Wild Youth Part 9

It's twelve miles. You couldn't get there till midnight, and you couldn't get back here with a wagon for another couple of hours from that. It would be daylight then. I can't stay here alone. I'm frightened, and I'm cold."

"Wait a minute," said Orlando.

He ran back to the dead horse, unloosed the saddle from its back, detached from it a rain-coat strapped to the pommel, and brought it to her.

"This will keep you warm," he said. "It isn't cold to-night. You only feel cold because you're upset and nervous."

"I'm frightened," she answered; "frightened of everything. Listen! Don't you hear something stirring--there!" She peered fearfully into the dusk behind them.

"Probably," he answered. "There are lots of prairie dogs and things about. The more you listen, the more you hear on the prairie, especially at night."

There was silence for a moment, and then he added: "My broncho'll steer straight for Slow Down Ranch, and that'll bring my men. You can be quite sure there'll be a search-party out from Tralee, too, at the first streak of dawn. You can't make the journey, so the only thing to be done is to wait here. That coat will keep you from getting cold, and I'll cut a lot of long gra.s.s and make you a bed here. Also, the gra.s.s is warm, and I'll cover you with it and with pine branches."

"I can't lie down," she answered. "No, I can't; I'm afraid. It's all so strange, and to-morrow, he--"

"There's nothing to be frightened about," he interrupted. "Nothing at all, Louise."

It was the first time he had ever addressed her by name, and it made her shiver with a new feeling. It seemed to tell a long, long story without words.

"You must do what I ask you to do--whatever I ask you to do," he repeated. "Will you?"

"Yes, anything you ask me I'll do," she answered, and then added quickly, "For you won't ask me to do anything I don't want to do. That's the difference. You understand, Orlando."

A few minutes later he had found a suitable place to make a kind of bed of gra.s.s for her, and had prepared it, with his knife, cutting the branches of small shrubs and gra.s.s and the scanty branches of the pine.

When it was finished, he came to her and said:

"It's all ready. Come and lie down, and I'll cover you up."

She got to her feet slowly, for she was in pain greater than she knew, so absorbed was her mind in this new life suddenly enveloping her, and then she said in a low voice: "No, not yet; I can't yet. I want to sit here. I've never felt the night like this before. It's wonderful, and I'm not nearly so cold now. I know I oughtn't to be cold at all, in the middle of summer like this." She paused, and seemed lost in contemplation of the sky. After a moment she added: "I never knew I could feel so far away from all the world as I do tonight. But the sky seems so near, and the moon and the stars so friendly."

"You haven't slept out of doors as I have hundreds of times," he answered. "The night and I are brothers; the stars are my little cousins; and the moon"--he giggled in his boyish way--"is my maiden aunt. She's so prudish and so kind and friendly, as you say. She's like an aunt I had--Aunt Samantha. She was my father's sister. I used to love her to visit my mother. She always brought me things, and she gave them to me as if they were on silver dishes--like a ceremony. She was so prim, I used to call her Aunt Primrose. She made me feel as if I could do anything I liked and break any law I pleased. But all the time, like a saint in a stained-gla.s.s window, she always seemed to be saying, 'Yes, you'd like to, but you mustn't.' She was just like the moon. I'm well acquainted with the moon, and--"

"Hush!" Louise interrupted. "Don't you hear something stirring--there, behind us?"

He laughed. "Of course something's always 'stirring behind us' on the prairie, and things you can't hear at all in the day are almost loud at night. There are thousands of sounds that never get to your ears when the sun is busy, but when Aunt Primrose Moon is saying, 'Hush! Hush!' to the naughty children of this world, you can hear a whole new population at work, cracking away like mad. Say, ain't I letting myself go to-night?" he added, giggling again and sitting down beside her. "I'm going to give you just half an hour, and at the end of that half-hour you've got to go to sleep."

"I can't--I can't," she said scarcely above a whisper. As though in response to an unspoken thought, he said casually: "I'm going to walk awhile when you've lain down, and then--" He pointed to a spot about twenty yards away. "Do you see the two big stones there? Well, when I've finished my walk and my talk with Aunty Primrose"--he laughed up at the moon--"I'm going to sit down there and snooze till daylight." He pointed again: "Right over there beside those two rocks. That's my bed. Do you see?"

She did not reply at once, but a long sigh came from her lips. "You'll be cold," she said.

"No, it's a hot night," he answered. "I'm too hot as it is." And he loosened his heavy red shirt at the throat.

"If I've got to go to bed in half an hour," she said presently, "tell me more about your Aunt Samantha, and about yourself, and your home before you came out here, and what you did when you were a little boy--tell me everything about yourself."

She was forgetting Tralee for the moment, and the man who raised his hand against her yesterday, and the life she had lived. Or was it only that she had grown young during these last two months, and the young can so easily forget!

"You want to hear? You really want to hear?" he asked. "Say, it won't be a very interesting story. Better let me tell you about the broncho-busting today."

"No, I want to hear about yourself." She looked intently at him for an instant, and then her eyes closed and the long lashes touched her cheek.

There was something very wilful in her beauty, and her body too had delicate, melancholy lines strange in one so young. She was not conscious that, in her dreamy abstraction, she was leaning towards him.

It was but an instant, though it seemed to him an interminable time, in which he fought the fierce desire to clasp her in his arms, and kiss the lips which, to his ears, said things more wonderful than he had ever dreamed of in his friendship with the night and the primrose moon.

He knew, however, that if he did, she would not go back to Tralee to-morrow; that tomorrow she would defy the leviathan; and that tomorrow he would not have the courage to say the things he must say to the evil-hearted master of Tralee, who, he knew, would challenge them with ugly accusations. He must be able to look old Mazarine fearlessly in the face; he would not be the slave of opportunity. He was going to fight clean. She was here beside him in the warm loneliness of the northern world, and he was full-grown in body and brain, with all the human emotions alive in him; yet he would fight clean.

Not for a half-hour, but for nearly an hour he told her what she wished to know, while she listened in a happy dream; and when at last she lay down, she refused his coverlet of dry gra.s.s, saying that she was quite warm. She declared that she did not even need the coat he had taken from the saddle of the dead horse, but he wrapped it around her, and, saying "Goodnight" almost brusquely, marched away in the light of the dying moon.

The night wore on. At first Louise's ears were sensitive to every sound, and there were stirrings in the hillock by which she slept, but she comforted herself with the thought that they were the stirrings of lonely little waifs of nature like herself. Though she dared not let the thought take form, yet she feared, too, the sound of human footsteps. By and by, however, in the sweet quiet of the night and the somnolent light of the moon, sleep captured her. When at last Orlando's footsteps did crush the dry gra.s.s, the sound failed to reach her ears, for it was then not very far from daylight, and she had slept for several hours. Sleep had not touched Orlando's eyes when, sitting down by the stones which were to mark his resting-place, he waited for Louise to wake.

CHAPTER X. THE MOON WAS NOT ALONE

Out on the prairie under the light of the stars a man had fought the first great battle of his life, and had emerged victorious. There are no drawn battles in the struggles of the soul. As Orlando fought, he was tortured by the thought that none would believe the truth to-morrow when it was told; and that there would be penalty though there was no crime.

As for Louise, she could have returned, almost blindly defiant, to her world, hand in hand with Orlando; and yet, when morning came, and her eyes opened on the prairie at day-break, with life stirring everywhere, she was glad of the victory--though the shadow of a great trouble to come was showing in her eyes.

She knew what she had to face at Tralee, and that she had no proof of her perfect innocence. It was of little use for them to call upon Heaven to witness what the night had been; and Joel Mazarine, who distrusted every man and woman, would distrust her with a sternness which guilt only could effectively defy!

Orlando's enforced gaiety as he invited her to a breakfast of a couple of biscuits, left from yesterday's broncho-busting, heartened her; yet both were conscious of the make-believe. They realized they were helpless in the grip of harsh circ.u.mstance. It was almost enough to make them take advantage of calumny and the traps set for them by Fate, and join hands for ever.

As they looked into each other's eyes, the same hopeless yet reckless thought flickered--flickered, and vanished. Yet as they looked out over the prairie towards Tralee, to which Louise must presently return, a rebellious sort of joy possessed them.

The discord of their thoughts was like music beside what had pa.s.sed at Tralee. There nothing relieved the black, sullen rage of Joel Mazarine.

He had returned to the house where his voice had always been able to summon his slaves, and to know that they would come--Chinaman, half-breed, wife. Now he called, and the wife did not come. On the new chestnut she had ridden away on the prairie, so the halfbreed woman had said, as hard as he could go. He had scanned the prairie till night came, without seeing a sign of her.

His black imagination instantly conceived the worst that Louise might do. It was not in him ever to have the decent alternative. He questioned the half-breed woman closely; he savagely interrogated the Chinaman; and then he declared that they lied to him, that they knew more than they said; and when he was unable to bear it any longer, he mounted his horse and galloped over to Slow Down Ranch. As he went, he kept swearing to himself that Louise had flown thither; and anger made his brain malignant. He could scarcely frame his words intelligibly when he arrived at Slow Down Ranch.

There he was presently convinced that his worst suspicions were true, for Orlando also had not returned. He saw it all. They had agreed to meet; they had met; they had eloped and were gone! His beady eyes were those of serpents watching for the instant to strike, and his words burst over the head of Orlando's mother like shrapnel.

For once, however, the futile, fantastic mother rose higher than herself, and declared that her son had never run away from, or with, anything in his life; that he--Joel Mazarine--had never had anything worth her son's running away with; and that her son, when he came back, would make him ask forgiveness as he had never asked it of his G.o.d.

Indeed, the gaudy little lady stood in her doorway and chattered her maledictions after him, as he rode back again towards Tralee muttering curses which no cla.s.s leader in the Methodist Church ought even to quote for pious purposes.

Joel Mazarine had flattered himself that he had everything life could give--money, property and a garden of youth in which his old age could loiter and be glad; and that he should be defied suddenly and his garden made desolate, that the lines of his good fortune should be crossed, caused him to rage like any heathen. His monstrous egotism made him like some infuriated bull in the arena, with the banderillos sticking in his hot hide.

The two people whom he cursed were in Elysium compared to the place where he tortured himself. There are desert birds that silently surround a rattlesnake, as he sleeps, with little bundles of cactus-heads and their million needles, so that, when the reptile wakes, it cannot escape through the palisade of bristling weapons by which it is surrounded; and in ghoulish anger it strikes its fangs into its own body until it dies.

Just such a helpless rage held Joel Mazarine, and his religion did not suggest seeking comfort at that Throne of Grace to which he had so publicly prayed on occasions.

Night held him prowling in his own coverts; morning found him yellow and mottled, malicious, but now silent. He somehow felt that he would know the truth and the whole truth soon. He ate his pork and beans for breakfast with the appet.i.te of a ravenous animal. He put pieces of the pork chop in his mouth with his fingers; he gulped his coffee; but all the time he kept his eyes on the open door, as though he expected some messenger to announce that Providence had stricken his rebellious wife by sudden death. It seemed to him that Nature and Jehovah must unite to avenge him.

After three hours of further waiting he determined to go into Askatoon.

He would have bills printed advertising for Louise as he had done for stray cattle; he would have notices put in the newspapers proclaiming that his wife was strayed or stolen and must be put in pound when discovered. At the moment he decided thus, he caught sight of a wagon approaching from the north. It was near enough for him to see that there was a woman in it; and the eyes of the half-breed hired woman, possessing the Indian far-sight, saw that it was Louise, and told her master so.

Ten minutes later Louise stood in front of the Master of Tralee, and the Master of Tralee filled the doorway. "What you want here?" he asked of her with blurred rage in his voice.

"I want to go to my room," Louise answered quietly but firmly. "Please stand aside."