Overland Red Part 46

"Mine--grew roses--in southern France."

"I am glad they eventually came to America," he said.

"Are you so fond of candy, Mr. Winthrop?"

"No."

"Neither am I."

"I'm glad they came, just the same. I simply can't help it."

"Overland--Mr. Summers--doesn't take life very seriously, does he?"

asked Louise.

"Not as seriously as life has taken him, at odd times."

"You brought Collie in your car, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"He's much better?"

"Yes. But he's pretty shaky yet. He's a little queer, in fact. As we came up the canon he asked me to stop the car by the cliff, near this end,--that place where the sunlight comes through a kind of notch in the west. I thought he was tired of the motion of the car, so we stopped and he lay back looking at the cliff. Pretty soon the sun shot a long ray past us and it fairly splattered gold on the canon wall. Then the shaft of sunlight went out. 'It will shine again,' he said, as if I didn't know that. Collie's a pretty sick man."

Later Winthrop and Louise joined the others at the veranda. Louise excused herself. She searched a long time before she found another rose.

This time it was a Colombe bud, full, red, and beautiful. She stepped to Collie's window. "Boy!" she called softly.

White and trembling, he stood in the long window looking down at her.

"I'm glad you are home again," she said.

He nodded, and glanced away.

"Boy!" she called again. "Catch." And she tossed the rose. He caught it and pressed it to his lips.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

NIGHT

Evening, placidly content with the warm silence, departed lingeringly.

Belated insects still buzzed in the wayside foliage. A bee, overtaken in his busy pilfering by the obliterating dusk, hung on a nodding mountain flower, unfearful above the canon's emptiness. An occasional bird ventured a boldly questioning note that lingered unfinished in the silence of indecision. Across the road hopped a young rabbit, a little rounded shadow that melted into the blur of the sage. A cold white fire, spreading behind the purple-edged ranges, enriched their somber panoply with illusive enchantments, ever changing as the dim effulgence drifted from peak to peak. Shadows grew luminous and were gone. In their stead wooded valleys and wide canons unfolded to the magic of the moon. There was no world but night and imagination.

With many rustlings the quail huddled in the live-oaks, complaining querulously until the darkness silenced them.

The warm, acrid fragrance of the hills was drawn intermittently across the cooler level of the shadowy road. A little owl, softly reiterating his cadences of rue, made loneliness as a thing tangible, a thing groping in the dusk with velvet hands.

Then came that hush of rest, that pause of preparation, as though night hesitated to awaken her countless myrmidons. With the lisping of invisible leaves the Great Master's music-book unfolded. That low, orchestral "F"--the dominant note of all nature's melodies--sounded in timorous unison--an experimental murmuring. Repeated in higher octaves, it swelled to shrill confidence, then a hundred, then myriad invisibles chanted to their beloved night or gossiped of the mystery of stars.

Then Night crept from the deep, cool canons to the starlit peaks and knelt with her sister hill-folk, Silence and Solitude; knelt, listening with bowed head to that ancient antiphony of thankfulness and praise; then rose and faced the western sea.

Boyar, the black pony, shook his head with a silvery jingling of rein-chains. His sleek flanks glistened in the moonlight. Louise curbed him gently with hand and voice as he stepped through the wide gateway of the ranch.

He paced lightly across the first shallow ford. Then the narrowing walls of the canon echoed his clean-cut steps--a patter of phantom hoof-beats following him, stride for stride. Down the long, ever-winding road they swung.

Louise, impelled to dreams by the languorous warm night and Boyar's easy stride up the steep, touched his neck with the rein and turned him into the Old Meadow Trail.

The tall, slender stems of the yucca and infrequent clumps of dwarfed cacti cast clear-edged shadows on the bare, moonlit ground. Boyar, sniffing, suddenly swung up and pivoted, his fore feet hanging over sheer black emptiness. Louise leaned forward, reining him round. Even before his fore feet touched the trail again, she heard the sibilant _bur-r-ing_ of the cold, uncoiling thing as it slid down the blind shadows of the hillside.

"I shan't believe in omens," she murmured.

She rea.s.sured the trembling Boyar, who fretted sideways and snorted as he pa.s.sed the spot where the snake had been coiled in the trail.

At the edge of the Old Meadow the girl dismounted, allowing Boyar to graze at will.

She climbed to the low rounded rock, her erstwhile throne of dreams, where she sat with knees gathered to her in her clasped hands. The pony paused in his grazing to lift his head and look at her with gently wondering eyes.

The utter solitude of the place, far above the viewless valley, allowed her thought a horizon impossible at the Moonstone Rancho. Alone she faced the grave question of making an unalterable choice. Collie had asked her to marry him. She had evaded direct reply to his direct question. She knew of no good reason why she should marry him. She knew of no better reason why she should not. She thought she was content with being loved. She was, for the moment.

The Old Meadow, that had once before revealed a sprightly and ragged romance, slumbered in the southern night; slumbered to awaken to the hushed tread of men and strange whisperings.

Down in the valley the coyotes called dismally, with that infinite shrill sadness of wild things that hunger, and in their wailing pulsed the eternal and unanswerable "Why?" challenging the peaceful stars.

Something in their questioning cry impelled Louise to lift her hands to the night. "What is it? What is it up there--behind everything--that never, never answers?"

The moon was lost somewhere behind the ragged peaks. The night grew deeper. The Old Meadow, shadowed by the range above it, grew dark, impenetrable, a place without boundary or breadth or depth.

"Got a match, kid?"

Louise raised her head. Some one was afoot on the Old Meadow Trail. She could hear the whisper of dried gra.s.ses against the boots of the men as another voice replied, "Sure! Here you are." And Louise knew that Collie was one of the men.

About to call, she hesitated, strangely curious as to who the other man might be, and why Collie and he should foregather in the Old Meadow, at night.

"Never mind," mumbled the first speaker; "I thought I wanted to smoke, but I don't. I want to talk first--about the Rose Girl."

Louise tried to call out, but she was interrupted by Overland's voice.

The two men had stopped at the lower side of the great rock. She could hear them plainly, although she could not see them.

"Collie--we're busted. We're done, Chico. I ain't said nothin' to Billy yet. He's got money, anyway. This here only hits you and me."

"What do you mean, Red?"

"I mean that the Rose Girl Mining Company, Incorporated, Jack Summers, President and General Manager, don't belong to us and never did. We been sellin' stock that ain't ours and never was."

"How's that?"

"I was goin' to write. But I ain't no hand to write about business.

Writin' po'try is bad enough. You recollec' them papers and that dust Billy tried to find, out there by the track?"