The Garden of Eden Part 19

He laid a hand on Connor's shoulder, but the gambler had won and lost too often with an impenetrable face to quail now. He even managed to smile.

"Hearken," said David. "My masters taught me many things, and everything they taught me must be true, for they were only voices of a mind out of another world. Yet, in spite of them," he went on kindly, "I begin to feel a kinship with you, Benjamin. Come, we will walk and talk together in the cool of the morning. Glani!"

The gray had wandered off to nibble at the turf; he whirled and came like a thrown lance.

"Glani," said David, "is usually the only living thing that walks with me in the morning; but now, my friend, we are three."

_CHAPTER FIFTEEN_

In the mid-afternoon of that day Connor rested in his room, and David rested in the lake, floating with only his nose and lips out of water.

Toward the center of the lake even the surface held the chill of the snows, but David floated in the warm shallows and looked up to the sky through a film of water. The tiny ripples became immense air waves that rushed from mountain to mountain, dashed the clouds up and down, and then left the heavens placid and windless.

He grew weary of this placidity, and as he turned upon one side he heard a prolonged hiss from the sh.o.r.e. David rolled with the speed of a water moccasin and headed in with his arm flashing in a powerful stroke that presently brought him to the edge of the beach. He rose in front of old Abraham.

A painter should have seen them together--the time-dried body of the old man and the exuberant youth of the master. He looked on the servant with a stern kindness.

"What are you doing here without a covering for your head while the sun is hot? Did they let you come of their own accord, Abraham?"

"I slipped away," chuckled Abraham. "Isaac was in the patio, but I went by him like a hawk-shadow. Then I ran among the trees. Hat? Well, no more have you a hat, David."

The master frowned, but his displeasure pa.s.sed quickly and he led the way to the lowest terrace. They sat on the soft thick gra.s.s, with their feet in the hot sand of the beach, and as the wind stirred the tree above them a mottling of shadow moved across them.

"You have come to speak privately with me," said David. "What is it?"

But Abraham embraced his skinny knees and smiled at the lake, his jaw falling.

"It's not what it was," he said, and wagged his head. "It's a sad lake compared to what it was."

David controlled his impatience.

"Tell me how it is changed."

"The color," said the old man. "Why, once, with a gallon of that blue you could have painted the whole sky." He shaded his face to look up, but so doing his glance ventured through the branches and close to the white-hot circle of the sun. His head dropped and he leaned on one arm.

"Look at the green of the gra.s.s," suggested David. "It will rest your eyes."

"Do you think my eyes are weak? No, I dropped my head to think how the world has fallen off in the last fifty years. It was all different in the days of John. But that was before you came to the valley."

"The sky was not the same?" queried the master.

"And men, also," said Abraham instantly. "Ho, yes! John was a man; you will not see his like in these days."

David flushed, but he held back his first answer. "Perhaps."

"There is no 'perhaps.'"

Abraham spoke with a decision that brought his jaw close up under his nose.

"He is my master," insisted Abraham, and, smiling suddenly, he whispered: "Mah ol' Ma.r.s.e Johnnie Cracken!"

"What's that?" called David.

Abraham stared at him with unseeing eyes. A mist of years drifted between them, and now the old man came slowly out of the past and found himself seated on the lawn in a lonely valley with great, naked mountains piled around it.

"What did you say?" repeated David.

Abraham hastily changed the subject.

"In those days if a stranger came to the Garden of Eden he did not stay.

Aye, and in those days Abraham could have taken the strongest by the neck and pitched him through the gates. I remember when the men came over the mountains--long before you were born. Ten men at the gate, I remember, and they had guns. But when my master told them to go away they looked at him and they looked at each other, but after a while they went away."

Abraham rocked in an ecstasy.

"No man could face my master. I remember how he sat on his horse that day."

"It was Rustir?" asked David eagerly.

"She was the queen of horses," replied the old man indirectly, "and he was the king of men; there are no more men like my master, and there are no more horses like Rustir."

There was a pause, then David spoke.

"John was a good man and a strong man," he said, looking down at his own brown hands. "And Rustir was a fine mare, but it is foolish to call her the best."

"There was never a horse like Rustir," said the old man monotonously.

"Bah! What of Glani?"

"Yes, that is a good colt."

"A good colt! Come, Abraham! Have you ever opened your dim eyes and really looked at him? Name one fault."

"I have said Glani is a good colt," repeated Abraham, worried.

"Come, come! You have said Rustir was better."

"Glani is a good colt, but too heavy in the forehand. Far too heavy there."

The restraint of David snapped.

"It is false! Ephraim, Jacob, they all say that Glani is the greatest."

"They change like the masters," grumbled Abraham. "The servants change.

They flatter and the master believes. But my master had an eye--he looked through a man like an eagle through mist. When I stood before my master my soul was naked; a wind blew through me. But I say John was one man; and there are no other horses like his mare Rustir. My master is silent; other men have words as heavy as their hands."

"Peace, Abraham, peace. You shame me. The Lord was far from me, and I spoke in anger, and I retract it."