portended fate.

They pa.s.sed with scarce a lift of their heads.

"They're takin' supplies up to that sheep outfit o' Rankin's," grumbled Ben. "Pierce an' some o' the others is talkin' about gettin' in a car load o' saltpeter an' dopin' the range if Rankin lets his herd work down any closeter--have it billed in as hardware or pianos, an' unload the car at night. Serve him right fur bein' a sheep man. An' yet I knowed Nels Rankin, five, six years ago, when there wa'n't a more respectable cuss in the hull San Juan."

In pa.s.sing the Pulcifer ranch they made talk about the hay-cutting, for a reaper sent its locustlike click from a brown stretch of bottom land.

Pulcifer had a good stand of hay, they agreed, and probably he wouldn't have such a big winter kill this year if he didn't act the fool and sell off too much of it. You couldn't expect to bring cattle through fat on cottonwood browse.

So they lamely gossiped the miles away in strained avoidance of the big event. Only once did Ewing look back, while Ben was occupied with the horses at a ford. The rocky wall at the verge of their lake was intimately near, despite the miles they had come, and below it, through a notch in the hills, he could see a spot of yellow--the new shake roof on a shed they had built that summer near the cabin. Then his eyes were ahead to where Pierce's wagon crawled up a hill.

Ben whipped up the horses and burst into song:

"One evening I was strolling through the city of the dead; I viewed where all around me their peaceful forms were spread."

He took the thing at a quick, rollicking tempo, as one resolved to be gay under difficulties.

When they drew up to the station platform at Pagosa, Ewing hurried to greet Mrs. Laithe and her brother. Pierce busied himself with the trunks, cautiously watching the man check them.

Ben Crider, after a long, fervent look at Ewing's back, caught his breath, sniffled, strangled this, and stepped quickly into his wagon.

Pulling the horses quietly away from the platform he whipped them into a sharp trot toward the town. Ewing ran back, shouting. Ben would not turn, but he thrust one arm back and upward with a careless wave.

Ewing stared hard at the bent head, the eloquent back, longing for a further sign, but none came. He was at the gateway of the world, a mist before his eyes.

A moment later their little train rattled into a narrow canon where its shrill whistle, battered from wall to wall, made the place alive with shrieking demons.

Having seen his charge to a seat in the one squalid car, Ewing went out to brace himself on the rear platform. She who was doing this thing had seemed a strange lady again; in her manner, as in her dress, more formal. The dark-blue, close-fitting gown, the small toque of blue velvet, the secretive veil, the newish gloves, instead of the old, worn riding gauntlets, the glossy-toed black boots so different from those of scarred tan he knew, all marked a change that heightened the pangs of homesickness he already suffered.

With burning eyes and tightened throat he saw the floor of the canon rush away from him, and watched old Baldy's snow hood flashing momentarily as the train twisted, now sinking below a quick-rushing wall of rock, now showing over a clump of cedars. It was as if the old peak had become sprightly at his going, and sought to bob curtsies to him.

At intervals the train came to a jangling halt. The little locomotive would leave it and ramble inconsequently off into the big pine woods, to return with screeches of triumph, dragging a car load of new-sawn boards from the mill. Or it would puff away to a siding and come back importantly with a car of excited sheep. At these halts Ewing would leap to the ground to feel the San Juan earth under his feet.

At the junction where they were to take the through train he reflected that nothing had really happened yet. He could turn back and be out of the dream. The little train would return up the canon presently. The conductor would be indifferent to his presence. To the brakeman, whom he knew, he could say, "Yes, I thought some of going to New York this morning, but I changed my mind." He would be back at Pagosa by five and find Ben at the post office or the "Happy Days" saloon. Then there would be no more of that curious sickness--a kind of sickish wanting. Yet, when the through train drew in, he hurried aboard.

He stood on the rear platform and watched a horseman jogging over the sandy plain to the west, picturing his ride from the junction to some lonely ranch on a distant river bottom. He would have the week's mail in a bag back of the saddle, and a stock of tobacco. He would reach the place after dark, perhaps, from sheer _ennui_, shooting at a coyote or two along the way. He knew that rider's life, the days of it and the nights, and all of good or ill that might ever betake him. It was well, he thought, to dare a bigger life, though he waved a friendly greeting to the unconscious horseman, jogging at the head of his train of dust.

He flung a tender glance at the diminished junction, now a low, dull blur on the level horizon, and went into the car.

For the moment the Pullman had no other occupant but himself and Mrs.

Laithe, and she was sleeping, he thought; but her eyes opened as he would have pa.s.sed her seat. She had replaced the toque with a brown cap he knew, and as she smiled up at him she seemed again almost the familiar G.o.dmother of his fairy tale. He pa.s.sed on, however, after a meaningless word or two and, sprawling in another section, surrendered himself to the troubled pretentiousness of the Pullman school of decoration.

He had left the lady grateful for his going. She was in no mood for that artless lyric chant of youth in which he was so adept. Her brother that morning had accused her of waning enthusiasm for her protege.

"I believe you're funking, Nell," he had said shrewdly. "You're discovering that mountain slumming is different from the city kind."

But she had protested that no discerning person of ordinary humanity could have done less for the prisoned youth. "Of course"--and she had sighed--"he's a mere bundle of untried eagerness, and we're responsible, in a way, for Heaven knows what, but we had to do it, didn't we?"

"Not 'we' had to! _You_ had to. It's all yours, Nell--the credit and the glory and all the rest. I prefer to get up my own responsibilities, if you don't mind."

"But you agreed with me--you _did_--you advised when I asked you--it's perfectly plain--you said, 'Of course!'"--But the train moved off in the midst of his laugh at this, and he had doffed his hat to her with a mocking gesture of freehanded relinquishment.

Now, as she closed her eyes again, her memory dived for some fairy tale or fragment of mythology in which an unsuspecting humanitarian rescued an insignificant woods thing, only to have it change on the instant into a creature troublesome in more ways than one. She was certain some primitive fabulist had foreseen this complication, but her mind was weary and shadowed, and the historic solution evaded her. "Mountain slumming" was truly more exigent than the town sort.

But this reflection aroused a defensive sympathy. The vision of Ewing as he had pa.s.sed glowed before her shut eyes, the active, square-shouldered, slender figure, garbed in a decently fitting suit of gray (she was glad to remember that), the quick eyes, ardent for life, the thinned, brown face, the usual buoyance held down to an easy self-possession that was new to her, the wild, reliant expectancy of a boy tempered all at once by some heritage of insight. Outwardly, at least, he would fit his new life. So reflecting, she dozed on the look of the man in his eyes, and dreamed that she feared this and fled.

But after mad flight through the windings of an interminable corridor she awoke to look squarely into his eyes, to cower instinctively under his touch on her arm. Her waking thought took the thread of the dream, her flight had been vain: he was there, and his voice throbbed fatefully within a secret chamber of her mind, even though his words rang little of portent.

"We are coming to the supper station."