Then I'll Come Back to You Part 42

CHAPTER XXII

IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS

It is said that men remember many things when death is imminent; and for days and days something had been dying hard in Stephen O'Mara's breast. His step was slow that afternoon when he drew apart to take up his position alone upon a bit of higher ground, his shoulders heavy and drooping; yet his brain was feverishly active. Recollection of many long gone days--thoughts of many things--came darting to his mind; but they were not thoughts of desperate, last-minute expedients which might stave off this present crisis. For if he had believed that force alone would win for him; if he had had faith that mere numbers could save his construction, he would not have left Garry Devereau with his scores of laborers, busy five miles to the south. Steve was not thinking of his construction now; it had become a dim and remote consideration. It had lost its importance in his scheme of things.

They came slowly at first--Wickersham's logs--thudding heavily, one by one, into the underpinnings of the bridge, sliding free or lodging cross-current as the case might be; then in a thicker and thicker tide that ground and up-ended and settled with the weight of the coffee-colored flood behind it. In the beginning the handful of men who had put those timbers into place set themselves, doggedly, to save their completed structure, until the man who had worked with them, shoulder to shoulder, through the night called them with a nod back to the bank. Obediently then they collected in a small knot behind him, murmurous, gutterally grumbling; waiting his further word they squatted on their haunches, staring hungrily at their chief who stood in seeming surrender, head bowed before them.

The coming of Wickersham's men was not a thing of degrees. They poured into view through the brush fringe at the north edge of the marsh and halted, but only for an instant.

"Who is your friend at the time when you need a friend?----Harrigan, that's me!"

The maudlin menace of that chorus rocketed from ridge to ridge. Then, a tight-ranked ma.s.s of humanity, they had formed and were sweeping forward again, stepping out to the beat of the ragtime which was their marching hymn. And still the man who stood apart from the rest gave no sign that he was aware of their approach. Once he did straighten; when separate faces began to be distinguishable in that reeling mob he turned and gazed, emptily, toward the group a few yards away--Wickersham putty-skinned before this storm which he had brewed; Allison himself pale; and the girl whose eyes were staring back at him with no clear understanding in their depths. He made no move toward action, not even when the singing pack surged up and spread out before him, until a jostling crescent, straggling at the points, half encircled him and swallowed up as well the little knot behind which had come bristling to its feet. Their onslaught had seemed an irresistible thing, bent upon instant violence; and yet little by little their syncopated defiance died away until they, too, were staring uncertainly at that worn and mud-stained figure which seemed to hang its head. His very inertia robbed them of their impetus.

"Harrigan, that's me!" they faltered now, and there came a lull in the valley at Thirty-Mile, broken only by heavy breathing and the crunch of logs jamming beneath the bridge, and the ugly swirl of backed-up water.

It held quiet while Steve looked up, mildly, and scanned the ring in front of him and nodded in recognition to a sullen few; then oaths broke that silence, and a command for room to pa.s.s. An upheaval disrupted the crescent's centre. Steve saw Big Louie's face high above the heads of his shorter companions; he watched him plow heavily forward. Shayne he glimpsed, automatically, and Fallon, faithful henchmen. And then Harrigan stood forth.

Long arms dangling, palms back, almost to his knees, that red-headed one minced forward on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. Harrigan was redeeming a promise many weeks overdue. It was spring, and Harrigan had come back!

"I'm here," he spoke to that bowed head, "if you are afther carin' to welcome me!"

"I've been expecting you, Harrigan."

Again that startling mildness.

There is little wonder that it deceived the riverman. Listening, watching O'Mara's slack form even Fat Joe's face burned; even Archie Wickersham's dared flash in triumph. And Harrigan's went savagely exultant.

"You talked out loud to me, once," he taunted. "Is it so difficult you find it now to speak up so I can hear?"

"Would you promise to listen to argument, Harrigan?"

Vilification tore at the other's lips, until friend and enemy marveled at what Steve took in silence.

"You have begun many things in this counthry," the obscene tirade ended. "You came out of these woods with rags on your back and started at bein' a gentleman when we were only bhoys. You've made a gr-reat success av it with the ladies, we'll gr-rant you that; but you should have stuck to your soft and lily-white pastime. For when you aimed to turn this river into a gentleman's proposition you started something too big for you to finish. I'm taking it off your hands, now. Can't you even talk back like a man?"

There must be fire starting over in the north-east, Steve meditated with an irrelevance strange even to himself--and that reference to her surely was not needed! Yes, there was a smudge of smoke rising behind Twin-face; people should be more careful wh.o.r.e they dropped matches in an unseasonably hot spring like this--and Harrigan's sneer for the boy who had come, wonder-eyed, out of the wilderness and looked upon the picture-thing in kilted velvet which she had been was certainly squandered viciousness now. Past and present they trouped before him, thoughts that spanned years of time and covered leagues of country, yet long before Harrigan had finished with his question Steve knew how he was going to answer it. He didn't have to debate that, and deliberation only gave him the keener joy of antic.i.p.ation.

All his life opposition had been a familiar of his. Days of hunger he had known and cold, and nights of black discouragement, but never so black until now but what he had been able to hold his vision clear.

But that vision was not his any longer to contemplate.

Circ.u.mstance had been his handicap; Circ.u.mstance he had met and thought to bend to his will; and yet Circ.u.mstance had beaten him; in the end Custom was laughing in his face. Beside those intangible antagonists which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and swaggering and cheap. But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was an ent.i.ty--a thing upon which one might hurl oneself and spend one's bitter intoleration.

Steve had stopped thinking; he had had too much of thought. Suddenly that question which had been a riddle to him was a riddle no longer.

He had the answer, and could see himself as others no doubt had seen him--a fool who had believed in the supremacy of fineness; a boy who had reached for the moon. But it left the issue clearer now. He, too, was a riverman; the degree was different, that was all. And rivermen did not vex their brains with abstract problems; they fought with their hands. His bowed head came back then, and the ma.s.s of men, catching sight of the mad, glad light that flared in his eyes, rolled back to give them room. He laughed at Harrigan. He was laughing at himself.

They heard and marveled at the pleasantry of his answer.

"Maybe you are right, Harrigan," he said. "You may be--I do not know.

I have started big things and left them unfinished. But you are wrong for the rest of it, Harrigan, for I am going--to--finish--you!"

Men tell of that encounter now; it is already epic on the river. One may listen to its details, and he chance into any of a half dozen places:--Mulcahy's, Laduc's, or Whitted's that once was Brown's. And always one will hear different details, but always one accord of verdict. They will tell you that no man ever went through worse vengeance and stayed a living man.

For like a blast of wrath O'Mara lifted and struck him. Harrigan's hands had not left his hips before he met the ground, and he was back on his feet like a bounding ball only to go down again before the smashing impact of those blows. Caution he tried to use in rising and they searched out his face, his chin, and drove him hither and yon.

Open fighting was not the river style of fighting and he closed this time and wrapped his gorilla arms about this fury who fought with lightning strokes to keep him off. His greater weight o'erbore them both; he broke away and his hob-nailed boots, lashing out, bit the flesh of O'Mara's temple--they tore the turf where his face had been.

There was madness in Harrigan's hideous roarings of hate, madness in his blind rushes; but his bull-strength availed at first. He weathered destruction and managed to close again. This time the lighter man was ready for the scuff of those armed boots; he twisted and covered his face with his shoulder, and only his shirt ripped open to let blood stream from the rent. On their feet they rocked--to their knees!

Faces grinding into the earth they strained and broke away. And always Harrigan came back and found him, blindly. Once his hairy hands searched O'Mara's face and O'Mara's forehead went wet with the agony of fingers tearing at his eye-sockets. Dropping he escaped that gouging grip, coming up he caught Harrigan's chin and turned him over backward.

Harrigan squandered his strength in drunken rushes, his breath in screams of hate. He tore forward when the other had already stepped aside, and Steve, shaking away the blood that was trickling rivulets into his eyes, met him returning. There came a time when Harrigan's enveloping arms found him less readily; came a change when Harrigan had to stand up and fight. And then, with deadly, insensate purpose which made the other's madness a wild and futile thing, Stephen O'Mara set himself to chop his face to pieces. Flail-like blows he side-stepped, and whipped to the other's eyes. That open guard he feinted wider and laid flesh open raw. Harrigan could no longer curse, for his lips were puffy things pulped between his own teeth and those merciless knuckles.

He could only sob, great groaning gasps for breath--and then he couldn't see!

And now Steve was laughing aloud. He knew that _she_ was watching; knew what loathing was in her eyes. And he--he was a riverman!

Sobbing himself for air, dripping crimson from forehead and shoulder, he set himself and swung from the waist. Like a pole-axed ox, Harrigan stopped as he was lurching in. His mouth sagged; his eyes flew wide in a fixed and stupid stare. Then his legs folded under him and he swayed limply down. But that blast of wrath would not let him lie! It raised him and beat him down again; raised him and beat him down. By his throat Steve swung him up--by throat and buckled belt. High over his head he swung that bulk and lashed forward from his heels. And Harrigan went back to his panting followers; twisting and spinning, his body swept Shayne and Fallon to the ground.

Allison had not stirred, nor putty-faced Wickersham, nor the girl who stood with hands at b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And now toward them Stephen O'Mara wheeled. His legs would fail him, and he steadied them; blood blinded him, and he wiped it away. Swaying giddily, he managed, somehow, a smile.

"Wickersham, I have met the man whom you hired to fight for you," he called clearly, "and he has earned his wage! Are you man enough to step forward now and fight for yourself?"

Wickersham clucked drily in his throat, and lifted an elbow to shield his face. Shrinking back behind the first shelter that chance afforded him he put the girl between him and his fear. And then weakness seized upon that sick and swaying man, but he spoke to her--to the unspeakable horror in her eyes.

"Barbara," he called thickly, "Barbara!"

He groped toward her, and she cried out, and drew back from such hands as those. Then a black wall rose before him and shut her from his sight. Fat Joe caught him as he fell.

Like huddled sheep, O'Mara's men and Wickersham's watched Joe bear him up the hill. Shayne and Fallon were bending over Harrigan; by the others he lay ignored. It was a mob without a leader until, as is the way in all crises, a new leader arose. Big Louie, stolid face no longer stolid, strode between those two factions and achieved the unknown heights for which his eyes had always hungered.

"I work for no man but is a man," he boomed. "That bridge--she still is hold!"

Steve had bidden Hardwick Elliott watch these men if their big moment ever came. And Elliott and Allison watched now. They were sheep no longer, nor malcontents, nor misled tools of cunning. Like wolves they followed that nameless man who was out upon the jam. Wickersham's men were back on the river, but that bridge would continue to hold! And while they worked, while Elliott and her father watched spellbound, blindly Barbara Allison turned, with no thought of what she was doing, and walked blindly into the brush.

The river was running clear by dusk when they raised the first hue and cry for her. It was dark when a runner bore the news to the cabin on the hillside that she was missing. And when men had been beating the woods for her for twelve hours as best they could in the dark, and no word came that she was found, Fat Joe no longer dared let lie in sleep his friend whose body he had cleansed and bandaged. At daybreak Joe waked him and told him Barbara was lost. They tried to argue with him, for his knees were still unsteady; even Allison whose jovial body seemed to have shrunk during his hours of waiting tried to convince him that the men now looking for her would find her soon or had already found her, perhaps. But he brushed them away while he was dressing; he threw off the hands that tried to detain him. And it was Steve who found her, as he had known it would he, just before a second night of dread was closing in upon her.

In circles of ever increasing radius he traveled at a foxtrot which thoughts of Fallon and Shayne and Harrigan would not let him abandon; but he had to run her down when he caught sight of her, for she fled like a wild thing before him. Floundering in a cedar swamp, soaked to the knees, little blue be-furred suit heavy with black muck, he came up with her. She was kneeling, shaking with terror, face hidden by her loosened hair, when he bent over her and raised her to her feet.

"Please," she whimpered, "Oh, please----"

Yet when he spoke her name her head leaped back and she recognized him instantly.

"I tried to wait," she chattered with all the voice she had left. "I tried to sit still until someone came for me, but I thought I knew the way. I tried not to listen to the noises; I remembered about the stars; and I knew I shouldn't run. But I thought you were--I thought you were----"

Remembered terror choked her. Consciousness slipped away.

By the same trail which once had led him to the "city" of Morrison he carried her now to that cabin which stood on the balsam knoll in the crook of the west branch; nor was it far for she had traveled straight, though in the wrong direction. But it was long after dark when the river gleamed ahead of him through the trees, jet and gla.s.sy in the deep pools, streaked with blurred star-reflections in the riffles. A grown woman is a grown man's burden, even though she seem very small to him; and Steve had to travel slowly. His head was spinning from fatigue and the throb of the jagged tear above his temple when the log building, streaked white with clay c.h.i.n.king, loomed up ahead, and yet involuntarily he stopped there a moment with his burden.

He had pictured, many times, a night when he would bring her there, with both of them watching the moon in the rapids and listening to the waves lipping the banks. This was not that night; that night would never be. But the rebellion and bitterness was gone from his heart.

After he had removed her wet shoes and stockings and brush-whipped suit and sheer black blouse, and she slept the sleep of exhaustion into which she had slipped from unconsciousness without even opening her eyes, he built a fire and sat before it until morning came. And when it dawned and she waked dazedly while he was preparing breakfast, he had finished reconstructing many things.

Her eyes went from wall to wall, frightened still and questioning at first, so he merely nodded and went outside and left her to remember alone. Returning with wood on his arm he found recollection of much in her gaze. She was looking at the thin heeled, b.u.t.toned boots before the fireplace; the stockings and furred garments cleaned of mud and dried on the backs of chairs. A cloud of color stole up from the blanket edge at her throat to the line of her hair.

"You were wet," he explained simply, "and you were too spent to help yourself. I could not let you sleep in them."