The Mountain Girl Part 16

Was she, then, so utterly untouched by his masculine presence? he wondered. If he did not speak first, would she keep silent forever?

Should he wait and see? Should he will her to speak and of herself unfold to him?

Suddenly she turned and looked clearly and pleasantly in his eyes.

"We'll be on a straight road for a piece after this hill; shall we hurry a little then?"

"Certainly, if you think best. You set the pace, and I'll follow." Again silence fell.

"Do you feel in a hurry?" he asked at length.

"I would like to get there soon. We can't tell what might be." She pressed her hand an instant to her throat and drew in her breath as if something hurt her.

"What is it?" he asked, drawing his horse nearer.

"Nothing. Only I wish we were there now."

"You are suffering in antic.i.p.ation, and it isn't necessary. Better not, indeed. Think of something else."

"Yes, suh." The two little words sounded humbly submissive. He had never been so baffled in an endeavor to bring another soul into a mood responsive to his own. This gentle acquiescence was not what he wished, but that she should reveal herself and betray to him even a hint--a gleam--of the deep undercurrent of her life.

Suddenly they emerged on the crest of a narrow ridge from which they could see off over range after range of mountain peaks on one side, growing dimmer, bluer, and more evanescent until lost in a heavenly distance, and on the other side a valley dropping down and down into a deep and purple gloom richly wooded and dense, surrounded by precipices topped with scrubby, wind-blown pines and oaks--a wild and rocky descent into mystery and seclusion. Here and there a slender thread of smoke, intensely blue, rose circling and filtering through the purple density against a black-green background of hemlocks.

Contrasted with the view on the other side, so celestially fair, this seemed to present something sinister, yet weirdly beautiful--a baffling, untamed wilderness. Along this ridge the road ran straight before them for a distance, stony and bleak, and the air swept over it sweet and strong from the sea, far away.

"Wait--wait a moment," he called, as his panting horse rounded the last curve of the climb, and she had already put her own to a gallop. She reined in sharply and came back to him, a glowing vision. "Stand a moment near me. We'll let our horses rest a bit and ourselves, too.

There is strength and vitality in this air; breathe it in deeply. What joy to be alive!"

She came near, and their horses held quiet communion, putting their noses together contentedly. Ca.s.sandra lifted her head high and turned her face toward the billowed mountains, and did what Thryng had not known her to do, what he had wondered if she ever did-- She laughed--laughed aloud and joyously.

"Why do you laugh?" he asked, and laughed with her.

"I'm that glad all at once. I don't know why. If the mountains could feel and be glad, seems like they'd be laughing now away off there by the sea. I wonder will I ever see the ocean."

"Of course you will. You are not going to live always shut up in these mountains. Laugh again. Let me hear you."

But she turned on him startled eyes. "I clean forgot that poor man down below, so like to die I am 'most afraid to get back there. Look down. It must have been in a place like that where Christian slew Apollyon in the dark valley, like I was reading to Hoyle last night."

"Does he live down in there? I mean the man Irwin--not Apollyon. He's dead, for Christian slew him."

"Yes, the Irwins live there. See yonder that spot of cleared red ground?

There's their place. The house is hid by the dark trees nigh the red spot. Can you make it out?"

"Yes, but I call that far."

"It's easy riding. Shall we go on? I'm that frightened--we'd better hurry."

"Is that your way when you are afraid to do a thing; you hurry to do it all the more?"

"Seems like we have to a heap of times. Seems like if I were only a man, I could be brave, but being a girl so, it is right hard."

She started her horse to a gallop, and side by side they hurried over the level top of the ridge--to Thryng an exhilarating moment, to her a speeding toward some terrible, unknown trial.

CHAPTER X

IN WHICH Ca.s.sANDRA AND DAVID VISIT THE HOME OF DECATUR IRWIN

Soon the way became steep and difficult and the path so narrow they were forced to go single file. Then Ca.s.sandra led and David followed. They pa.s.sed no dwellings, and even the little home to which they were going was lost to view. He wondered if she were not weary, remembering that she had been over the distance twice before that day, and begged her, as he had done when they set out, to allow him to carry the basket, but still she would not.

"I never think of it. I often carry things this way.--We have to here in the mountains." She glanced back at him and smiled. "I reckon you find it hard because you are not used to living like we do; we're soon there now, see yonder?"

A turn in the path brought them in sight of the cabin, set in its bare, desolate patch of red soil. About the door swarmed unkempt children of all sizes, as bees hang out of an over-filled hive, the largest not more than twelve years old, and the youngest carried on the mother's arm. It was David's first visit to one of the poorest of the mountain homes, and he surveyed the scene before him with dismay.

Below the house was a spring, and there, suspended from the long-reaching branch of a huge beech tree, now leafless and bare, a great, black iron pot swung by a chain over a fire built on the ground among a heap of stones. On a board at one side lay wet, gray garments, twisted in knots as they had been wrung out of the soapy water. The woman had been washing, and the vapor was rising from the black pot of boiling suds, but, seeing their approach, she had gone to her door, her babe on her arm and the other children trooping at her heels and clinging to her skirts. They peered up from under frowzy, overhanging locks of hair like a group of ragged, bedraggled Scotch terriers.

The mother herself seemed scarcely older than the oldest, and Thryng regarded her with amazement when he noticed her infantile, undeveloped face and learned that she had brought into the world all those who cl.u.s.tered about her. His amazement grew as he entered the dark little cabin and saw that they must all eat and sleep in its one small room, which they seemed to fill to overflowing as they crowded in after him, accompanied by three lean hounds, who sniffed suspiciously at his leggings.

Far in the darkest corner lay the father on a pallet of corn-husks covered with soiled bedclothing. The windows were mere holes in the walls, unglazed, unframed, and closed at night or in bad weather by wooden shutters, when the room was lighted only by the flames from the now black and empty fireplace. Here, while mother and children were out by "the branch" washing, the injured man lay alone, stoically patient, declaring that his "laig" was some better, that he did not feel "so much misery in hit as yesterday."

Thryng had seen much squalor and wretchedness, but never before in a home in the country where women and children were to be found. For a moment he looked helplessly at the silent, staring group, and at the man, who feebly tried to indicate to his wife the extending of some courtesy to the stranger.

"Set a cheer, Polly," he said weakly, offering his great hand. "You are right welcome, suh. Are you visitin' these parts?"

"This is the doctor I was telling you about, Cate,--Doctor Thryng. I begged him to come up and see could he do anything for you," said Ca.s.sandra. Then she urged the woman to go back to her work and take the children with her. "Doctor and I will look after your old man awhile."

She succeeded in clearing the place of all but one lean hound, who continued to stand by his master and lick his hand, whining presciently, and one or two of the children, who lingered around the door to peer in curiously at the doctor.

A shutter near the bed was tightly closed and, in struggling to open it, Ca.s.sandra discovered it was broken at the hinges and had been nailed in place. David flew to her a.s.sistance and, wrenching out the nails, tore it free, letting in a flood of light upon the wretchedness around them.

Then he turned his attention to the patient, a man of powerful frame, but lean almost to emaciation, who watched the young physician's face silently with widely opened blue eyes, their pale color intensified by the surrounding shock of matted, curling, vividly red hair and beard.

It required but a few moments to ascertain that the man's condition was indeed critical. Ca.s.sandra had gone out and now returned with her hands full of dry pine sticks. Bending on one knee before the empty fireplace, she arranged them and hung a kettle over them full of fresh water. David turned and watched her light the fire.

"Good. We shall need hot water immediately. How long since you have eaten?" he asked the man.

"He hain't eat nothing all day," said the wife, who had returned and again stood in the door with all her flock, gazing at him. Then the woman grew plaintively garrulous about the trouble she had had "doin'

fer him," and begged David to tell her "could he he'p 'im." At last Thryng put a hurried end to her talk by saying he could do nothing--nothing at all for her old man, unless she took herself and the children all away. She looked terror-stricken, and her mouth drew together in a stubborn, resentful line as if in some way he had precipitated ill luck upon them by his coming. Ca.s.sandra at once took her basket and walked out toward the stream, and they all followed, leaving David and the father in sole possession of the place.

Then he turned to the bed and began a kindly explanation. He found the man more intelligent and much more tractable than the woman, but it was hard to make him believe that he must inevitably lose either his life or his foot, and that they had not an hour--not a half hour--to spare, but must decide at once. David's manner, gentle, but firmly urgent, at last succeeded. The big man broke down and wept weakly, but yielded; only he stipulated that his wife must not be told.

"No, no! She and the children must be kept away; but I need help. Is there no one--no man whom we can get to come here quickly?"

"They is n.o.body--naw--I reckon not."

David was distressed, but he searched about until he found an old battered pail in which to prepare his antiseptic, and busied himself in replenishing the fire and boiling the water; all the time his every move was watched by the hound and the pathetic blue eyes of his master.

Soon Ca.s.sandra returned, to David's great relief, alone. She smiled as she looked in his face, and spoke quietly: "I told her to take the children and gather dock and mullein leaves and such like to make tea for her old man, and if she'd stay awhile, I'd look after him and have supper for them when they got back. Is there anything I can do now?"