The Emigrant Trail Part 43

"Let the wagon get on ahead," he whispered. "We'll follow at a distance."

The whisper, so low that the silence was unbroken by it, came to her, a clear sound carrying with it a thrill of understanding. She trembled and--his arm against hers as his hand held her rein--he felt the subdued vibration like the quivering of a frightened animal. The wagon lumbered away with the sifting dust gushing from the wheels. A stirred cloud rose upon its wake and they could feel it thick and stifling in their nostrils. She watched the receding arch cut down the back by the crack in the closed canvas, while he watched her. The sound of crushed twigs and straining wheels lessened, the stillness gathered between these noises of laboring life and the two mounted figures. As it settled each could hear the other's breathing and feel a mutual throb, as though the same leaping artery fed them both. In the blue night encircled by the waste, they were as still as vessels balanced to a hair in which pa.s.sion brimmed to the edge.

"Come on," she said huskily, and twitched her reins from his hold.

The horses started, walking slowly. A strip of mangled sage lay in front, back of them the heavens hung, a star-strewn curtain. It seemed to the man and woman that they were the only living things in the world, its people, its sounds, its interests, were in some undescried distance where life progressed with languid pulses. How long the silence lasted neither knew. He broke it with a whisper:

"Why did you get David the water last night?"

Her answer came so low he had to bend to hear it.

"He wanted it. I had to."

"Why do you give him all he asks for? David is nothing to you."

This time no answer came, and he stretched his hand and clasped the pommel of her saddle. The horses, feeling the pull of the powerful arm, drew together. His knee pressed on the shoulder of her pony, and feeling him almost against her she bent sideways, flinching from the contact.

"Why do you shrink from me, Missy?"

"I'm afraid," she whispered.

They paced on for a moment in silence. When he tried to speak his lips were stiff, and he moistened them to murmur:

"Of what?"

She shrunk still further and raised a hand between them. He s.n.a.t.c.hed at it, pulling it down, saying hoa.r.s.ely:

"Of me?"

"Of something--I don't know what. Of something terrible and strange."

She tried to strike at her horse with the reins, but the man's hand dropped like a hawk on the pommel and drew the tired animal back to the foot pace.

"If you love me there's no need of fear," he said, then waited, the sound of her terrified breathing like the beating of waves in his ears, and murmured lower than before, "And you love me. I know it."

Her face showed in dark profile against the deep sky. He stared at it, then suddenly set his teeth and gave the pommel a violent jerk that made the horse stagger and grind against its companion. The creaking of the wagon came faint from a wake of shadowy trail.

"You've done it for weeks. Before you knew. Before you lied to your father when he tried to make you marry David."

She dropped the reins and clinched her hands against her breast, a movement of repression and also of pleading to anything that would protect her, any force that would give her strength to fight, not the man alone, but herself. But the will was not within her. The desert grew dim, the faint sounds from the wagon faded. Like a charmed bird, staring straight before it, mute and enthralled, she rocked lightly to left and right, and then swayed toward him.

The horse, feeling the dropped rein, stopped, jerking its neck forward in the luxury of rest, its companion coming to a standstill beside it.

Courant raised himself in his saddle and gathered her in an embrace that crushed her against his bony frame, then pressed against her face with his, till he pushed it upward and could see it, white, with closed eyes, on his shoulder. He bent till his long hair mingled with hers and laid his lips on her mouth with the clutch of a bee on a flower.

They stood a compact silhouette, clear in the luminous starlight. The crack in the canvas that covered the wagon back widened and the eye that had been watching them, stared bright and wide, as if all the life of the feeble body had concentrated in that one organ of sense. The hands, damp and trembling, drew the canvas edges closer, but left s.p.a.ce enough for the eye to dwell on this vision of a shattered world. It continued to gaze as Susan slid from the encircling arms, dropped from her horse, and came running forward, stumbling on the fallen bushes, as she ran panting out the old servant's name. Then it went back to the mountain man, a black shape in the loneliness of the night.

CHAPTER V

A slowly lightening sky, beneath it the transparent sapphire of the desert wakening to the dawn, and cutting the blue expanse the line of the new trail. A long b.u.t.te, a bristling outline on the paling north, ran out from a crumpled cl.u.s.tering of hills, and the road bent to meet it. The air came from it touched with a cooling freshness, and as they pressed toward it they saw the small, swift shine of water, a little pool, gra.s.s-ringed, with silver threads creeping to the sands.

They drank and then slept, sinking to oblivion as they dropped on the ground, not waiting to undo their blankets or pick out comfortable spots. The sun, lifting a bright eye above the earth's rim, shot its long beams over their motionless figures, "bundles of life," alone in a lifeless world.

David alone could not rest. Withdrawn from the others he lay in the shadow of the wagon, watching small points in the distance with a glance that saw nothing. All sense of pain and weakness had left him.

Physically he felt strangely light and free of sensation. With his brain endowed with an abnormal activity he suffered an agony of spirit so poignant that there were moments when he drew back and looked at himself wondering how he endured it. He was suddenly broken away from everything cherished and desirable in life. The bare and heart-rending earth about him was as the expression of his ruined hopes. And after these submergences in despair a tide of questions carried him to livelier torment: Why had she done it? What had changed her? When had she ceased to care?

All his deadened manhood revived. He wanted her, he owned her, she was his. Sick and unable to fight for her she had been stolen from him, and he writhed in spasms of self pity at the thought of the cruelty of it. How could he, disabled, broken by unaccustomed hardships, cope with the iron-fibered man whose body and spirit were at one with these harsh settings? _He_ was unfitted for it, for the heroic struggle, for the battle man to man for a woman as men had fought in the world's dawn into which they had retraced their steps. He could not make himself over, become another being to appeal to a sense in her he had never touched. He could only plead with her, beg mercy of her, and he saw that these were not the means that won women grown half savage in correspondence with a savage environment.

Then came moments of exhaustion when he could not believe it. Closing his eyes he called up the placid life that was to have been his and Susan's, and could not think but that it still must be. Like a child he clung to his hope, to the belief that something would intervene and give her back to him; not he, he was unable to, but something that stood for justice and mercy. All his life he had abided by the law, walked uprightly, done his best. Was he to be smitten now through no fault of his own? It was all a horrible dream, and presently there would be an awakening with Susan beside him as she had been in the first calm weeks of their betrothal. The sweetness of those days returned to him with the intolerable pang of a fair time, long past and never to come again. He threw his head back as if in a paroxysm of pain. It could not be and yet in his heart he knew it was true. In the grip of his torment he thought of the G.o.d that watching over Israel slumbered not nor slept. With his eyes on the implacable sky he tried to pray, tried to drag down from the empty gulf of air the help that would bring back his lost happiness.

At Susan's first waking movement he started and turned his head toward her. She saw him, averted her face, and began the preparations for the meal. He lay watching her and he knew that her avoidance of his glance was intentional. He also saw that her manner of preoccupied bustle was affected. She was pale, her face set in hard lines. When she spoke once to Daddy John her voice was unlike itself, hoa.r.s.e and throaty, its mellow music gone.

They gathered and took their places in silence, save for the old man, who tried to talk, but meeting no response gave it up. Between the three others not a word was exchanged. A stifling oppression lay on them, and they did not dare to look at one another. The girl found it impossible to swallow and taking a piece of biscuit from her mouth threw it into the sand.

The air was sultry, light whisps of mist lying low over the plain. The weight of these vaporous films seemed to rest on them heavy as the weight of water, and before the meal was finished, Susan, overborne by a growing dread and premonition of tragedy, rose and left her place, disappearing round a b.u.t.tress of the rock. Courant stopped eating and looked after her, his head slowly moving as his eye followed her. To anyone watching it would have been easy to read this pursuing glance, the look of the hunter on his quarry. David saw it and rose to his knees. A rifle lay within arm's reach, and for one furious moment he felt an impulse to s.n.a.t.c.h it and kill the man. But a rush of inhibiting instinct checked him. Had death or violence menaced her he could have done it, but without the incentive of the immediate horror he could never rise so far beyond himself.

Susan climbed the rock's side to a plateau on its western face. The sun beat on her like a furnace mouth. Here and there black filigrees of shade shrank to the bases of splintered ledges. Below the plain lay outflung in the stupor of midday. On its verge the mountains stretched, a bright blue, shadowless film. A mirage trembled to the south, a gla.s.sy vision, crystal clear amid the chalky streakings and the rings of parched and blanching sinks. Across the prospect the faint, unfamiliar mist hung as if, in the torrid temperature, the earth was steaming.

She sat down on a shelf of rock not feeling the burning sunshine or the heat that the baked ledges threw back upon her. The life within her was so intense that no impressions from the outside could enter, even her eyes took in no image of the prospect they dwelt on. Courant's kiss had brought her to a place toward which, she now realized, she had been moving for a long time, advancing upon it, unknowing, but impelled like a somnambulist willed toward a given goal. What was to happen she did not know. She felt a dread so heavy that it crushed all else from her mind. They had reached a crisis where everything had stopped, a dark and baleful focus to which all that had gone before had been slowly converging. The whole journey had been leading to this climax of suspended breath and fearful, inner waiting.

She heard the sc.r.a.ping of ascending feet, and when she saw David stared at him, her eyes unblinking in stony expectancy. He came and stood before her, and she knew that at last he had guessed, and felt no fear, no resistance against the explanation that must come. He suddenly had lost all significance, was hardly a human organism, or if a human organism, one that had no relation to her. Neither spoke for some minutes. He was afraid, and she waited, knowing what he was going to say, wishing it was said, and the hampering persistence of his claim was ended.

At length he said tremulously:

"Susan, I saw you last night. What did you do it for? What am I to think?"

That he had had proof of her disloyalty relieved her. There would be less to say in this settling of accounts.

"Well," she answered, looking into his eyes. "You saw!"

He cried desperately, "I saw him kiss you. You let him. What did it mean?"

"Why do you ask? If you saw you know."

"I don't know. I want to know. Tell me, explain to me." He paused, and then cried with a pitiful note of pleading, "Tell me it wasn't so.

Tell me I made a mistake."

He was willing, anxious, for her to lie. Against the evidence of his own senses he would have made himself believe her, drugged his pain with her falsehoods. What remnant of consideration she had vanished.

"You made no mistake," she answered. "It was as you saw."

"I don't believe it. I can't. You wouldn't have done it. It's I you're promised to. Haven't I your word? Haven't you been kind as an angel to me when the others would have let me die out here like a dog?

What did you do it for if you didn't care?"

"I was sorry," and then with cold, measured slowness, "and I felt guilty."