Over the Pass Part 31

"You know? You know?" he repeated.

"About the millions," she corrected herself, hastily. "Go on, Jack, if you wish!" Urgency crept into her tone, the urgency of wishing to have done with a scene which she was bearing with the fort.i.tude of tightened nerves.

"It was the millions that sent me out here with a message, when I did not much care about anything, and their message was: 'We do not want to see you again if you are to be forever a weakling. Get strong, for our power is to the strong! Get strong, or do not come back!'"

"Yes?"

For the first time since he had begun his story she looked fairly at him.

It was as if the armor had melted with sympathy and pity and she, in the pride of the poverty of Little Rivers, was armed with a Samaritan kindliness. For a second only he saw her thus, before she looked away to the horizon and he saw that she was again in armor.

"And I craved strength! It was my one way to make good. I rode the solitudes, following the seasons, getting strength. I rejoiced in the tan of my arm and the movement of my own muscles. I learned to love the feel of a rifle-stock against my shoulder, the touch of the trigger to my finger's end. I would shoot at the cactus in the moonlight--oh, that is difficult, shooting by moonlight!--and I gloried in my increasing accuracy--I, the weakling of libraries and galleries and sunny verandas of tourist resorts! Afraid at first of a precipice's edge, I came to enjoy looking over into abysses and in spending a whole day climbing down into their depths, while Firio waited in camp. And at times I would cry out: 'Millions, I am strong! I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of anything!' In the days when I knew I could never be acceptable as their master I knew I was in no danger of ever having to face them. When I had grown strong, less than ever did I want to face them. I know not why, but I saw shadows; I looked into another kind of depths--mental depths--which held a message that I feared. So I procrastinated, staying on in the air which had given me red blood. But that was cowardly, and that day I came over the pa.s.s I was making my last ride in the kingdom of irresponsibility. I was going home!

"When you asked me not to face Leddy I simply had to refuse. I had just as soon as not that Leddy would shoot at me, because I wanted to see if he would. Yes, I was strong. I had conquered. And if Leddy hit me, why, I did not have to go back to battle with the shadows--the obsession of shadows which had grown in my mind as my strength grew. When I was smiling in Leddy's muzzle, as they say I did, I was just smiling exultantly at the millions that had called me a weakling, and saying, like some boaster, 'Could you do this, millions?' I--I--well, Mary, I--I have told you what I never was quite able to tell myself before."

"Thank you, Jack!" she answered, and all the particles of sunlight that bathed her seemed to reflect her quiet gladness as something detached, permeating, and transcendent.

"When Leddy challenged me I wanted to fight," he went on. "I wanted to see how cool I, the weakling whom the millions scorned, could be in battle. After Leddy's shot in the _arroyo_ I found that strength had discovered something else in me--something that had lain dormant in boyhood and had not awakened to any consciousness of itself in the five years on the desert--something of which all my boyhood training made me no less afraid than of the shadows, born of the blood, born of the very strength I had won. It seemed to run counter to books and gardens and peace itself--a lawless, devil-like creature! Yes, I gloried in the fact that I could kill Leddy. It was an intoxication to hold a steady bead on him. And you saw and felt that in me--yes, I tell you everything as a man must when he comes to a woman offering himself, his all, with his angels, his devils, and his dreams!"

He paused trembling, as before a judge. She turned quickly, with a sudden, winsome vivacity, the glow of a great satisfaction in her eyes and smiling a comradeship which made her old att.i.tude over the wall a thing of dross and yet far more intimate. Her hand went out to meet his.

"Jack, we have had good times together," she said. "We were never mawkish; we were just good citizens of Little Rivers, weren't we? And, Jack, every mortal of us is partly what he is born and the rest is what he can do to bend inheritance to his will. But we can never quite transform our inheritance and if we stifle it, some day it will break loose. The first thing is to face what seems born in us, and you have made a good beginning."

She gave his hands a nervous, earnest clasp and withdrew hers as she rose. So they stood facing each other, she in the panoply of good will, he with his heart on his sleeve. The swiftly changing pictures of the Eternal Painter in his evening orgy seemed to fill the air with the music of a symphony in its last measures, and her very breaths and smiles to be keeping time with its irresistible movement toward the finale.

"I must be starting back, Jack," she said.

"And, Mary, I must learn how to master the millions. Oh, I have not the courage of the little dwarf pine in the canyon! Mary, Mary, I calloused my hands for you! I want to master the millions for you! I would give you the freedom of Little Rivers and all the cities of the world!"

"No, Jack! This is my side of the pa.s.s. I shall be very happy here."

"Then I will stay in Little Rivers! I will leave the millions to the shadows! I will stay on ranch-making, fortune-making. Mary, I love you! I love you!"

There was no staying the flame of his feeling. He seized her hands; he drew her to him. But her hands were cold; they were shivering.

"Jack! No, no! It is not in the blood!" she cried in the face of some mocking phantom, her calmness gone and her words rocking with the tumult of emotion.

"In the blood, Mary? What do you mean? What do you know that I don't know? Do you know those shadows that I cannot understand better than I?" he pleaded; and he was thinking of the Doge's look of pity and challenge and of the meeting long ago in Florence as the hazy filaments of a mystery.

"No, I should not have said that. What do I know? Little--nothing that will help! I know what is in me, as I know what is in you. I am afraid of myself--afraid of you!"

"Mary, I will fight all the shadows!" He drew her close to him resistlessly in his might.

"Jack, you will not use your strength against me! Jack!"

He saw her eyes in a mist of pain and reproach as he released her. And now she threw back her head; she was smiling in the philosophy of garden nonsense as she cried:

"Good-by, Jack! Luck against the dinosaur! Don't press him too hard when he is turning a sharp corner. Remember he has a long reach with his old paleozoic tail. Luck!" with a laugh through her tears; a laugh with tremulous cheer in it and yet with the ring of a key in the lock of a gate.

Unsteadily he bent over and taking her hands in his pressed his lips to them.

"Yes, luck!" he repeated, and half staggering turned toward the defile.

"Luck!" she called after him when he was out of sight. "Luck!" she called to the silence of the pa.s.s.

Three days with the trail and the Eternal Painter mocking him, when the singing of Spanish verses that go click with the beat of horse-hoofs in the sand sounded hollow as the refrain of vain memories, and from the steps of a Pullman he had a final glimpse of Firio's mournful face, with its dark eyes shining in the light of the station lamp. Firio had in his hand a paper, a sort of will and testament given him at the last minute, which made him master in fee simple of the ranch where he had been servant, with the provision that the Doge of Little Rivers might store his overflow of books there forever.

PART II

HE FINDS HIMSELF

XXIII

LABELLED AND SHIPPED

Behold Jack clad in the habiliments of conventional civilization taken from the stock of ready-made suitings in an El Paso store! They were of the Moscowitz and Guggenheim type, the very latest and nattiest, as advertised in popular prints. The dealer said that no gentleman could be well dressed without them. He wanted to complete the transformation with a cream-colored Fedora or a brown derby.

"I'll wait on the thirty-third degree a little longer," said Jack, fondling the flat-brimmed cowpuncher model of affectionate predilection.

Swinging on a hook on the sleeper with the sway of the train, its company was soothing to him all the way across the continent.

The time was March, that season of the northern year when winter growing stale has a gritty, sticky taste and the relief of spring seems yet far away. After the desert air the steam heat was stifling and nauseating.

Jack's head was a barrel about to burst its hoops; his skin drying like a mummy's; his muscles in a starchy misery from lack of exercise. He felt boxed up, an express package labelled and shipped. When he crawled into his berth at night it was with a sense of giving himself up to asphyxiation at the whim of strange G.o.ds.

If you have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, six months far from the hysteria of t.i.ttering electric bells, the bra.s.sy honk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech of their wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add a certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on the morning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosom of the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbidding abysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man has done his mightiest in contriving ma.s.ses to imitate the architectural chaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the dome of heaven, in which a pale, suffused, yellowish spot alone bespoke the existence of a sun in the universe.

In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father, naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr.

would meet for the first time in five years. Jack was conscious of a faster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as the crowd debouched from the ferryboat. At the exit to the street a big limousine was waiting. The gilt initials on the door left no doubt for whom it had been sent. But there was no one to meet him, no one after his long absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jack sharply. After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them the footman advanced.

"If you please, Mr. Wingfield," he said, taking Jack's suit case.

"What would Jim Galway think of me now!" thought Jack. He put his head inside the car cautiously. "Another box!" he thought, this time aloud.

"You have the check for it, sir?" asked the footman, thinking that Jack was using the English of the mother island for trunk.

"No. That's all my baggage."

In the tapering, cut-gla.s.s vase between the two front window-panels of the "box" was a rose--a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions, evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master.

Its freshness and color appealed to Jack. He took it out and pressed it to his nostrils.

"Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect," he said to the amazed attendants; "and I will walk if you will take the suit case to the house."

He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered across town, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey, now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills of the river-front avenues.