The Rim of the Desert Part 14

Tisdale's brows relaxed. He laughed a little softly, trying to ease her evident distress. "I am glad you did, Miss Armitage. I am mighty glad you did. But I see," he went on slowly, his face clouding again, "I see Mrs.

Weatherbee had been talking to you about that tract. It's strange I hadn't thought of that possibility. I'll wager she even tried to sell the land off a map, in Seattle. I wonder, though, when this Weatherbee trip was arranged to look the property over, that she didn't come, too. But no doubt that seemed too eager."

The blue lights flashed in her eyes; her lip trembled. "Be fair," she said. "You can afford to be--generous."

"I am going to be generous, Miss Armitage, to you." The ready humor touched his mouth again, the corners of his eyes. "I am going to take you over the ground with me; show you Weatherbee's project, his drawn plans.

But afterwards, if you outbid me--"

"You need not be afraid of that," she interrupted quickly. "I--you must know"--she paused, her lashes drooped--"I--am not very rich," she finessed.

Tisdale laughed outright. "Neither am I. Neither am I." Then, his glance studying the road, he said: "I think we take that branch. But wait!" He drew his map from his pocket and pored over it a moment. "Yes, we turn there. After that there is just one track."

For an instant Miss Armitage seemed to waver. She sent a backward look to the river, and the glance, returning, swept Tisdale; then she straightened in her seat and swung the bays into the branch. It cut the valley diagonally, away from the Wenatchee, past a last orchard, into wild lands that stretched in level benches under the mountain wall. One tawny, sage-mottled slope began to detach from the rest; it took the shape of a reclining brazen beast, partly leopard, partly wolf, and a line of pine trees that had taken root in a moist strata along the backbone had the effect of a bristling mane.

"That is Weatherbee's landmark," said Tisdale. "He called it Cerberus. It is all sketched in true as life on his plans. The gap there under the brute's paw is the entrance to his vale."

As they approached, the mountain seemed to move; it took the appearance of an animal, ready to spring. Miss Armitage, watching, shivered. The dreadful expectation she had shown the previous night when the cry of the cougar came down the wind, rose in her face. It was as though she had come upon that beast, more terrifying than she had feared, lying in wait for her. Then the moment pa.s.sed. She raised her head, her hands tightened on the reins, and she drove resolutely into the shadows of the awful front.

"Now," she said, not quite steadily, "now I know how monstrously alive a mountain can seem."

Tisdale looked at her. "You never could live in Alaska," he said. "You feel too much this personality of inanimate things. That was David Weatherbee's trouble. You know how in the end he thought those Alaska peaks were moving. They got to 'crowding' him."

The girl turned a little and met his look. Her eyes, wide with dread, entreated him. "Yes, I know," she said, and her voice was almost a whisper. "I was thinking of him. But please don't say any more. I can't-- bear it--here."

So she was thinking of Weatherbee. Her emotion sprang from her sympathy for him. A gentleness that was almost tenderness crept over Tisdale's face. How fine she was, how sensitively made, and how measureless her capacity for loving, if she could feel like this for a man of whom she had only heard.

Miss Armitage, squaring her shoulders and sitting very erect once more, her lips closed in a straight red line drove firmly on. A stream ran musically along the road side,--a stream so small it was marvelous it had a voice. As they rounded the mountain, the gap widened into the mouth of the vale, which lifted back to an upper bench, over-topped by a lofty plateau. Then she swung the team around and stopped. The way was cut off by a barbed wire fence.

The enclosure was apparently a corral for a flock of Angora goats. There was no gate for the pa.s.sage of teams; the road ended there, and a rough sign nailed to a hingeless wicket warned the wayfarer to "Keep Out." On a rocky k.n.o.b near this entrance a gaunt, hard-featured woman sat knitting.

She measured the trespa.s.sers with a furtive, smouldering glance and clicked her needles with unnecessary force.

Tisdale's eyes made a swift inventory of the poor shelter, half cabin, partly shed, that evidently housed both the woman and her flock, then searched the barren field for some sort of hitching post. But the few bushes along the stream were small, kept low, doubtless, by the browsing goats, and his glance rested on a fringe of poplars beyond the upper fence.

"There's no way around," he said at last, and the amus.e.m.e.nt broke softly in his face. "We will have to go through."

"The wicket will take the team singly," she answered, "but we must unhitch and leave the buggy here."

"And first, if you think you can hold the colts that long, I must tackle this thistle."

"I can manage," she said, and the sparkles danced in her eyes, "unless you are vanquished."

The woman rose and stood glowering while he sprang down and drew the wooden pin to open the wicket. Then, "You keep off my land," she ordered sharply. "I will, madam," he answered quietly, "as soon as I am satisfied it is yours."

"I've lived on this claim 'most five years," she screamed. "I'm homesteading, and when I've used the water seven years, I get the rights."

She sprang backward with a cattish movement and caught up a gun that had been concealed in some bushes. "Now you go," she said.

But Tisdale stayed. He stood weighing her with his steady, appraising eyes, while he drew the township plat from his pocket.

"This is the quarter section I have come to look up. It starts here, you see,"--and having unfolded the map, he turned to hold it under her glance--"at the mouth of this gap, and lifts back through the pocket, taking in the slopes to this bench and on up over this ridge to include these springs."

The woman, curbing herself to look at the plat, allowed the rifle to settle in the curve of her arm. "I piped the water down," she said. "This stream was a dry gully. I fenced and put up a house."

"The tract was commuted and bought outright from the Government over seven years ago." Tisdale's voice quickened; he set his lips dominantly and folded the map. "I have copies of the field notes with me and the owner's landscape plans. And I am a surveyor, madam. It won't take me long to find out whether there is a mistake. But, before I go over the ground, I must get my horses through to a hitching-place. I will have to lower that upper fence, but if you will keep your goats together, I promise to put it back as soon as the team is through."

"You let that fence alone." Tisdale had started to cross the field, and she followed, railing, though the gun still rested in the hollow of her arm. "If one of those goats breaks away, the whole herd'll go wild. I can't round 'em in without my dog. He's off trailing one of the ewes. She strayed yesterday, and he'll chase the mountain through if he has to. It's no use to whistle; he won't come back without her. You let that fence be.

You wouldn't dare to touch it," she finished impotently, "if I had a man."

"Haven't you?" Tisdale swung around, and his voice dropped to its soft undernote. "That's mighty hard. Who laid all that water-pipe? Who built your house?"

"I did," she answered grimly. "The man who hauled my load of lumber stopped long enough to help set the posts, but I did the rest."

"You did?" Tisdale shook his head incredulously. "My! My! Made all the necessary improvements, single-handed, to hold your homestead and at the same time managed these goats."

The woman's glance moved to the shack and out over the barren fields, and a shade of uncertainty crept into her pa.s.sionate eyes. "The improvements don't make much of a show yet; I've had to be off so much in the mountains, foraging with the herd. But I was able to hire a boy half a day with the shearing this spring, and from now on they're going to pay. There are twenty-eight in the bunch, counting the kids, and I started with one old billy and two ewes."

"My! My! what a record!" Tisdale paused to look back at Miss Armitage, who had turned the bays, allowing them to pace down a length of road and back.

"But," he added, walking on, "what led you to choose goats instead of sheep?"

"I didn't do the choosing"; she moved abreast of Hollis, "it was a fool man."

"So," he answered softly, with a glimmer of amus.e.m.e.nt in his eyes, "there is a man, after all."

"There was," she corrected grimly. "The easiest fellow to be talked over under the sun; the kind always chasing off after a new scheme. First it was a mineral claim; then he banked the future on timber, and when he got tired waiting for stumpage to soar, he put up a d.i.n.ky sawmill to cut his own trees. He was doing well, for him, getting out ties for a new railroad--it was down in Oregon--when he saw the chance to trade for a proved-up homestead. But it was the limit when he started out to buy a bunch of sheep and came back with that old Angora billy and two ewes."

"I see." They were near the fence, and Tisdale swerved a little to reach a stout poplar that formed the corner post. He saw that the wire ends met there and felt in his pocket for his knife. "I see. And then he left the responsibility to his wife."

"The wedding hadn't come off," she said sharply. "It was fixed for the seventeenth of June, and that was only May. And I told him I couldn't risk it--not in the face of those goats."

"And he?" pressed Hollis gently. This thistle, isolated, denied human intercourse, was more easily handled than he had hoped.

"He said it suited him all right. He had been wanting to go to Alaska.

Nothing but that wedding had kept him back."

Tisdale stopped and opened his knife. "And he went?" he asked.

"Yes." The woman's face worked a little, and she stood looking at him with hard, tragic eyes. "He sold the homestead for what he could get to raise the money to take him to Dawson. He was gone in less than twenty-four hours and before daylight, that night he left, I heard those goats _ma-a-ing_ under my window. He had staked them there in the front yard and tucked a note, with his compliments, in the door. He wrote he didn't know of anything else he could leave that would make me remember him better."

Tisdale shook his head. "I wish I had been there." He slipped the knife in between the ends of the wires and the bole, clawing, prying, twisting.

"And you kept them?" he added.

"Yes, I don't know why, unless it was because I knew it was the last thing he expected. But I hated them worse than snakes. I couldn't stand it having them around, and I hired a boy to herd them out on his father's farm. Then I went on helping Dad, selling general merchandise and sorting mail. But the post-office was moved that year five miles to the new railroad station, and they put in a new man. Of course that meant a line of goods, too, and compet.i.tion. Trade fell off, then sickness came. It lasted two years, and when Dad was gone, there wasn't much left of the store but debt." She paused a moment, looking up to the serene sky above the high plateau. A sudden moisture softened her burning eyes, and her free hand crept to her throat. "Dad was a mighty fine man," she said. "He had a great business head. It wasn't his fault he didn't leave me well fixed."

Tisdale laid the loosened wire down on the ground and started to work on another. "But there was the man in Alaska," he said. "Of course you let him know."

"No, sir." Her eyes flashed back to Tisdale's face. "You wouldn't have caught me writing to Johnny Banks, then. I'm not that kind. The most I could do was to see what I could make of the goats. I commenced herding them myself, but I hadn't the face to do it down there in Oregon, where everybody knew me, and I gradually worked north with them until I ended here."

Tisdale had dropped his knife. He stooped to pick it up. "That's where you made your mistake," he said.

The woman drew a step nearer, watching his face; tense, breathless.