The Bail Jumper Part 23

"That sounds like starting in the middle of a book," laughed the girl.

"The first chapters are only preliminary, anyway," said Burton.

"All right, Ray," she said, extending her hand. "This eliminates the first ten chapters. Now I must gallop home and have your suppers ready."

And almost before he knew he had released her hand the cloud of dust trailed again down the valley.

The McKay farmhouse was built of logs, with an upper story over the main section. The board floors were white and bare, save where a wolf skin or other trophy of the chase served as ornament and carpet. The hard, clean floors, the whitewashed, bulging logs, the bare joists and rafters, afforded a charm of rustic simplicity which no display of wealth can provide. Even as he ate his supper with a relish of his long drive Burton's eyes stole about into the shadowy corners of the room, where the firelight from the wood stove flickered along the floor and lost itself in the darkness. There was everywhere an air of comfort; of peace; of simplicity; yet what tales might those lurking corners repeat of the pioneers who for twenty years had shared the McKay hospitality as they related exploits of the early days more wonderful than any fiction!

The meal was ended. Burton felt that at least he had not been a bright conversationalist. Several times the farmer's daughter had addressed a remark to him a second time, and he answered almost in monosyllables.

His mind was too busy with the past-with the far, vague, distant past, when he sat before the wood fire and felt his young frame thrill as he listened to tales of adventure in the shanties of the Madawaska-tales of the river drive and the faction-fight, of the cry of the wolverine by lonely moonlit sh.o.r.es and the weird romances of loup-garou and windigo.

How he thrilled with a deep wonder of the mystery of the untrod path which lay before him, leading into the far, strange fields of manhood, where he too should do great deeds and win great victories and fear nothing. But even as he dreamed of future bravery he would snuggle nearer to the centre of the group. He could almost hear the wolverine baying out beyond the stables!... Then there was the evening prayer and the good-night kiss, and the ascent up the creaking stairs; the bed under the bare rafters, where through the broken shingles a single star watched until his eyes closed with the sweet weariness of early childhood, and he knew that the angels were guarding his sleep. G.o.d! How far had he travelled since then!

"You are tired, Ray," said the girl. "Let me show you to your room."

"Yep," added the farmer. "The sleepin' sickness has got you. We have it just as bad as in Africa. It don't kill anybody here, but there's no cure 'cept to sleep it off. Trouble is, the new-comer allus gets the sleepin' sickness an' the eatin' sickness tugether, which makes it powerful hard on the proprietor. It's twenty-one years since Ah struck these diggin's, an' Ah mind yet how Ah et an' slep' that first year.

Your mother use to say there wa'n't no use cookin' agin an appet.i.te like that. Yep, Kid, that was twenty-one years ago. You was born the next spring."

"That's how Dad betrays a woman's secret," bantered the girl. But the farmer was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes staring at the sparks as they dropped from the grate. His elbows rested on his knees, his palms stretched straight before him, the fingers touching at the tips.

There was a strange tenderness in the weather-worn face; a misty light in those honest old eyes. He was thinking of a little mound, just up the hillside, on which the gra.s.s had grown for twenty years.

The girl touched Burton's arm. He looked in her face, and she raised her eyebrows a hair's-breadth. No word was spoken as he followed her silently up the stairs.

At the door of his room she placed the lamp in his hand. Then in a low voice she said, "Dad never forgets. Dear old Dad!"

She remained lost in thought for a few moments, and Burton surveyed her.

She had removed the brown riding habit in which he first saw her, and stood revealed in a modest black dress. Her fair face, brown with the summer winds, seemed almost to fade into the ma.s.ses of her brown hair, as the calm sea fades into the sh.o.r.e-line. The only shade of colour she wore was a string of scarlet ribbon drawing the dark garment together at her throat. She was rather under average height, and at first he thought her slim, but a second glance convinced him that the perfection of her proportions and her strong, athletic life gave an impression that the scales would quickly dissipate. The upper lip rose slightly in the centre, as though alert to smile; the nose, strong but not over large, caught the vision for a moment, but immediately it was stolen by the eyes. What eyes they were! The warmth of the chinook, the freedom of the great plains, the wonder of sunset and dawn, the mystery of the deep, starless night, the courage of the white, fearless winter-all were blended in their hazel depths; or was it brown, or amber-grey? The lamp tricked him; he would see in daylight.

Her wits came back from their wanderings with a suddenness that caused her to start.

"You were dreaming at supper-time," she said. "I am dreaming now."

"G.o.d bless the world's dreamers," said Burton, fervently. "How often in Bible history He revealed himself to His people in a dream! And shall He not do it still? Can we suppose the Father of thought has lost the key to the midnight chambers of the brain? But practical men despise dreamers."

Her eyes had opened wider as he spoke; she was leaning slightly toward him when he finished. Thoughts are such mighty magnets that they attract even the material bodies that encase them. There was an appreciation in her look and her partly opened lips that Burton did not fail to notice.

"Practical men are fools," she said. "Good night."

For some days Burton did not find himself a.s.signed to any regular duties about the farm. Grain-growing was only a small part of Mr. McKay's business, and was, indeed, still regarded as largely experimental; the real wealth of the farm was represented by the herds of ranch cattle which fed in the heavy gra.s.s of the valley or roamed the unsettled plains for miles around. With these herds Burton had no concern; they were under the care of two cowboys long in Mr. McKay's employ. Decent fellows Burton found them to be, yet while they treated him with frank familiarity they could not altogether disguise their inbred conviction that the cow-puncher is of better clay than the sod-buster. He envied them their wild free life, their rides over the limitless plains, their "leave and liking to shout," while he sharpened the binder knives and tacked new slats on the canvases, and made fly-blankets for the horses out of twine sacks. The ancient war of the herdsman and the grainman was being fought out again in his own breast, and he secretly admitted a sense of envy. To ride the plains seemed a greater thing than to till them.

But if the cattlemen excited a measure of envy in the breast of Burton, he soon discovered that he had unwittingly aroused their jealousy.

Although their feeling toward him took no unkind form of expression, he became more and more conscious that he was regarded as an intruder, an unwelcome person tolerated simply for courtesy's sake. And the boy knew, by a kind of intuition, that the farmer's daughter was largely responsible for this. With the cattlemen she chatted flippantly, giving them word for word and laughing at their smartest sallies; but with Burton she talked slowly in the dusk of the long, cool evenings, when the work inside and out was finished, and the farmer smoked his pipe on the kitchen porch. The cowboys, whom she had known for years, she still held saucily at a safe distance; but with Burton, on a week's acquaintance, she spoke of things whereof her soul hungered for conversation. She had taken the boy at his word. She had started in the middle of the book.

And to himself Burton confessed that to him she was a new relevation of womanhood. At times, out of the nightmare of the past, he would conjure up that face which, in all his wanderings and through all his a.s.sociations, still hedged his soul about on every side, so that he could follow no emotion far until he met it. He saw her as she rode home on her pony along the pasture path, while the gathering dusk raised the willows very tall about them; he saw her as they sat by the water's edge that never to-be-forgotten Sunday at the Crossing; he saw her again, half-reclining against a wall, her face drawn as though with pain and yet flushed as in excitement, the flickering light of an uncertain fire falling upon her fine features. He stood her before him and he tried to compare, but he could not compare. It was as though one would compare form with colour, or sound with sight. She was, he knew, everything that was "pure womanly," but this daughter of the prairie was something more.

Although clothed in all the delicacy of her s.e.x, she seemed to hide nothing, to conceal nothing, behind that distinction of nature which has been so grossly misused by convention. At times she spoke to him as a sister might speak; at other times it might have been the voice of his mother; again, she was a child at his feet; but most of all it seemed she spoke as a brother. It was this spirit of comradeship, this att.i.tude of equality, this frankness so sincere that it seemed the only natural thing-the inevitable thing-it was these that drew his soul out to her with the affection of a brother. And yet he marvelled that the face still hedged him about; that every new experience, every new confidence, seemed to paint it still clearer on his mind's horizon.

The season wore on. Presently the wheat fields were ripe, and Burton found himself so lost in work that thoughts of his past, his present, and his future seemed crowded out of the busy hours. His practical knowledge of farm work and farm machinery, and the genuine personal interest he took in everything that fell to his lot, won for him a regard by the old farmer that was almost paternal. Indeed, more than once Mr. McKay dropped remarks about his advancing years, intimating that he felt the time must soon come when he should place the active management of his affairs in younger hands, and on such occasions Burton felt his heart bound as the thought of a possibility fired his pulses.

But then the face rose, calm and thoughtful, and the possibility died away amid the mist of dreams.

And then, one Sunday afternoon, after the wheat was all in stook, came another incident to change the course of his career. The cowboys, with a number of friends, were riding to neighbouring ranches; Mr. McKay dozed over an old newspaper as he sat in the shade of the kitchen porch; and Burton and Kate lounged on the front verandah, reading little excerpts from their magazines, but most of the time staring with dreaming eyes across the hot prairies.

"Pshaw," said Burton, after his fourth attempt to centre his interest in a story, "I can't read to-day. Let's go for a walk, Kate." He called her Kate now, although he had not been able to bring himself to the more familiar name by which the other hands addressed her. And yet he knew that he was much better acquainted with her than were they.

The girl clasped her hands above her head and yawned leisurely. Then she looked long and intently at the fringe of willows along the gulley.

"It's too hot," she said at length.

"What, you a prairie girl and afraid of the heat?" Burton bantered.

"I'm not afraid of it," she answered, laughing, "but I respect it. And I can't walk in the gra.s.s in this skirt. And most of all," she confessed, bringing her elbows to her knees and resting her chin on her hands-"most of all, I'm lazy."

"I admire lazy people," said Burton.

"Oh, how gallant you are! I suppose if I had said I was lame you would have admired lame people?"

"But I spoke seriously," he protested. "I don't say I admire one who is chronically lazy, but I do respect the man or woman who can forget the rush of life now and again and lapse into a period of laziness.

'Leisure,' some people call it, and it is closely identified with culture, which brings us around to the poets and the painters and art generally."

"Speaking of art, did I ever let you see my pictures? I have a few I gathered when I was East at college. Oh, yes, and my photographs. That is where so many acquaintances start, you know, over the family alb.u.m, while one expounds to someone who doesn't care the tribal history of people he doesn't know."

The sentence was ended on the stairs. In a minute she was down with a basketful of photographs.

"Now, Mr. Ray, you shall behold the friends of my girlhood-up to date.

By the way, when are you going to let me into the mystery of your surname? One of these days some of the neighbours will call, and I shall have to introduce you as 'Our man Ray.' Here I have told you my history from Alpha to Omega, and all I know about you is that your first name is Ray. When, please sir, will I be sufficiently established in your confidence to be entrusted with your name?"

For a moment he hesitated. What she said was true. She had given large confidences and received little. Why should he not tell his name? Why, indeed, should he not tell her all? He was sure that it could not change her att.i.tude toward him; he was sure that his trust would never be betrayed, and the weight of his secret was hanging heavy about his life.

That strange human instinct which demands the right of confidence the privilege of confession, was becoming irresistibly strong within him.

"I have a reason for concealing my name," he said at length. "I do not wish to tell the name until I can tell the reason also."

"And when will that be, may I ask?" It was a respectful question, not a demand for information.

"Oh, perhaps the next time we chat together," he laughed, anxious to shelve the matter for the moment. "Now, let us see these photographs."

She sat on a stool beside his chair, pa.s.sing up the photographs for his scrutiny. With each she had a word of comment, but Burton looked at them mechanically. They were nothing to him but strange faces, in which he felt only a reflected interest. At length she raised a photograph which she held a moment longer than usual. "This," she said, "is a picture of my particular college chum-my best girl friend. She is pure gold."

She placed the pasteboard in his fingers. His eyes wandered to the face, and then his head shot forward as though he had been magnetised. He instantly attempted to recover his composure, but his fingers trembled and his breath came hard. It was the face of Myrtle Vane!

CHAPTER XVII-THE HOMESTEAD LINE

"Where'er Endeavour bares her arm, And grapples with the Things To Be, At desk or counter, forge or farm, On veldt or prairie, land or sea, And men press onward, undismayed, The Empire Builder plies his trade."

_The Empire Builders._

What explanation Burton made of his agitation he never quite remembered.

He knew he had said something about a remarkable likeness to a friend of his, but he felt that his behaviour at best had had only a lame excuse.

Kate, however, had accepted it with the frankness that had marked her att.i.tude toward him since the day they first met, and had rattled on her tribute to Myrtle Vane, to every word of which Burton inwardly said amen. But when she mentioned that they still corresponded regularly, and that she expected a letter by the next mail, he found himself battling with conflicting emotions. It was plain that he must tell her all or nothing; either he must take her into his life or he must go out of hers. He knew that he loomed big in the world of this farmer's daughter, and that when she next wrote to Myrtle she would tell about this Ray, her discovery. The name would excite Miss Vane's interest, identification would surely come, sooner or later. And what would this girl from whom he had torn himself under the shadow of the law and who was in very reality more to him than existence itself-what would she say when she knew of his life as a fugitive from justice, a betrayer of his bondsman, whose regard for her had been so slight that he had deserted her under the fear of his own punishment-what would she say when she knew he had cast off all responsibility for the past and to-day was living in happiness, the trusted friend of her trusted friend? He saw his life crumbling about him like a house of cards. He saw only too plainly how his desertion of the girl he loved would cost him the friendship of the girl he so much admired.