Told In The Hills Part 13

"Didn't you find any?" asked Genesee, waking to the practical things of life at Jim's remark.

"Find any? No! Is there any?" asked that little gourmand, with hope and doubt chasing each other over his rather thin face.

"I don't know--there ought to be;" and lifting a loose board in the floor by the cupboard, he drew forth a closely-woven reed basket, and on a smooth stone in the bottom lay a large piece of yellow b.u.t.ter, around which Jim performed a sort of dance of adoration.

What a supper that was, in the light of the pitch-pine and the fierce accompaniment of the outside tempest! Jim vowed that never were there potatoes so near perfection, in their brown jackets and their steaming, powdery flakes; and the yellow pone, and the amber coffee, and the cool slices of b.u.t.ter that Genesee told them was from an Indian village thirty miles north. And to the table were brought such tremendous appet.i.tes! at least by the cook and steward of the party. And above all, what a delicious atmosphere of unreality pervaded the whole thing! Again and again Genesee's eyes seemed to say, "Can it be you?" and grew warm as her quizzical glances told him it could be no one else.

As the night wore on, and the storm continued, he brought in armfuls of wood from the shed without, and in the talk round the fire his manner grew more a.s.sured--more at home with the surroundings that were yet his own. Long they talked, until Jim, unable to think of any more questions to ask of silver-mining and bear-hunting, slipped down in the corner, with his head on a saddle, and went fast asleep.

"I'll sit up and keep the fire going," said Genesee, at this sign of the late hour; "but you had better get what rest you can on that bunk there--you'll need it for your ride in the morning."

"In the morning!" repeated the girl coolly; "that sounds as if you are determined our visit shall end as soon as possible, Mr. Genesee Jack."

"Don't talk like that!" he said, looking across at her; "you don't know anything about it." And getting up hastily, he walked back and forward across the room; once stopping suddenly, as if with some determination to speak, and then, as she looked up at him, his courage seemed to vanish, and he turned his face away from her and walked to the door.

The storm had stilled its shrieks, and was dying away in misty moans down the dip in the hills, taking the rain with it. The darkness was intense as he held the door open and looked into the black vault, where not a glimmer of a star or even a gray cloud could be seen.

"It's much nicer in-doors," decided Miss Hardy, moving her chair against the chimney-piece, and propping herself there to rest.

"Jim had better lie on the bed, he is so sleepy, and I am not at all so; this chair is good enough for me, if you don't mind."

He picked the sleeping boy up without a word, and laid him on the couch of bear-skins without waking him.

"There isn't much I do mind," he said, as he came back to the fire-place; "that is, if you are only comfortable."

"I am--very much so," she answered, "and would be entirely so if you only seemed a little more at home. As it is, I have felt all evening as if we are upsetting your peace of mind in some way--not as if we are unwelcome, mind you, but just as if you are worried about us."

"That so?" he queried, not looking at her; "that's curious. I didn't know I was looking so, and I'm sure you and the boy are mighty welcome to my cabin or anything in the world I can do for you."

There was no mistaking the heartiness of the man's words, and she smiled her grat.i.tude from the niche in the corner, where, with her back toward the blaze, only one side of her face was outlined by the light.

"Very well," she said amicably; "you can do something for me just now--open the door for a little while; the room seems close with being shut up so tight from the rain--and then make yourself comfortable there on that buffalo-robe before the fire. I remember your lounging habits in the camp, and a chair doesn't seem to quite suit you. Yes, that looks much better, as if you were at home again."

Stretched on the robe, with her saddle on which to prop up his shoulders, he lay, looking in the red coals, as if forgetful of her speech or herself. But at last he repeated her words:

"At home again! Do you know there's a big lot of meaning in those words, Miss, especially to a man who hasn't known what home meant for years?

and to-night, with white people in my cabin and a white woman to make things look natural, I tell you it makes me remember what home used to be, in a way I have not experienced for many a day."

"Then I'm glad I strayed off into the storm and your cabin," said the girl promptly; "because a man shouldn't forget his home and home-folks, especially if the memories would be good ones. People need all the good memories they can keep with them in this world; they're a sort of steering apparatus in a life-boat, and help a man make a straight journey toward his future."

"That's so," he said, and put his hand up over his eyes as if to shield them from the heat of the fire. He was lying full in the light, while she was in the shadow. He could scarcely see her features, with her head drawn back against the wall like that. And the very fact of knowing herself almost unseen--a voice, only, speaking to him--gave her courage to say things as she could not have said them at another time.

"Do you know," she said, as she sat there watching him with his eyes covered by his hand--"do you know that once or twice when we have been together I have wished I was a man, that I could say some things to you that a woman or a girl--that is, most girls--can't say very well? One of the things is that I should be glad to hear of you getting out of this life here; there is something wrong about it to you--something that doesn't suit you; I don't know what it is, but I can see you are not the man you might be--and ought to be. I've thought of it often since I saw you last, and sometimes--yes--I've been sorry for my ugly manner toward you. White people, when they meet in these out-of-the-way places in the world, ought to be as so many brothers and sisters to each other; and there were times, often, when I might have helped you to feel at home among us--when I might have been more kind."

"More kind? Good G.o.d!" whispered the man.

"And I made up my mind," continued the girl courageously, "that if I ever saw you again, I was going to speak plainly to you about yourself and the dissatisfaction with yourself that you spoke of that day in the laurel thicket. I don't know what the cause of it is, and I don't want to, but if it is any wrong that you've done in--in the past, a bad way to atone is by burying oneself alive, along with all energy and ambition. Now, you may think me presuming to say these things to you like this; but I've been wishing somebody would say them to you, and there seems no one here to do it but me, and so--"

She stopped, not so much because she had finished as because she felt herself failing utterly in saying the things she had really intended to say. It all sounded very flat and commonplace in her own ears--not at all the words to carry any influence to anyone, and so she stopped helplessly and looked at him.

"I'm glad it is you that says them," he answered, still without looking at her, "because you've got the stuff in you for such a good, square friend to a man--the sort of woman a person could go to in trouble, even if they hadn't the pa.s.sport of a saint to take with them; and I wish--I wish I could tell you to-night something of the things that you've started on. If I could--" he stopped a moment.

"I suppose any other girl--" she began in a deprecating tone; but he dropped his hand from his eyes and looked at her.

"You're not like other girls," he said with a great fondness in his eyes, "and that's just the reason I feel like telling you all. You're not like any girl I've ever known. I've often felt like speaking to you as if you were a boy--an almighty aggravatin' slip of a boy sometimes; and yet--"

He lay silent for a little while, so long that the girl wondered if he had forgotten what he was to try to tell her. The warmth after the rain had made them neglect the fire, and its blaze had dropped low and lower, until she was entirely in the shadow--only across the hearth and his form did the light fall.

"And yet," he continued, as if there had been no break in his speech, "there's been many a night I've dreamed of seeing you sit here by this fire-place just as I've seen you to-night; just as bright like and contented, as if all the roughness and poorness of it was nothing to you, or else a big joke for you to make fun of; and then--well, at such times you didn't seem like a boy, but--"

Again he stopped.

"Never mind what I'm like," suggested the girl; "that doesn't matter. I guess everyone seems a different person with different people; but you wanted to tell me something of yourself, didn't you?"

"That's what I'm trying to get at," he answered, "but it isn't easy.

I've got to go back so far to start at the beginning--back ten years, to reckon up mistakes. That's a big job, my girl--my girl."

The lingering repet.i.tion of those words opened the girl's eyes wide with a sudden memory of that moonlit night in the gulch. Then she had not fancied those whispered words! they had been uttered, and by his voice; and those fancied tears of Tillie's, and--the kisses!

So thick came those thronging memories, that she did not notice his long, dreamy silence. She was thinking of that night, and all the sweet, vague suggestion in it that had vanished with the new day. She was comparing its brief charm with this meeting of to-night that was ignoring it so effectually; that was as the beginning of a new knowledge of each other, with the commonplace and practical as a basis.

Her reverie was broken sharply by the sight of a form that suddenly, silently, appeared in the door-way. Her first impulse of movement or speech was checked as the faint, flickering light shifted across the visage of the new-comer, and she recognized the Indian girl who had hidden behind the ponies. A smile was on the dark face as she saw Genesee lying there, asleep he must have looked from the door, and utterly oblivious of her entrance. Her soft moccasins left no sound as she crossed the floor and dropped down beside him, laying one arm about his throat. He clasped the hand quickly and opened his half-shut eyes.

Did he, for an instant, mistake it for another hand that had slipped into his that one night? Whatever he thought, his face was like that of death as he met the eyes of the Indian girl.

"Talapa!" he muttered, and his fingers closing on her wrist must have twisted it painfully, by the quick change in her half-Indian, half-French face. He seemed hardly conscious of it. Just then he looked at her as if she was in reality that Indian deity of the inferno from whom her name was derived.

"Hyak nika kelapie!" (I returned quickly), she whined, as if puzzled at her reception, and darting furious sidelong glances from the black eyes that had the width between them that is given to serpents. "Nah!"

she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed angrily, as no answer was made to her; and freeing her hand, she rose to her feet. She had not once seen the white girl in the shadow. Coming from the darkness into the light, her eyes were blinded to all but the one plainly seen figure. But as she rose to her feet, and Genesee with her, Rachel stooped to the pile of wood beside her, and throwing some bits of pine on the fire, sent the sparks flying upward, and a second later a blaze of light flooded the room.

The action was a natural, self-possessed one--it took a great deal to upset Miss Hardy's equanimity--and she coolly sat down again facing the astonished Indian girl and Genesee; but her face was very white, though she said not a word.

"There is no need for me to try to remember the beginning, is there,"

said Genesee bitterly, looking at her with sombre, moody eyes, "since the end has told its own story? This is--my--my--"

Did he say wife? She never could be quite sure of the word, but she knew he tried to say it.

His voice sounded smothered, unnatural, as it had that day in the laurel thicket when he had spoken of locking himself out from a heaven. She understood what he meant now.

"No, there is no need," she said, as quietly as she could, though her heart seemed choking her and her hands trembled. "I hope all will come right for you sometime, and--I understand, now."

Did she really understand, even then, or know the moral lie the man had told, the lie that, in his abas.e.m.e.nt, he felt was easier to have her believe than the truth?

Talapa stood drying her moccasins at the fire, as if not understanding their words; but the slow, cunning smile crept back to her lips as she recognized the white girl, and no doubt remembered that she and Genesee had ridden together that day at the camp.

He picked up his hat and walked to the door, after her kindly words, putting his hand out ahead of him in a blind sort of way, and then stopped, saying to her gently:

"Get what rest you can--try to, anyway; you will need it." And then, with some words in Indian to Talapa, he went out into the night.