The Land of Strong Men Part 25

CHAPTER XV

FAITH WINTON TURNS UP

Angus came out of the darkness slowly with the weight still upon him.

There was a strange, salt taste in his mouth and a rank smell in his nostrils. His head seemed pillowed, but his eyelids were gummed, and when he threw up his hand to clear them his fingers touched wetness.

Then through a raw, red fog he saw a girl's face bending above him, and blue eyes that seemed misty as an April sky through showers, though perhaps it was only his uncertain vision that made them so.

"Please say something--if you can hear me!" said a low, clear voice as his senses came back fully.

"All right," he said. "I'm all right, I guess. What's holding me? What's on me?"

As his eyes shifted downward, a huge mound of brown fur rose against them, hiding the landscape. It was the carca.s.s of the bear which lay across his legs, burying them from the waist down.

"I can't move it," the girl told him. "Oh, are you badly hurt? Can you take a drink of water? I'll lift your head!" She spoke all in a breath, tremulously, for she had considered him almost a dead man. She lifted his head from where it lay in her lap, and held an old tin can full of spring water to his lips.

Angus drank and felt better.

"I don't think I'm hurt much," he said. "Where is all the blood coming from?" He put his hand to his head, touching gingerly a four-inch rip in his scalp. There was a pain in his side which was worse when he moved, but he said nothing about that and otherwise he could find nothing wrong.

"You must get out from under that brute," the girl told him. "I've tried to pull it off, and I've tried to pull you out, but I'm not strong enough."

She stooped behind him, her hands beneath his shoulders, and he drew his legs clear of the weight. When he got to his feet he was giddy for a moment and leaned against her for support. With her a.s.sistance he got to the spring, and washed off the coagulated blood, while she made a bandage of their handkerchiefs and fitted it deftly. The icy water cleared away the last of the fog, and save for a growing stiffness and soreness he felt well enough. He looked at the girl who sat beside him on the brown gra.s.s and wondered who she was and where on earth she had come from.

The girl was tall, and clean and graceful as a young pine. She carried her head well lifted, which Angus considered a good sign in horses and human beings. A ma.s.s of fair hair was coiled low at the base of it and drawn smoothly back from a broad forehead. Her eyes were a clear blue which reminded Angus of certain mountain lakes, and yet a little weary and troubled as if some shadow overcast them. Her smooth cheeks, too, were pale, with but little of the color that comes from the kiss of wind and sun. She was an utter stranger to him, and yet there was something vaguely familiar.

The fact was that he was staring at her. She met his gaze evenly.

"Do you know that you are lucky not to be badly hurt?" she said.

"It would have served me right if I had been."

"Why?"

"For leaving my rifle in the first place, and for rotten shooting in the second," he replied seriously. "I should have stopped him, and so I would if I had taken my time about it. I guess I got rattled."

"Is that your trouble?" she laughed. "The bear is simply riddled with bullets."

"Is that so?" he returned with obvious pleasure. "Tell me what happened."

"I stopped running when you fired the first shot," she said. "You and the bear seemed to go down together, and he rolled clean over you. It was only in his last flurry that he threw himself across your legs."

"Lucky he didn't claw me up in that flurry. He was a tough old boy."

"If you had been killed it would have been my fault," she said seriously. "You were quite safe, and you attacked him to save me."

"I would have come down, anyway, the first chance he gave me to get hold of my rifle."

"It was stupid of me," she persisted. "At first, you see, I couldn't believe there was a bear. I thought you were trying to frighten me. And then I just _couldn't_ catch that pony. I'm not used to horses, I'm afraid."

Now, as she spoke, something in her voice struck a chord in Angus'

recollection. Where had he heard that faint lisp, that slurring of the sibilants? For a moment he puzzled, groping for an elusive memory. And then suddenly it leaped at him out of the one day, years before, whose happenings, even the least of them, he never forgot. And he saw a little girl, frightened but trying to be brave, and a lanky boy confronting her with a rifle.

"Good Lord!" he exclaimed, "you are little Faith Winton!"

She frowned, drawing herself up a little.

"I am Faith Winton, but how do you know? Have I ever--" She broke off, staring at him. "Why, it's impossible. You can't be _that_ boy!"

"I used to be," he told her. "I've grown a little, since."

"Angus! Angus Mackay!" she cried, her face lighting swiftly. "Oh, I know you now. I've never forgotten. And your sister's doughnuts! How good they were, and how good you were to me!" She leaned forward, catching his great, brown, work-hardened paws in her slim hands. "Oh, I'm so glad to see you again, Ang--I mean Mr. Mackay."

"My name is still Angus."

"Oh, but that was years ago. How did you recognize me? I was such a little girl. To think of meeting you again--like this!"

"I knew you by your lisp," he told her. "And I wish you would call me 'Angus.'"

"Well--Anguth!" She said it with the old lisp. "I can't help it sometimes," she confessed. "I struggle and struggle, and then I forget myself and--lithp. Do you mind it very much?"

"I like it."

"Tho nithe of you to thay tho!" she exaggerated laughing. "No, I won't lisp any more--until I forget myself. But how big you are--almost as big as Gavin himself."

"I am big enough," Angus admitted. "I get in my own way sometimes." For the first time he noticed a black band on her sleeve. She caught the glance.

"My father died two months ago." Her voice broke, and Angus looked away.

"I am sorry," he said awkwardly.

"I can't talk about it very well yet," she said. "I didn't mean to. One shouldn't--to a stranger."

"But I'm not a stranger. You seem like--well--like an old friend."

"I'm glad of that," she said, smiling a trifle sadly. "You see, father and I were always together, and it's new and--and hard to be alone. But I suppose I shall get used to it after a while."

"You have your kin here," he ventured.

"Yes, I have them," she agreed. "But they are not really my kin. And then I won't be with them very long."

"You are going away?" For some reason Angus experienced a sensation of regret.

"No, I am going to stay here. I am thinking of ranching."

"Ranching!" he exclaimed.

"Yes. Why not?"