Where the Trail Divides Part 18

Then, indeed, it was the man's moment. Then, and not until then, he accepted his reward.

"Bess!" She was in his arms. "Bess!" He tasted Paradise. "Bess!" That was all.

For the second time that day the air of the tiny town tingled with portent of the unusual. For the second time a crowd was gathered; only now it was not at the station, but at a place of far more sinister import, within and in front of the "Lost Hope" saloon. Again in personnel it was different, notably different from that of the first occasion. The same irresponsibles were there, as ever they are present at times of storm; but added to the aggregation now, outnumbering them, were others ordinarily responsible, men typical in every way of the time and place. A second difference of even greater portent was the motif of gathering. For it was not a mere rumour, an idle curiosity, that had brought them together now. On the contrary they had at last, these dominant Anglo-Saxons, begun to take themselves seriously. Rumour, inevitable in a place where days were as much alike as the one-story buildings on the main street, had begun when How Landor had commenced to haunt the station at the time of the incoming train. The incident of the morning had familiarised the rumour into gossip. Hard upon this had followed a report from the hotel landlord, and gossip had become certainty. Then it was that horse-play had ceased, and, save at the point of congregation, a silence, unwonted and sinister, had taken its place. So marked was the change that when at last the Indian and the girl left the hotel together on their way to the parsonage the street through which they pa.s.sed was as still as though it were the street of a prairie dog town. So quiet it was that the girl was deceived; but the ears of the Indian were keener, and faint as an echo beneath it, as yet well in the distance, he detected the warning of an alien note. Not as on that other day out on the prairie when he caught the first trumpet call of the Canada goose, did he recognise the sound from previous familiarity. Never in his life had he heard its like; yet now an instinct told him its meaning, told him as well its menace. Not once did he look back, not one word of prophecy did he speak to the girl at his side; yet as surely as a grey timber wolf realises what is to come when he catches the first faint bay of the hounds on his trail, How Landor realised that at last for him the hour of destiny had struck, that as surely as the wild thing must battle for life he must do likewise--and that soon, very, very soon.

Up the street they went: a small dark girl garbed as no woman was ever garbed in a fashion-plate, a tall copper-brown man all but humorously grotesque in a ready-made suit of clothes that were far from a fit and the first starched shirt and collar he had ever worn. Laughable unqualifiedly, this red man tricked out in the individuality-destroying dress of the white brother would have been to an observer who had not the key to the situation; but to one who knew the motive of the alteration it was far as the ends of the earth from humorous. On they went, silent now, each in widely separated antic.i.p.ation; and after them, at first silent likewise, then as it advanced growing noisier and noisier, followed the crowd which had congregated at the Lost Hope saloon. As on the day of the little landman's funeral when Captain William Landor had pa.s.sed up the street of Cayote Centre, ahead where the Indian and the girl advanced not the figure of a human being was in sight, unless one were suspicious and looked closely, not a face; but to the Indian eyes were everywhere. Every house they pa.s.sed--for they were in the residence section now--had its pair or multiple pairs peering out through the slats of a blind, or, as in a theatre preceding a performance, at the side of a drawn curtain. Like wildfire the news had spread; like turtles timid women folk had drawn close within their sh.e.l.ls; yet everywhere curiosity they could not repress prompted them to take a last look before the storm. Once, and once only, the pedestrians were interrupted. Then a house dog came bounding across the lawn to pause at a safe distance and growl a menace; and again the all-noting Indian had observed the cause of the unwonted bravery, had heard the low voice from the kitchen that had urged the beast on.

Thus nearer and nearer that sunny fall morning the storm approached.

Long before this, un.o.bservant though she was, had the girl not been living in the future instead of the present, she would have recognised its coming. For the pursuers were gaining rapidly now. They had crossed onto the same street, the princ.i.p.al residence thoroughfare, and were coming as a crowd ever moves: swiftly, those in the rear exerting themselves to get to the fore, and so again. Far from silent by this time, the man ahead, the man who never deigned a backward glance, could hear their voices in a perpetual rumble; could distinguish at intervals, interrupting it, above it, a voice commanding, inflaming. Without seeing, he knew that at last his persecutors had found a commander, a directing spirit--and as well as he knew his own name he knew who that leader was. Unsophisticated absolutely in the ways of the world was this man; but in the reading of his fellows he was a master.

Apparently oblivious when a part of this same crowd had congregated at the train, he had nevertheless observed them individual by individual; and in his own consciousness had known that the moment, his moment, had not come: for a leader, the leader, was not there. Again when the train had pulled in he had watched--and still the leader did not appear. But he was not deceived. As he had trusted in the girl's coming he had trusted in another's following surrept.i.tiously; and as now he heard that one voice sounding above the other voices he knew he had been right. For the man at the head of that pursuing mob which gained on them so rapidly block by block, the man whose influence in those brief hours the Indian and the girl had been alone in the tiny room at the hotel had vitalised the lukewarm racial hostility into a thing of menace, was the same man whose life he had once saved, the same man about whose throat ere the identical night had pa.s.sed his fingers had closed: Clayton Craig by name, one time of Boston, Ma.s.s., but now, by his uncle's will, master of the Buffalo b.u.t.te ranch house!

Meanwhile in the study of the parsonage Clifford Mitch.e.l.l was again looking out the single window. Time and time again he had tried to work--and as often failed. At last he had conformed to the inevitable and was merely waiting. The house was on the outskirts of the town and the window faced the open prairie; bare and rolling as far as the eye could reach. He was city bred, this mild-faced servant of G.o.d, and as yet the prairie country was a thing at which to marvel. He was looking out upon it now, absently, thoughtfully, wondering at its immensity and its silence--when of a sudden he became conscious that it was no longer silent. Instead to his ears, growing louder moment by moment, penetrating the illy constructed walls, came an indistinct roar; rising, lowering, yet ever constant: a sound unlike any other on earth, distinctive as the silence preceding had been typical--the clamour of angry, menacing human voices _en ma.s.se._ Once, not long before, in a city street the listener had heard that identical sound; and recognition was instantaneous. Swift as memory he recalled the strike that had been its cause, the horde of sympathisers who had of a sudden appeared as from the very earth, the white face and desperate figure of the solitary "scab" fighting a moment, and a moment only, for life, in their midst. Swift as memory came that picture; and swift upon its heels, blotting it out, the present returned. Clifford Mitch.e.l.l had not been among this people long; yet already he had caught the spirit of the place, and as he listened he knew full well what a similar gathering among them would mean. He was not a brave man, this blue-eyed pastor; not a drop of fighting blood was in his veins; and as moment after moment pa.s.sed and the sound grew nearer and nearer, the first real terror of his life came creeping over him. Not in his mind was there a doubt as to the destination of that oncoming mult.i.tude. Premonition had been too electric in the air that day for him to question its meaning.

They were coming to him, to him, Clifford Mitch.e.l.l, these irresponsible menacing humans. It might be another for whom they had gathered; but he as well would share in their displeasure, in their punishment: for he was a party to the thing of which they disapproved. All the day, from the time the Indian had called and almost simultaneously, vague rumours of trouble had come floating in the visitor's wake; he had been in antic.i.p.ation; and now the thing antic.i.p.ated had become a certainty.

Answering he felt the cold perspiration come pouring out on his forehead; and absently, he wiped it away with the palm of his hand.

Following came a purely physical weakness; and stumbling across the room he took the seat beside the desk. Unconsciously nervous, restless, his fingers fumbled with the pile of papers before him until they came to a certain one he had buried. Almost as though impelled against his will to do so he spread this one flat before him and sat staring at it, dumbly waiting.

Nearer and nearer came the roar as he sat there, irresistible, c.u.mulatively menacing as a force of nature; and instinctively, by it alone, the listener marked the approach of its makers. He could hear them down the street at the other end of the block before the residence of Banker Briggs. He knew this to a certainty because part of those who came were on the sidewalk, and that was the only piece of cement in town. Again, by the same token, he knew when they pa.s.sed the only other house in the block besides his own. There was a gap in the boardwalk there, and when the leaders reached it the patter of their footsteps went suddenly m.u.f.fled on the bare earth. It was his turn next, his in a moment; yes, the feet were already on the confines of his own yard, the roar of their owners' voices was all about. He could even distinguish what they were saying now, could catch names, his own name.

Of a sudden, expected and yet unexpected, a dark shadow pa.s.sed before his window, and another; then a swarm. Simultaneously faces, not a few but as many as could crowd into the s.p.a.ce, appeared outside the panes, staring curiously in. Involuntarily he arose to draw the shade; and at that moment, interrupting, startlingly loud, there came a knock at his front door.

Clifford Mitch.e.l.l paused on his way to the window, stood irresolute; and, seemingly impossible as it was, the number of curious faces multiplied.

The knock was repeated; not fearfully or frantically, but deliberately and with an insistence there was no misunderstanding.

This time the minister responded. He did not pause to blot out the faces of the curious. The licence he had been absently holding was still in his hand; but he did not delay to put it down. There was something compelling in that knock; something that demanded instant obedience, and he obeyed. The living-room through which he pa.s.sed on his way had two windows and, identical with that of his study, each was black with humanity; but he did not even glance at them. His legs trembled involuntarily and his throat was dry as though he had been speaking for hours; yet, nevertheless, he obeyed. With a hand that shook perceptibly he turned the b.u.t.ton of the spring lock, and, opening the door onto the street, looked out.

While Clifford Mitch.e.l.l lived, while lived every man of the uncounted throng gathered there beneath the noon-time sun that October day, they remembered that moment, the moments that followed. As real life is ever stranger than fiction, so off the stage occur incidents more stirring than at the play. Standing there in the narrow doorway, white-faced, hesitant, awaiting a command, the minister himself exemplified the fact beyond question; yet of his own grotesque part he was oblivious. He had thought for but one thing that moment, had room in his consciousness for but one impression; and that was for the drama ready there before him.

And small wonder, for, looking out, this was what he saw:

An uneven straggling village street, mottled with patches of dead gra.s.s and weeds. Along it, here and there, like kernels of seed scattered on fallow ground, a sprinkling of one-story houses. This the background. In the midst of it all, covering his lawn, overflowing into the yards of his neighbours, dense, crowding the better to see, all-surrounding, was a solid zone of motley humanity. Old men with weather-beaten faces and untrimmed beards were there, young men with the marks that dissipation and pa.s.sion indelibly stamp, awkward, gawky youths unconsciously aping their elders, smooth-faced youngsters in outgrown garments; all ages and conditions of the human frontier male were there--but in that zone not a single woman. Ranchers there were in corduroys and denims, cowboys in buckskin and flannel, gamblers in the glaring colours distinctive of their kind, business men with closely cropped moustaches, idlers in anything and everything; but amid them all not a friendly face. This the surrounding zone, the mongrel pack that had brought the quarry to bay.

In the centre of the half circle they formed, within a couple of paces of the now open doorway, were three people. Two of them, a rather small brown girl and a tall wiry Indian in a new suit of ready-made clothes and a derby hat of the model of the year before, were nearest; so near that the door, which swung outward, all but touched them. The other, a well-built, smooth-faced Easterner with a white skin and delicate hands, was opposite. His dress was the dress of a man of fashion, his cravat and patent leather b.u.t.toned shoes were of the latest style; but his linen was soiled now, and a two-days' growth of beard covered his chin.

Moreover, his eyes were bloodshot and, despite an effort to prevent, as he stood there now he wavered a bit to right and left. One look told his story. He had been drinking, drinking for days; and, worst of all, he had been drinking this day, drinking in antic.i.p.ation of this very moment, swallowing courage against the necessity of the now. All this the stage and its setting, upon which the white-faced minister raised the curtain. Simultaneously, as ever an audience grows silent when the real play begins, it grew silent now. The hinges of the little-used front door were rusty and had squeaked startlingly. Otherwise not a sound marked the opening of the drama.

A moment following the silence was intense, a thing one could feel; then of a sudden it was broken--not by words, but by action. One step the white-skinned man took forward; a step toward the girl. A second step he advanced, and halted; for, preventing, the hand of the other man was upon his own.

"Stand back, please," said an even voice. "It's not time for congratulations yet. Stand back, please."

Answering there was a sound; but not articulate. It was a curse, a challenge, a menace all in one; and with a hysterical terrified little cry the girl shrank back into the doorway itself. But none other, not even the minister, stirred.

"Mr. Craig," the words were low, almost intimately low, but in the stillness they seemed fairly loud. "I ask you once more to stand back. I don't warn you, I merely request--but I shall not ask it again." Of a sudden the speaker's hand left the other's arm, dropped by his own side.

"Stand back, please."

Face to face the two men stood there; the one face working, pa.s.sionate, menacing; the other emotionless as the blue sky overhead. A moment they remained so while the breathless onlookers expected anything, while from the doorstep the minister's white lips moved in a voiceless prayer; then slowly, lingeringly, the man who had advanced drew back. A step he took silently, another, and his breathing became audible, still another, and was himself amid the spectators. Then for the first time he found voice.

"You spoke your own sentence then, redskin," he blazed. "We'd have let you go if you'd given up the girl; but now--now--May G.o.d have mercy on your soul now, How Landor!"

Again there was silence; silence absolute. As at that first meeting on the car platform, the girl had turned facing them. It was the crisis, and as before an instinct which she did not understand, which she merely obeyed, brought her to the Indian's side; held her there motionless, pa.s.sive, mysteriously unafraid. Her usually brown face was very pale and her eyes were unnaturally bright; but withal she was unbelievably calm--calm as a child with its hand in its father's hand. Not even that solid zone of menacing, staring eyes had terror for her now. Whether or no she loved him, as she believed in G.o.d she trusted in that motionless, dominant human by her side.

A moment they stood so in a silence wherein they could hear each other breathe, wherein the prayer that had never left the minister's lips became audible; then came the end. Incredible after it was over was that _denouement_, inexplicable to a legion of old men, then among the boys, who witnessed it, to this day. Yet as the incredible continues to take place in this world it took place then. As one man can ever dominate other men it was done that silent noon hour. For that moment the first challenge that had ever pa.s.sed the lips of How Landor was spoken. The only challenge that he ever made to man or woman in his life found voice; and was not accepted. One step he took toward that listening, expectant throng and halted. With the old, old motion his arms folded across his chest.

"Men," he said, "I don't want trouble here to-day. I've done my best to avoid it; but the end has come. I've stood everything at your hands, every insult which you could conceive, things which no white man would have permitted for a second; and so far without resentment. But I shall stand it no more. I'm one to a hundred; but that makes no difference.

Bess Landor and I are to be married now and here; here before you all. I shall not talk to you again. I shall not ask you to leave us in peace; but as surely as one of you speaks another word of insult to her or to me, as surely as one of you attempts to interfere or prevent, I shall kill that man. No matter which of you it is, I shall do this thing." A moment longer he stood so, observing them steadily, with folded arms; then, still facing, he moved back a step. "Mr. Mitch.e.l.l," he said, "we are ready."

And there that October noonday, fair in the open with two hundred curious eyes watching, in a silence unbroken as that of prairie night itself, Bess Landor and Ma-wa-cha-sa the Sioux were married. The minister stumbled in the ritual, and though he held the book close before his face, it was memory alone that prompted the form; for the pages shook until the letters were blurred. Yet it was done, and, save one alone, every spectator who had come with a far different intent stayed and listened to the end. That one, a tall, modish alien with a red, flushed face covered with a two-days' growth of bread, was likewise watching when it began. But when it was over he was not there; and not one of those who had followed his lead had noticed his going.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MYSTERY OF SOLITUDE

Westward across the unbroken prairie country, into the smiling, sun-kissed silence and emptiness, two people were driving: a white girl of two-and-twenty summers and an Indian man a few years older. Back of them, in the direction from which they had come, was the outline of a straggling, desolate village. Ahead, to either side, was the rolling brown earth; and at the end of it, abrupt apparently as a material wall, the blue of a cloudless October sky. The team they were driving, a mouse-coloured broncho and a mate a shade darker, were restless after three days of enforced inactivity and tugged at the bit mightily. Though the day was perfectly still, the canvas curtains of the old surrey flapped lazily in a breeze born of the pace alone. The harness on the ponies shuffled and creaked with every move. Though the bolts of the ancient vehicle had been carefully tightened, it nevertheless groaned at intervals with the motion; mysteriously, like the unconscious sigh of the aged, apparently without reason. Beneath the wheels the frost-dried gra.s.s rattled continuously, monotonously; but save this last there was no other sound. Since the two humans had left the limits of the tiny town there had been no other sound. Now and then the girl had glanced behind, instinctively, almost fearfully; but not once had the man followed her example, had he stirred in his place. Swiftly, silently, he was leaving civilisation behind him; by the scarce visible landmarks he alone distinguished was returning to his own, to the wild that lay in the distance beyond.

Thus westward, direct as a tight cord, on and on they went; and back of them gradually, all but unconsciously, the low-built terminus grew dimmer and dimmer, vanished detail by detail as completely as though it had never been. Last of all to disappear, already a mere black dot against the blue, was the water tank beside the station. For three miles, four, it held its place; then, as, with the old unconscious motion the girl turned to look back, she searched for it in vain. Behind them as before, unbroken, limiting, only the brown plain and the blue surrounding wall met her gaze. At last, there in the solitude, there with no observer save nature and nature's G.o.d, she and the other were alone.

As the first man and the first woman were alone they were alone. From horizon to horizon was not a sign of human handiwork, not a suggestion of human presence. They might live or die, or laugh or weep, or love or hate--and none of their kind would be the wiser. All her life that she could remember the girl had lived so, all her life she had but to lift her eyes above her feet to gaze into the infinite; yet in the irony of fate never until this moment, the moment when of all she should have been the happiest, did the immensity of this solitude appeal to her so, did appreciation of the terrible, haunting loneliness it concealed touch her with its grip. Care free, thoughtless, never until the whirl of the last fortnight had the future, her future, appealed to her as something which she herself must shape or alter. Heretofore it had been a thing taken for granted, preordained as the alternate coming of light and of darkness. But in that intervening time, short as it was, she had awakened. Rude as had been the circ.u.mstances that had aroused her, they had nevertheless been effective. Without volition upon her part the panorama of another life had been unrolled before her eyes. Sensations, thoughts, impulses of which she had never previously dreamed had been hers. Pa.s.sions unconceived had stalked before her gaze. More a nightmare on the whole than an awakening it had all been; yet nevertheless the experience had been hers. Much of its meaning had pa.s.sed her by. Events had crowded too thickly for her to grasp the whole; but _en ma.s.se_ the effect had been definite--startlingly definite. Unbelievable as it may seem, for the first time in her existence she had aroused to the consciousness of being an individual ent.i.ty. The inevitable metamorphosis of age, the thing which differentiates a child from an adult, belated long in her pa.s.sive life, had at last taken place.

Bewilderingly sudden, so sudden that as yet she had not adjusted herself to the change, had barely become conscious thereof, yet certain as existence itself, the transformation had come to pa.s.s. Looking back there that afternoon, looking where the town had been and now was not, mingling with the impressions of a day full to overflowing, there came to the girl for the first time a definite appreciation of this thing that she had done. And that moment from the scene, never to appear again, pa.s.sed Bess Landor the child; and invisibly into her place, taking up the play where the other had left, came Elizabeth Landor the woman.

Very, very long the girl sat there so; unconsciously long. With the swift reaction of youth, the scene of the excitement vanished, the personal menace gone, the impression it had made pa.s.sed promptly into abeyance. As when she and the man had sat alone in the tiny room of the hotel, another consideration was too insistent, too vital, to prevent dominating the moment. Any other diversion, save absolute physical pain itself, would have been inadequate, was inadequate. Gradually, minute by minute, as the outline of the town itself had vanished, the depressing impression of that jeering frontier mob faded; and in its stead, looming bigger and bigger, advancing, enfolding like a storm cloud until it blotted out every other thought, came realisation of the thing she had done: came appreciation of its finality, its immensity. Then it was that the infinite bigness of this uninhabited wild, the sense of its infinite loneliness, pressed her close. Despite herself, against all reason, as a child is afraid of the dark there grew upon her a terror of this intangible thing called solitude that stretched out into the future endlessly. Smiling as it was this day, unchangeably smiling, she fancied a time when it would not smile, when its pa.s.sive eventless monotony would be maddening. Swiftly, c.u.mulatively as with every intense nature impressions reproduce, this one augmented. Again into the consideration intruded the absolute finality, the irrevocability of her choice. More distinctly than when she had listened to the original, memory recalled the vow of the marriage ceremony she had taken: "For better or for worse, in sickness or in health, until death do us part." No, there was no escape, no possible avenue that remained unguarded. The knowledge overwhelmed her, suffocated her. Vague possibilities, recently born, became realities. Closer and closer gripped the solitude. For the first time in her existence the dead surrounding silence became unbearable.

Almost desperately she shifted back in her seat. Instinctively she sought the hand of her companion, pressed it tight. A mist came into her eyes, until the very team itself was blotted out.

"Oh, How," she confessed tensely, "I'm afraid!"

The man roused, as one recalled from reverie, as one awakened but not yet completely returned.

"Afraid, Bess? Afraid of what?"

"Of the silence, of the future; of you, a bit."

"Afraid of me, Bess?" Perplexed, wondering, the man held the team to a walk and simultaneously the side curtains ceased flapping, hung close.

"I don't think I understand. Tell me why, Bess."

"I can't. A child doesn't know why it's afraid of the dark. The dark has never hurt it. It merely is."

At her side the man sat looking at her. He did not touch her, he did not move. In the time since they had come into his own a wonderful change had come into the face of this Indian man; and never was it so wonderful as at this moment. He still wore the grotesque ready-made clothes. The high collar, galling to him as a bridle to an unbroken cayuse, had made a red circle about his throat; yet of it and of them he was oblivious.

Very, very young he looked at this time; fairly boyish. There was a colour in his beardless cheeks higher than the bronze of his race. The black eyes were soft as a child's, trusting as a child's. In the career of every human being there comes a time supreme, a climax, a period of exaltation to which memory will ever after recur, which serves as a standard of happiness absolute; and in the career of How Landor the hour had struck. This he knew; and yet, knowing, he could scarcely credit the truth. His cup of happiness was full, full to overflowing; yet he was almost afraid to put it to his lips for fear it would vanish, lest it should prove a myth.

Thus he sat there, this Indian man with whom fate was jesting, worshipping with a faith and love more intense than a Christian for his G.o.d; yet, with instinctive reticence, worshipping with closed lips. Thus the minutes pa.s.sed; minutes of silence wherein he should have been eloquent, minutes that held an opportunity that would never be his again. Smiling, ironic, fate the satirist looked on at her handiwork, watched to the end; and then, observing that _finale_, laughed--and with the voice of Elizabeth Landor.

"Don't work at it any more, How," derided destiny. "You don't understand, and I can't tell you."

She straightened in her seat and shrugged her shoulders with a gesture she had never used before, that had come very lately: come concomitantly with the arrival of the woman Elizabeth. "Anyway, I think it will be all right. I at least am not afraid of your eloping with someone else." She laughed again at the thought and folded her hands carefully in her lap.