Told In The Hills Part 14

His words to Talapa were in regard to their guests' comfort, for that silent individual at once began preparations for bed-making on her behalf, until Rachel told her in Chinook that she would sleep in her chair where she was. And there she sat through the night, feeling that the eyes of the Indian girl were never taken from her as the motionless form lay rolled in a blanket on the floor, much as it had rolled itself up on the gra.s.s that other day.

Jim was throned in royal state, for he had the bed all to himself, and in the morning opened his eyes in amazement as he smelled the coffee and saw the Indian girl moving about as if at home.

"Yes, we've got a new cook, Jim," said Miss Hardy, from the window; "so we are out of work, you and I. Sleep well?"

"Great!" said Jim, yawning widely. "Where's Mr. Jack?"

"Out, somewhere," returned the girl comprehensively. She did not add that he had been out all night, and Jim was too much interested with the prospect of breakfast to be very curious.

He had it, as he had the bed--all to himself. Miss Hardy was not hungry, for a wonder, and Talapa disappeared after it was placed on the table.

The girl asked Jim if that was Indian etiquette, but Jim didn't know what etiquette was, so he couldn't tell.

Through that long vigil of the night there had returned to the girl much of her light, ironical manner; but the mockery was more of herself and her own emotions than aught else, for when Genesee brought the horses to the door and she looked in his face, any thought of jesting with him was impossible; the signs of a storm were on him as they were on the mountains in the morning light.

"I will guide you back to the home trail," he said as he held Betty at the door for her to mount.

"Go in and get some breakfast," was all the answer she made him. But he shook his head, and reached his hand to help her.

"What's the matter with everyone this morning?" asked Jim. "There hasn't been a bite of breakfast eaten only what I got away with myself."

Genesee glanced in at the table. "Would you eat nothing because it was mine?" he asked in a low tone.

"I did not because I could not," she said in the same tone; and then added, good-humoredly: "Despite Jim's belief in my appet.i.te, it does go back on me sometimes--and this is one of the times. It's too early in the morning for breakfast. Are you going with us on foot?" as she noticed Mowitza, unsaddled, grazing about the green turf at the edge of the timber.

"Yes," he answered, "I have not far to go."

She slipped past him, and gathering her dress up from the wet gra.s.s walked over to where Mowitza browsed. The beautiful mare raised her head and came over the gra.s.s with long, light steps, as if recognizing the low call of her visitor; and resting her head on the girl's shoulder, there seemed to be a conversation between them perfectly satisfactory to each; while Mowitza's owner stood looking at them with a world of conflicting emotions in his face.

"I have been saying good-bye to Mowitza," she remarked, as she joined them and mounted Betty, "and we are both disconsolate. She carried me out of danger once, and I am slow to forget a favor."

It was a very matter-of-fact statement; she was a matter-of-fact young woman that morning. Genesee felt that she was trying to let him know her memory would keep only the best of her knowledge of him. It was an added debt to that which he already owed her, and he walked in silence at her horse's head, finding no words to express his thoughts, and not daring to use them if he had.

The valleys were wrapped in the whitest of mists as they got a glimpse of them from the heights. The sun was struggling through one veil only to be plunged into another, and all the cedar wood was in the drip, drip of tears that follow tempests. Where was all that glory of the east at sunrise which those two had once watched from a mountain not far from this? In the east, as they looked now, there were only faint streaks of lavender across the sky--of lavender the color of mourning.

He directed Jim the way of the trail, and then turned to her.

"I don't know what to say to you--or just how low you will think me," he said in a miserable sort of way. "When I think of--of some things, I wonder that you even speak to me this morning--G.o.d! I'm ashamed to look you in the face!"

And he looked it. All the cool a.s.surance that had been a prominent phase of his personality that evening when Hardy met him first, was gone. His handsome, careless face and the independent head were drooped before hers as his broad-brimmed hat was pulled a little lower over his eyes.

Some women are curious, and this one, whom he had thought unlike all others, rather justified his belief, as she bent over in the saddle and lifted the cover from his dark hair.

"Don't be!" she said gently--and as he looked up at her she held out her hand--"nika tillik.u.m" (my friend); and the sweetness possible in the words had never been known by him until she uttered them so. "My friend, don't feel like that, and don't think me quite a fool. I've seen enough of life to know that few men under the same circ.u.mstances would try as hard to be honest as you did, and if you failed in some ways, the fault was as much mine as yours."

"Rachel!" It was the first time he had ever called her that.

"Yes, I had some time to think about it last night," she said, with a little ironical smile about her lips; "and the conclusion I've come to is that we should afford to be honest this morning, and not--not so very much ashamed;" and then she hurried on in her speech, stumbling a little as the clasp of his hand made her unsteady through all her determination. "I will not see you again, perhaps ever. But I want you to know that I have faith in your making a great deal of your life if you try; you have the right foundations--strong will and a good principle. Mentally, you have been asleep here in the hills--don't find fault with your awakening. And don't feel so--so remorseful about--that night. There are some things people do and think that they can't help--we couldn't help that night; and so--good-bye--Jack."

"G.o.d bless you, girl!" were the heart-felt, earnest words that answered her good-bye; and with a last firm clasp of hands, she turned Betty's head toward the trail Jim had taken, and rode away under the cedar boughs.

Genesee stood bare-headed, with a new light in his eyes as he watched her--the dawn of some growing determination.

Once she looked back, and seeing him still there, touched her cap in military fashion, and with a smile disappeared in the wet woods. As he turned away there crept from the shrubbery at the junction of the trails Talapa, who, with that slow, knowing smile about her full lips, stole after him--in her dusky silence a very shadow of a man's past that grows heavy and wide after the noon is dead, and bars out lives from sunny doors where happiness might be found. His head was bent low, thinking--thinking as he walked back to the cabin that had once held at least a sort of content--a content based on one side of his nature. Had the other died, or was it only asleep? And she had told him not to find fault with his awakening--she! He had never before realized the wealth or loss one woman could make to the world.

"Ashamed to look her in the face!" His own words echoed in his ears as he walked under the wet leaves, with the shadow of the shame skulking unseen after him; and then, little by little, the sense of her farewell came back to him, and running through it, that strong thread of faith in him yet, making his life more worth living.

"d.a.m.ned little in my present outfit for her to build any foundation for hope on," he muttered grimly, as he saddled and bridled Mowitza, as if in hot haste to be gone somewhere, and then sat down on the door-step as if forgetful of the intention.

Talapa slipped past him with an armful of bark for the fire. Not a word had pa.s.sed between them since the night before, and the girl watched him covertly from under drooped lids. Was she trying to fathom his meditations, or determine how far they were to affect her own future?

For as the birds foretell by the signs in the air the change of the summer, so Talapa, through the atmosphere of the cabin that morning, felt approach the end of a season that had been to her luxurious with comforts new to her; and though the Indian blood in her veins may have disdained the adjuncts of civilization, yet the French tide that crossed it carried to her the Gallic yearning for the dainties and delicacies of life. To be sure, one would not find many of those in a backwoodsman's cabin; but all content is comparative, and Talapa's basis of comparison was the earthen floor of a thronged "tepee," or wigwam, where blows had been more frequent than square meals; and being a thing feminine, her affections turned to this white man of the woods who could give her a floor of boards and a dinner-pot never empty, and moreover, being of the s.e.x feminine, those bonds of affection were no doubt securely fastened--bonds welded in a circle--endless.

At least those attributes, vaguely remembered, are usually conceded to the more gentle half of humanity, and I give Talapa the benefit of the belief, as her portrait has been of necessity set in the shadows, and has need of all the high lights that can be found for it. Whatever she may have lacked from a high-church point of view, she had at least enviable self-possession. Whatever tumult of wounded feeling there may have been in this daughter of the forest, she moved around sedately, with an air that in a white woman would be called martyr-like, and said nothing.

It was as well, perhaps, that she had the rare gift of silence, for the man at the door, with his chin resting grimly on his fists, did not seem at all sympathetic, or in the humor to fit himself to anyone's moods.

The tones of that girl's voice were still vibrating over chords in his nature that disturbed him. He did not even notice Talapa's movements until she ceased them by squatting down with native grace by the fire-place, and then--

"Get up off that!" he roared, in a voice that hastened Talapa's rising considerably.

"That" was the buffalo-robe on which the other girl had throned herself the night before; and what a picture she had made in the fire-light!

Genesee in two strides crossed the floor, and grabbing the robe, flung it over his shoulder. No, it was not courteous to unseat a lady with so little ceremony--it may not even have been natural to him, so many things are not natural to us human things that are yet so true.

"And why so?" asked Talapa sullenly, her back against the wall as if in a position to show fight; that is, she said "Pe-kah-ta?" but, for the benefit of the civilized reader, the ordinary English is given--"And why so?"

Genesee looked at her a moment from head to foot, but the scrutiny resulted in silence--no remark. At length he walked back to the chest against the wall, and unlocking it, drew out an account-book, between the leaves of which were some money orders; two of them he took out, putting the rest in his pocket. Then, writing a signature on those two--not the name of Jack Genesee, by the way--he turned to Mistress Talapa, who had slid from the wall down on the floor minus the buffalo-robe.

"Here!" he said tersely. "I am going away. Klat-awah si-ah--do you understand?" And then, fishing some silver out of his pocket, he handed it to her with the notes. "Take these to the settlement--to the bank-store. They'll give you money--money to live all winter. Live in the cabin if you want; only get out in the spring--do you hear? I will want it myself then--and I want it alone."

Without comment, Talapa reached up and took the money, looking curiously at the notes, as if to decipher the meaning in the pictured paper, and then:

"Nika wake tikegh Talapa?" she queried, but with nothing in her tone to tell if she cared whether he wanted her or not.

"Not by a--" he began energetically, and then, "you are your own boss now," he added, more quietly. "Go where you please, only you'd better keep clear of the old gang, for I won't buy you from them again--k.u.mtuks?"

Talapa nodded that she understood, her eyes roving about the cabin, possibly taking note of the wealth that she had until spring to revel in or filch from.

Genesee noticed that mental reckoning.

"Leave these things alone," he said shortly. "Use them, but leave them here. If any of them are gone when I get back--well, I'll go after them."

And throwing the robe over his arm again, he strode out through the door, mounted Mowitza, and rode away.

It was not a sentimental finale to an idyl of the wood, but by the time the finale is reached, the average human specimen has no sentiment to waste. Had they possessed any to begin with?

It was hard to tell whether Talapa was crushed by the cold cruelty of that leave-taking, or whether she was indifferent; that very uncertainty is a charm exerted over us by those conservative natures that lock within themselves wrath or joy where we ordinary mortals give expression to ours with all the language possessed by us, and occasionally borrow some adjectives that would puzzle us to give a translation of.

Talapa sat where he left her, not moving except once to shy a pine knot at a rat by the cupboard--and hit it, too, though she did belong to the s.e.x divine. So she sat, pensively dribbling the silver coin from hand to hand, until the morning crept away and the sun shone through the mists.

What was it that at last awakened her from an apparent dreamland--the note of that bird whistling in the forest in very gladness that the sun shone again? Evidently so, and the Indian blood in her veins had taught her the secret of sympathy with the wild things, for she gave an answering call, half voice, half whistle. Silence for a little, and then again from the timber came that quavering note, with the rising inflection at the finish that was so near an interrogation.