Sunny Slopes Part 13

She must love it, she would love it, she did love it. It was a rich, beautiful, gracious land,--gray, sandy, barren, but green with promise to Carol and to David, as it had been to thousands of others who came that way with a burden of weakness buoyed by hope.

A shrill shriek sounded outside the tent,--a dangerous rustling in the sand, a crinkling of dead leaves in the corners of the steps, a ring, a roar, a wild tumult. Something whirled to the floor in David's room, papers rattled, curtains flapped, and there was a metallic patter on the uncarpeted floor of the tent. Carol gave an indistinct murmur of fear and burrowed beneath the covers.

It was David who threw back the blankets and turned on the lights.

Just a sand-storm, that was all,--a common sand-storm, without which New Mexico might be almost any other place on earth. David's Bible had been whirled from the window-ledge, and fine sand was piling in through the screens.

Carol withdrew from the covers most courageously when she heard the comforting click of the electric switch, and the rea.s.suring squeak of David's feet on the floor of the room.

"Everything's all right," he called to her. "Don't get scared. Will you help me put these flaps down?"

Carol leaped from her bed at that, and ran to lower the windows. Then she sat by David's side while the storm raged outside, roaring and piling sand against the little tent.

After that, to bed once more, still determinedly in love with the land of health, and praying fervently for morning.

Soon David's heavy breathing proclaimed him sound asleep. But sleep would not come to Carol. She gazed as one hypnotized into the starry brightness of the black sky as she could see it through the window beside her. How ominously dark it was. Softly she slipped out of bed and lowered the flaps of the window. She did not like that darkness.

After the storm, David had insisted the windows must be opened again,--that was the first law of lungers and chasers.

She was cold when she got back into bed, for the chill of the mountain nights was new to her. And an hour later, when she was almost dozing, footsteps prowled about the tent, loitering in the leaves outside her western window. David was sleeping, she must not interfere with a moment of his restoring rest. She clasped her hands beneath the covers, and moistened her feverish lips. If it were an Indian lurking there, his deadly tomahawk upraised, she prayed he might strike the fatal blow at once. But the steps pa.s.sed, and she climbed on her knees and lowered the flaps on the side where the steps sounded.

Later, the sudden tinkle of a bell across the grounds startled her into sitting posture. No, it wasn't David, after all,--somebody else,--some other woman's David, likely, ringing for the nurse. Carol sighed. How could David get well and strong out here, with all these other sick ones to wring his heart with pity? Were the doctors surely right,--was this the land of health?

Again footsteps approached the tent, stirring up the dry sand, and again Carol held her breath until they had pa.s.sed. Then she grimly closed the windows on the third side of her room, and smiled to herself as she thought, "I'll get them up again before David is awake."

But she crept into bed and slept at last.

Early, very early, she was awakened by the sunlight pouring upon the flaps at the windows. It was five o'clock, and very cold. Carol wrapped a blanket about her and peeked in upon her husband.

"Good morning," she greeted him brightly. "Isn't it lovely and bright?

How is my nice old boy? Nearly well?"

"Just fine. How did you sleep?"

"Like a top," she declared.

"Were you afraid?"

"Um, not exactly," she denied, glancing at him with sudden suspicion.

"Did the wind blow all your flaps down?"

"How did you know?"

"Oh, I was up long ago looking in on you. We'll get a room over in the Main Building to-day. It costs more, but the accommodations are so much better. We are directly on the path from the street, so we hear every pa.s.sing footstep."

Carol blushed. "I am not afraid," she insisted.

"We'll get a room just the same. It will be easier for you all the way around."

Carol flung open the door and gazed out upon the land of health. The long desolate mesa land stretched far away to the mountains, now showing pink and rosy in the early sunshine. The little white tents about them were as suggestively pitiful as before. There were no trees, no flowers, no carpeting gra.s.s, to brighten the desolation.

Bare, bleak, sandy slopes reached to the mountains on every side.

David sat up in bed and looked out with her.

"Just a long bare slope of sand, isn't it?" she whispered. "Sand and cactus,--no roses blooming here upon the sandy slopes."

"Yes, just sandy slopes to the mountains,--but Carol, they are sunny,--bare and bleak, but still they are sunny for us. Let's not lose sight of that."

CHAPTER XI

THE OLD TEACHER

"Chicago, Illinois.

"Dear Carol and David--

"It is most remarkable that you two can keep on laughing away out there by yourselves. It makes me think perhaps there is something fine in this being married business that sort of makes up for the rest of it.

I think it must take an exceptionally good eyesight to discern sunshine on the slopes of sickness. If I were traveling that route, I am convinced I should find it led me through dark valleys and over stony pathways with storm clouds and thunders and lightnings smashing all around my head.

"You admonished me to talk about myself and leave you alone. Well, I suppose you know more about yourselves than I could possibly tell you, and since it is your own little baby sister, I am sure you are more than willing to turn your telescope away from the sunny slopes a while for a glimpse of my business dabbles.

"This is Chicago.

"Aunt Grace was rendered more speechless than ever when I announced my intention of coming, and Prudence was shocked. But father and I talked it over, and he looked at me in that funny searching way he has and then said:

"'Good for you, Connie, you have the right idea. Chicago isn't big enough to swallow you, but it won't take you long to eat Chicago bodily. Of course you ought to go.'

"I know it is not safe to praise men too highly, they are so easily convinced of their astounding virtues, but that time I couldn't resist shaking hands with father and I said, and meant it:

"'Father, you are the only one in the world. I don't believe even the Lord could make your duplicate.'

"'Mr. Nesbitt was very angry because I left them'. He said that after he took me, a stupid little country ignoramus, and made something out of me, my desertion was nothing short of rank ingrat.i.tude and religious hypocrisy and treason to the land of my birth. One might have inferred that he picked me out of the gutter, brushed the dirt off, smoothed my ragged looks, and seated me royally in his stenographic chair, and made a business lady out of me. But it didn't work.

"I came.

"Mr. Baker, the minister there, is back of it. He met me on the street one day.

"'I hear you are literary,' he said.

"'Well, I think I can write,' I answered modestly.

"Then he said he had a third-half-nephew by marriage, to whom, ground under the heel of financial incompetency, he had once loaned the startling sum of fifty dollars,--I say startling, because it startled me to know a preacher ever had that much ready cash ahead of his grocery bill. Anyhow, the third-half-nephew, with the fifty dollars as a nucleus,--I think Providence must have multiplied it a little, for our fifty dollars never accomplished miracles like that,--but with that fifty dollars as a starter he did a little plunging for himself, and is now owner and editor of a great publishing house in Chicago.

"And Mr. Baker, the old minister, kept him going and coming, you might say, by sending him at frequent intervals, bright and budding lights with which to illuminate his publications. It seems the third-half-nephew by marriage, in grat.i.tude for the fifty dollars, never refused a position to any satellite his uncle chose to recommend.

And Mr. Baker glowed with delight that he had been able, from the unliterary center of Centerville to send so many candles to shine in the chandelier of Chicago.