Over the Pass Part 22

"Shall we start in the morning and have luncheon at the foot of the range?" suggested Jack.

She favored an early afternoon start; he argued for his point of view, and in their preoccupation with the pa.s.sage of arms they did not notice Pedro Nogales slipping along beside the hedge with soft steps, his hand under his jacket. A gleam out of the bosom of Pedro's jacket, a cry from Mary, and a knife flashed upward and drove toward Jack's neck.

Jack had seemed oblivious of his surroundings, his gaze centered on Mary.

Yet he was able to duck backward so that the blade only slit open his shirt as Pedro, with the misdirected force of his blow, lunged past its object. Mary saw that face which had been laughing into hers, which had been so close to hers in its persistent smile of persuasion, struck white and rigid and a glint like that of the blade itself in the eyes. In a breath Jack had become another being of incarnate, unthinking physical power and swiftness. One hand seized Pedro's wrist, the other his upper arm, and Mary heard the metallic click of the knife as it struck the earth and the sickening sound of the bone of Pedro's forearm cracking.

She saw Pedro's eyes bursting from their sockets in pain and fear; she saw Jack's still profile of unyielding will and the set muscles of his neck and the knitting muscles of his forearm driving Pedro over against the hedge, as if bent on breaking the Mexican's back in two, and she waited in frozen apprehension to hear another bone crack, even expecting Pedro's death cry.

"The devil is out of Senor Don't Care!" It was the voice of Ignacio, who had come around the house in time to witness the scene.

"What fearful strength! You will kill him!" It was the voice of the Doge, from the porch.

"Yes, please stop!" Mary pleaded.

Suddenly, at the sound of her cry, Jack released his hold. The strong column of his neck became apparently too weak to hold the weight of his head. Inert, he fell against the hedge for support, his hands hanging limp at his side, while he stared dazedly into s.p.a.ce. It seemed then that Pedro might have picked up the knife and carried out his plan of murder without defence by the victim.

"Yes, yes, yes!" Jack repeated.

Pedro had not moved from the hollow in the hedge which the impress of his body had made. He was trembling, his lips had fallen away from his teeth, and he watched Jack in stricken horror, a beaten creature waiting on some judgment from which there was no appeal.

"We'll tell fairy stories"--Jack's soft tones of persuasion repeated themselves in Mary's ears in contrast to the effect of what she had just witnessed. Her hand slipped along the crest of the hedge, as if to steady herself.

"I'll change my mind about going to the pa.s.s, Jack," she said.

"Yes, Mary," he answered in a faint tone.

He looked around to see her back as she turned away from him; then, with an effort, he stepped free of the hedge.

"Come, we will go to the doctor!" he said to the Mexican.

He touched Pedro's shoulder softly and softly ran his hand down the sleeve in which the arm hung limp. Pedro had not moved; he still leaned against the hedge inanimate as a mannikin.

"Come! Your legs are not broken! You can walk!" said Jim Galway, who had come up in a hurry when he saw what was happening.

"Pedro, you will learn not to play with the devil in Senor Don't Care!"

whispered Ignacio, while Mary had disappeared in the house and the Doge stood watching.

Jack had stroked Pedro's head while the bone was being set. He had arranged for Pedro's care. And now he was in his own yard with Jag Ear and the ponies, rubbing their muzzles alternately in silent impartiality, his head bowed reflectively as Firio came around the corner of the house. At first he half stared at Firio, then he surveyed the steeds of his long journeyings in questioning uncertainty, and then looked back at Firio, smiling wanly.

"Firio," he said, "I feel that I am a pretty big coward. Firio, I am full up--full to overflowing. My mind is stuffed with cobwebs. I--I must think things out. I must have the solitudes."

"The trail!" prescribed Doctor Firio.

After Jack had given his ranch in charge to Galway, he rode away in the dusk, not by the main street, but straight across the levels toward the pa.s.s.

XVII

THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND

Jasper Ewold was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer express them with the simple directness of our ancestors. He kept a diary with what he called a perfect regularity of intermittency. A week might pa.s.s without his writing a single word, and again he might indulge freely for a dozen nights running. He wrote as much or as little as he pleased. He wrote when he had something to tell and when he was in the mood to tell it.

"It is facing yourself in your own ink," he said. "It is confessing that you are an egoist and providing an antidote for your egoism. Firstly, you will never be bored by your own past if you can appreciate your errors and inconsistencies. Secondly, you will never be tempted to bore others with your past as long as you wish to pose as a wise man."

He must have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to form a powerful current.

On the evening that Jack took to the trail again, Jasper Ewold had a number of thick notebooks out of the box in the library which he always kept locked, and placed them on the living-room table beside his easy chair, in which he settled himself. Mary was sewing while he pored over his life in review as written by his own hand. Her knowledge of the secrets of that chronicle from wandering student days to desert exile was limited to glimpses of the close lines of fine-written pages across the breadth of the circle of the lamp's reflection. He surrounded his diary with a line of mystery which she never attempted to cross. On occasions he would read to her certain portions which struck his recollection happily; but these were invariably limited to his impressions of some city or some work of art that he was seeing for the first time in the geniality of the unadulterated joy of living in what she guessed was the period of youth before she was born; and never did they throw any light on his story except that of his views as a traveller and a personality.

But he did not break out into a single quotation to-night. It seemed as if he were following the thread of some reference from year to year; for he ran his fingers through the leaves of certain parts hastily and became studiously intense at other parts as he gloomily pondered over them.

Neither she nor her father had mentioned Jack since the scene by the hedge. This was entirely in keeping with custom. It seemed a matter of instinct with both that they never talked to each other of him. Yet she was conscious that he had been in her father's mind all through the evening meal, and she was equally certain that her father realized that he was in her mind.

It was late when the Doge finished his reading, and he finished it with the page of the last book, where the fine handwriting stopped at the edge of the blank white s.p.a.ce of the future. An old desire, ever strong with Mary, which she had never quite had the temerity to express, had become impelling under the influence of her father's unusually long and silent preoccupation.

"Am I never to have a glimpse of that treasure? Am I never, never to read your diary?" she asked.

The Doge drew his tufted eyebrows together in utter astonishment.

"What! What, Mary! Why, Mary, I might preach a lesson on the folly of feminine curiosity. Do you think I would ask to see your diary?"

"But I don't keep one."

"Hoo-hoo-hoo!" The Doge was blowing out his lips in an ado of deprecatory nonsense. "Don't keep one? Have you lost your memory?"

"I had it a minute ago--yes," after an instant's playful consideration, "I am sure that I have it now."

"Then, everybody with a memory certainly keeps a diary. Would you want me to read all the foolish things you had ever thought? Do you think I would want to?"

"No," she answered.

"There you are, then!" declared the Doge victoriously, as he rose, slipping a rubber band with a forbidding snap over the last book. "And this is all stupid personal stuff--but mine own!"

There was an unconscious sigh of weariness as he took up the thumbed leather volumes. He was haggard. "Mine own" had given him no pleasure that evening. All the years of his life seemed to rest heavily upon him for a silent moment. Mary feared that she had hurt him by her request.

"You have read so much you will scarcely do any writing to-night,"

she ventured.

"Yes, I will add a few more lines--the spirit is in me--a few more days to the long record," he said, absently, then, after a pause, suddenly, with a kind of suppressed force vibrating in his voice: "Well, our Sir Chaps has gone."

"As unceremoniously as he came," she answered.

"It was terrible the way he broke Nogales's wrist!" remarked the Doge narrowly.

"Terrible!" she a.s.sented as she folded her work, her head bent.

"Gone, and doubtless for good!" he continued, still watching her sharply.

"Very likely!" she answered carelessly without looking up. "His vagarious playtime for this section is over."