The Rim of the Desert Part 20

"And the girl," said Elizabeth after a moment, "did you never see her again?"

"Oh, yes." The genial lines deepened, and Hollis rose from his chair.

"Often. I always look them up when I am in Seattle."

"But who was John?"

"John? Why, he was her husband."

The Olympics had reappeared; the sun dropped behind a cloud over a high crest; shafts of light silvered the gorges; the peaks caught an amethyst glow. Tisdale, tracing once more that far canyon across the front of Constance, walked slowly forward into the bows.

The yacht touched the Bremerton dock to take on the lieutenant who was expected aboard, and at the same time Jimmie Daniels swung lightly over the side aft. The Seattle steamer whistled from her slip on the farther side of the wharf, and he hurried to the gang-plank. There he sent a glance behind and saw Tisdale still standing with his back squared to the landing, looking off over the harbor. And the _Press_ representative smiled. He had gathered little information in regard to the coal question, but in that notebook, b.u.t.toned snugly away in his coat, he had set down the papoose story, word for word.

CHAPTER XVI

THE ALTERNATIVE

Tisdale did not follow the lieutenant aft. When the _Aquila_ turned into Port Orchard, he still remained looking off her bows. The sun had set, a soft breeze was in his face, and the Sound was no longer a mirror; it fluted, broke in racy waves; the cut.w.a.ter struck from them an intricate melody. Northward a few thin streamers of cloud warmed like painted flames, and their reflection changed the sea to running fire. Then he was conscious that some one approached behind him; she stopped at his elbow to watch the brilliant scene. And instantly the spirit of combat in him stirred; his muscles tightened like those of a man on guard.

After a moment she commenced to sing very softly, in unison with the music of the waves along the keel,

"How dear to me the hour when daylight dies."

Even subdued, her voice was beautiful. It began surely, insistently, to undermine all that stout breastwork he had reared against her these twenty-four hours. But he thrust his hands in his pockets and turned to her with that upward look of probing, upbraiding eyes.

The song died. A flush rose over her face, but she met the look bravely.

"I came to explain," she said. "I thought at the beginning, when we started on that drive through the mountains, you knew my ident.i.ty.

Afterwards I tried repeatedly to tell you, but when I saw how bitterly you--hated--me, my courage failed."

Her lip trembled over a sighing breath, and she looked, away up the brilliant sea. Tisdale could not doubt her. His mind raced back to incident on incident of that journey; in flashes it was all made clear to him. Even during that supreme hour of the electrical storm had she not tried to undeceive him? He forgave her her transgressions against him; he forgave her so completely that, at the recollection of the one moment in the basin, his pulses sang. Then, inside his pockets, his hands clenched, and he scourged himself for the lapse.

"I was in desperate need," she went on quickly. "There was a debt--a debt of honor--I wished to pay. And Mr. Foster told me you were interested in that desert land; that you were going to look it over. He caught me by long distance telephone the night he sailed for Alaska, to let me know.

Oh, it all sounds sordid, but if you have ever come to the ragged edge of things--"

She stopped, with a little outward, deprecating movement of her hands, and turned again to meet Tisdale's look. But he was still silent. "I believed when you knew me," she went on, "you would see I am not the kind of woman you imagined; I even hoped, for David's sake, you would forgive me. But I did not know there was such friendship as yours in the world. I thought only mothers loved so,--the great ones, the Hagars, the Marys. It is more than that; it is the best and deepest of every kind of love in one. I can't fathom it--unless--men sometimes are born with twin souls."

It was not the influence of her personality now; it was not any magnetism.

Something far down in the depths of him responded to that something in her. It was as though he felt the white soul of her rising transcendent over her body. It spoke in her pose, her eloquent face, and it filled the brief silence with an insistent, almost vibrant appeal.

"They are," he answered, and the emotion in his own face played softly through his voice, "I am sure that they are. Weatherbee had other friends, plenty of them, scattered from the Yukon territory to Nome; men who would have been glad to go out of their way to serve him, if they had known; but he never asked anything of them; he saved the right to call on me. Neither of us ever came as near that 'ragged edge of things' as he did, toppled on it as he did, for so long. There never was a braver fight, against greater odds, single-handed, yet I failed him." He paused while his eyes again sought that high gorge of the Olympic Mountains, then added: "The most I can do now is to see that his work is carried on."

"You mean," she said not quite steadily, "you are going to buy that land?"

"I mean"--he frowned a little--"I am going to renew my offer to finance the project for you. You owe it to David Weatherbee even more than I do.

Go back to that pocket; set his desert blossoming. It's your only salvation."

She groped for the bulwark behind her and moved back to its support. "I could not. I could not. I should go mad in that terrible place."

"Listen, madam." He said this very gently, but his voice carried its vibrant undernote as though down beneath the surface a waiting reserve force stirred. "I did not tell all about that orchard of spruce twigs. It was planted along a bench, the miniature of the one we climbed in the Wenatchee Mountains, that was crossed with tiny, frozen, irrigating ca.n.a.ls leading from a basin; and midway stood a house. You must have known that trick he had of carving small things with his pocket-knife. Then imagine that delicately modeled house of snow. It was the nucleus of the whole, and before the door, fine as a cameo and holding a bundle in her arms, was set the image of a woman."

There was a silent moment. She waited, leaning a little forward, watching Tisdale's face, while a sort of incredulous surprise rose through the despair in her eyes. "There were women at Fairbanks and Seward after the first year," he went on. "Bright, refined women who would have counted it a privilege to share things, his hardest luck, with David Weatherbee. But the best of them in his eyes was nothing more than a shadow. There was just one woman in the world for him. That image stood for you. The whole project revolved around you. It would be incomplete now without you."

She shrank closer against the bulwark, glancing about her with the swift look of a creature trapped, then for a moment dropped her face in her hands. When she tried to say something, the words would not come. Her lips, her whole face quivered, but she could only shake her head in protest again and again.

Tisdale waited, watching her with his upward look from under contracted brows. "What else can you do?" he asked at last. "Your tract is too small to be handled by a syndicate, and now that the levels of the Columbia desert are to be brought under a big irrigation project, which means a nominal expense to the grower, your high pocket, unimproved, will hardly attract the single buyer. Will you, then, plat it in five-acre tracts for the Seattle market and invite the--interest of your friends?"

She drew erect; the danger signals flamed briefly in her eyes. "My friends can be dis-interested, Mr. Tisdale. It has only been through them, for a long time, I have been able to keep my hold."

"There's where you made your mistake at the start; in gaining that hold.

When you conformed to their standards, your own were overthrown."

"That is not true." She did not raise her voice any; it dropped rather to a minor note? but a tremor ran over her body, and her face for an instant betrayed how deep the shaft had struck. "And, always, when I have accepted a favor, I have given full measure in exchange. But there is an alternative you seem to have overlooked."

"I understand," he said slowly, and his color rose. "You may marry again."

Then he asked, without protest: "Is it Foster?"

On occasion, during that long drive through the mountains, he had felt the varying height and thickness of an invisible barrier, but never, until that moment, its chill. Then Marcia Feversham called her, and she turned to go down the deck. "I'm coming!" she answered and stopped to look back.

"You need not trouble about Mr. Foster," she said. "He--is safe."

CHAPTER XVII

"ALL THESE THINGS WILL I GIVE THEE"

Frederic had suggested a rubber at auction bridge.

Elizabeth fixed another pillow under his shoulders and moved the card table to his satisfaction, then took a chair near the players and unfolded her crochet, while Tisdale, whose injured hand excluded him from the game, seated himself beside her. He asked whimsically if she was manufacturing a cloud like the one in the west where the sun had set; but she lacked her sister's ready repartee, and, arresting her needle long enough to glance at him and back to the woolly, peach-pink pile in her lap, answered seriously: "It's going to be a hug-me-tight."

The lieutenant laughed. "Sounds interesting, does it not?" he said, shuffling the cards. "But calm yourself, sir; a hug-me-tight is merely a kind of sweater built on the lines of a vest."

He dealt, and Mrs. Feversham bid a lily. From his position Tisdale was able to watch Mrs. Weatherbee's face and her cards. She held herself erect in a subdued excitement as the game progressed; the pink flush deepened and went and came in her cheek; the blue lights danced in her eyes.

Repeatedly she flashed intelligence to her partner across the board. And the lieutenant began to wait in critical moments for the glance. They won the first hand. Then it became apparent that he and Morganstein were betting on the side, and Marcia remonstrated. "It isn't that we are scrupulous alone," she said, "but we lose inspiration playing second fiddle."

"Come in then," suggested Frederic and explained to the lieutenant: "She can put up a hundred dollars and lose 'em like a soldier."

"The money stayed in the family," she said quickly. "Beatriz, it is your bid."

Mrs. Weatherbee was calculating the possibilities of her hand. Her suit was diamonds; seven in sequence from the jack. She held also the three highest in clubs and the other black king. She was weak in hearts. "I bid two diamonds," she said slowly, "and, Marcia, it's my ruby against your check for three hundred dollars."

There was a flutter of surprise. "No," remonstrated Elizabeth sharply.

"No, Marcia can buy the ring for what it is worth."