Buck looked up as two crows flew low
over his head and passed on their way, croaking out
their alarm and dissatisfaction. Mechanically
his eyes followed their movements. For he was
well versed in the sights, and sounds, and habits
of his world.
Presently he turned again to the trail,
and the expression of his eyes had changed to one
of speculation. Caesar was traveling eagerly.
He had not yet forgotten that farther on along that
trail lay the old barn which had been his home from
his earliest recollections.
Buck had had no intention of making
this visit to the farm when he left Beasley’s
saloon. He had not had the remotest intention
of carrying out the man’s broadly-given hint.
A hint from Beasley was always unwelcome to him, and
generally roused an obstinate desire to take an opposite
course. Nor was it until he reached the ford of
the creek that the significance of the man’s
tone penetrated his dislike of him. Quite abruptly
he made up his mind to keep straight on. Curiosity,
added to a slight feeling of uneasiness, urged him,
and, leaving the ford behind him, he kept on down
the trail.
His decision once taken, he felt easier
as he rode on. Besides, he admitted to himself
now, he was rather thankful to the saloon-keeper for
providing him with something in the nature of an excuse
for such a visit. He was different from those
others, who, in perfect confidence and ignorance,
required not the least encouragement to persecute Joan
with their attentions. He found it more than difficult
to realize that his visits were anything but irksome
to the new owner of the farm now that she had settled
down with the adequate support of her “hired”
man.
Joan’s graciousness to him was
the one great delight of his every waking hour.
But he dreaded the moment when her manner might become
the mere tolerance she displayed toward Ike and Pete,
and any of the others who chose to make her farm a
halting-place. So his visits had become rarer;
far rarer than made for his own peace of mind, for
Joan was always in his thoughts.
Tramping the long trail of the mountains
her smiling eyes were always somewhere ahead of him,
encouraging him, and shedding a radiance of hope and
delight upon the dullest moments of his routine.
Never for one moment was the delightful picture of
her presence absent from his thoughts. And to
him there was nothing in the whole wide world so fair,
and sweet, and worthy of the worship he so willingly
cast at her feet.
His life had always been full in his
wilderness of Nature’s splendor. In his
moments of leisure he had been more than happily content
in the pleasant friendship of the man who had sheltered
him from childhood. But now now as
he looked back over all those years, the associations
seemed dull and empty empty of all that
made life worth living. Not only had he come
to realize the woman’s place in a man’s
life. It was the old story of the fruit of knowledge.
Woman had always been a sealed book to him. Now,
at last, the cover had been turned and the pages lay
before him for the reading. He yearned for Joan
with all the strength and passionate ardor of his
strong young heart. Nor, even in his yearning,
had he full understanding of the real depths of his
feelings.
How could he study or analyze them?
His love had no thought of the world in it. It
had no thought of anything that could bring it down
to the level of concrete sensation. He could
not have told one feeling that was his. With
Joan at his side he moved in a mental paradise which
no language could depict. With Joan at his side
he lived with every nerve pulsating, attuned to a
perfect consciousness of joy. With Joan at his
side there was nothing but light and radiance which
filled every sense with a happiness than which he
could conceive no greater. Alone, this great
wide world about him was verily a wilderness.
The man’s feelings quickly mastered
his momentary uneasiness as his horse bore him on
toward his goal. The forest path over which he
was traveling had lost its hue of gloom which the
shadowed pine woods ever convey. There was light
everywhere, that light which comes straight from the
heart and is capable of lending radiance even to the
grave-side itself.
The trail lay straight ahead of him
for some distance. Then it swerved in a big sweep
away to the left. He knew this bend. The
farm lay something less than half a mile beyond it.
As they neared it Caesar pricked his ears and whinnied.
Buck leant forward and patted his neck out of the
very joy of anticipation. It almost seemed to
him as if the creature knew who was waiting at the
end of the journey and was rejoicing with him.
For once he had misunderstood the mood of his horse.
He realized this in a moment.
The eager creature began to move with a less swinging
stride, and his gait quickly became something in the
nature of a “prop.” They were round
the bend, and the horse whinnied again. This
time it raised its head and snorted nervously.
And instantly Buck was alive to the creature’s
anxiety. He understood the quick glancing from
side to side, and the halting of that changing step
which is always a sign of fear.
Ahead the trail completed the letter
S it had begun. They were nearing the final curve
to the right. Buck searched the distance for the
cause of Caesar’s apprehension. And all
unconsciously his mind went back to the winging of
the crows overhead and the sound of their harsh voices.
He spurred the creature sharply, and steadied him down.
They reached the final bend and passed
round it, and in a moment Buck had an answer to the
questions in his mind. It was a terrible spectacle
that greeted his eyes as he reined his horse in and
brought him to an abrupt halt. He had reached
the battle-ground where death had claimed its toll
of human passion. There, swiftly, almost silently,
two men had fought out their rivalry for a woman’s
favor a favor given to neither.
It needed little enough imagination
to read the facts. All the ingredients of the
swift-moving drama were there before his eyes the
combatants stretched out in the sand of the trail,
with staring eyes and dropping jaws, gazing up at
the brilliant vault of the heavens, whither, may be,
their savage spirits had fled; the woman crouching
down at the roadside with face buried upon outstretched
arms, her slight body heaving with hysterical sobs;
the horses, horses he knew well enough by sight, lost
to the tragedy amidst the more succulent roots of
the parching grass beneath the shadow of overhanging
trees.
One glance at the combatants told
Buck all he wanted to know. They were dead.
He had been too long upon the western trail to doubt
the signs he beheld. His duty and inclination
were with the living. In a moment he was out
of the saddle and at Joan’s side, raising her
from her position of grief and misery in arms as gentle
as they were strong.
He had no real understanding of the
necessities of the moment. All he knew, all he
desired, was to afford the girl that help and protection
he felt she needed. His first thought was to keep
her from a further sight of what had occurred.
So he held her in his arms, limp and yielding, for
one uncertain moment. Then, for the second time
in his life, he bore her off toward her home.
But now his feelings were of a totally
different nature. There was neither ecstasy nor
dreaming. He was anxious and beset. As he
bore her along he spoke to her, encouraging her with
gentle words of sympathy and hope. But her fainting
condition left him no reward, and her half-closed
eyes, filled with unshed tears, remained dull and
unresponsive.
No sound broke the stillness in the
parlor at the farm. Buck was leaning against
the small centre-table gravely watching the bowed head
of the silently-weeping girl, who was seated upon the
rough settle which lined the wall. Her slight
figure was supported by the pillows which had been
set in place by the ministering hands of Mrs. Ransford.
Buck’s reception by the farm-wife
had been very different on this occasion. She
had met him with his burden some distance down the
trail, whither she had followed her young mistress,
whose fleetness had left her far behind. Her
tongue had started to clack at once, but Buck was
in no mood to put up with unnecessary chatter.
A peremptory order had had the astonishing effect
of silencing her, and a further command had set her
bustling to help her mistress.
Once immediate needs had been attended
to, the man told his story briefly, and added his
interpretation of the scene he had just witnessed.
He further dispatched the old woman to summon the hired
man from his ploughing, and, for once, found ready
obedience where he might well have expected nothing
but objection.
Thus it was the man and girl were
alone in the parlor. Buck was waiting for Joan’s
storm of tears to pass.
The moment came at last, and quite
abruptly. Joan stirred; she flung her head up
and dashed the weak tears from her eyes, struggling
bravely for composure. But the moment she spoke
her words belied the resolution, and showed her still
in the toils of an overwhelming despair.
“What can I do?” she cried
piteously. “What am I to do? I can
see nothing nothing but disaster in every
direction. It is all a part of my life; a part
of me. I cannot escape it. I have tried to,
but I cannot. Oh, I feel so helpless so
helpless!”
Buck’s eyes shone with love
and pity. He was stirred to the depths of his
manhood by her appeal. Here again was that shadow
she had spoken of before, that he had become familiar
with. He tried to tell himself that she was simply
unnerved, but he knew her trouble was more than that.
All his love drove him to a longing for a means of
comforting her.
“Forget the things you seen,”
he said in a low tone. And he felt that his words
were bald even stupid.
The girl’s troubled eyes were
looking up into his in a desperate hope. It was
almost as if this man were her only support, and she
were making one final appeal before abandoning altogether
her saving hold.
“Forget them? Oh, Buck,
Buck, you don’t know what you are saying.
You don’t understand you can’t,
or you would not speak like that. You see,”
she went on, forgetting in her trouble that this man
did not know her story, “Ike was here.
Here! He made love to me. He he
kissed me. He brutally kissed me when I had no
power to resist him. And now now this
has happened.”
But the man before her had suddenly
changed while she was speaking. The softness
had left his eyes. They had suddenly become hot,
and bloodshot, and hard. His breath came quickly,
heavily, his thin nostrils dilating with the furious
emotion that swept through his body. Ike had
kissed her. He had forgotten all her sufferings
in his own sudden, jealous fury.
Joan waited. The change in the
man had passed unobserved by her. Then, as no
answer was forthcoming, she went on
“Wherever I go it is the same.
Death and disaster. Oh, it is awful! Sometimes
I think I shall go mad. Is there no corner of
the earth where I can hide myself from the shadow
of this haunting curse?”
“Ike kissed you?”
Buck’s voice grated harshly.
Somehow her appeal had passed him by. All his
better thoughts and feelings were overshadowed for
the moment. A fierce madness was sweeping through
his veins, his heart, his brain, a madness of feeling
such as he had never before experienced.
The girl answered him, still without
recognizing the change.
“Yes,” she said in a dull,
hopeless way. “And the inevitable happened.
It followed swiftly, surely, as it always seems to
follow. He is dead.”
“He got it as he
should get it. He got no more than he’d
have got if I’d been around.”
Buck’s mood could no longer
escape her. She looked into the hard, young face,
startled. She saw the fury in his eyes, the clenched
jaws, with their muscles outstanding with the force
of the fury stirring him.
The sight agitated her, but somehow
it did not frighten. She half understood.
At least she thought she did. She read his resentment
as that of a man who sees in the outrage a breaking
of all the laws of chivalry. She missed the real
note underlying it.
“What does his act matter?”
she said almost indifferently, her mind on what she
regarded as the real tragedy. “He was drunk.
He was not responsible. No, no. It is not
that which matters. It was the other. He
left me to go to his death. Had Pete
not been waiting for him it would have been just the
same. Disaster! Death! Oh! can you not
see? It is the disaster which always follows
me.”
Her protest was not without its effect.
So insistent was she on the resulting tragedy that
Buck found himself endeavoring to follow her thought
in spite of his own feelings. She was associating
this tragedy with herself as part of her
life, her fate.
But it was some moments before the
man was sufficiently master of himself before
he could detach his thought altogether from the human
feelings stirring him. The words sang on his ear-drums.
“He he kissed me.” They
were flaming through his brain. They blurred every
other thought, and, for a time, left him incapable
of lending her that support he would so willingly
give her. Finally, however, his better nature
had its way. He choked down his jealous fury,
and strove to find means of comforting her.
“It’s all wrong,”
he cried, with a sudden force which claimed the girl’s
attention, and, for the time at least, held her troubled
thought suspended. “How can this be your
doing? Why for should it be a curse on you because
two fellers shoot each other up? They hated each
other because of you. Wal that’s
natural. It’s dead human. It’s
been done before, an’ I’m sure guessin’
it’ll be done again. It’s not you.
It’s it’s nature human
nature. Say, Miss Joan, you ain’t got the
lessons of these hills right yet. Folks out here
are diffrent to city folks. That is, their ways
of doin’ the same things are diff’rent.
We feel the same that’s because we’re
made the same but we act diff’rent.
If I’d bin around, I’d have shot Ike with
a whole heap of pleasure. An’ if I had,
wher’s the cuss on you? Kissin’ a
gal like that can’t be done around here.”
“But Pete was not here. He didn’t
know.”
Joan was quick to grasp the weakness of his argument.
“It don’t matter a cent,”
cried Buck, his teeth clipping his words. “He
needed his med’cine an’ got
it.”
Joan sighed hopelessly.
“You don’t understand,
and and I can’t tell it you all.
Sometimes I feel I could kill myself. How can
I help realizing the truth? It is forced on me.
I am a leper, a a pariah.”
The girl leant back on her cushions,
and her whole despairing attitude became an appeal
to his manhood. The last vestige of Buck’s
jealousy passed from him. He longed to tell her
all there was in his heart. He longed to take
her in his arms and comfort her, and protect her from
every shadow the whole wide world held for her.
He longed to tell her of the love that was his, and
how no power on earth could change it. But he
did none of these things.
“The things you’re callin’
yourself don’t sound wholesome,” he said
simply. “I can’t see they fit in anyway.
Guess they ain’t natural.”
Joan caught at the word.
“Natural!” she cried.
“Is any of it natural?” She laughed hysterically.
Buck nodded.
“It’s all natural,”
he said. “You’ve hit it. You
don’t need my word. Jest you ask the Padre.
He’ll give it you all. He’ll tell
you jest how notions can make a cuss of any life,
an’ how to get shut of sech notions. He’s
taught me, an’ he’ll teach you. I
can’t jest pass his words on. They don’t
git the same meaning when I say ’em. I ain’t
wise to that sort of thing. But ther’s
things I am wise to, and they’re the things
he’s taught me. You’re feeling mean,
mean an’ miser’ble, that makes me ter’ble
mean to see. Say, Miss Joan, I ain’t much
handin’ advice. I ain’t got brain
enough to hand that sort of thing around, but I’d
sure ask you to say right here ther’ ain’t
no cuss on your life, an’ never was. You
jest guess there’s a cuss around chasin’
glory at your expense. Wal, git right up, an’
grit your teeth an’ fight good. Don’t
sit around feeling mean. If you’d do that,
I tell you that cuss’ll hit the trail so quick
you won’t git time to see it, an’ you’ll
bust yourself laffin’ to think you ever tho’t
it was around your layout. An’ before I
done talkin’ I’ll ast you to remember
that when menfolks git around insultin’ a helpless
gal, cuss or no cuss, he’s goin’ to git
his med’cine good an’ from me.”
Buck’s effort had its reward.
The smile that had gradually found its way into his
own eyes caught something of a reflection in those
of the girl. He had dragged her from the depths
of her despair by the force of the frank courage that
was his. He had lifted her by the sheer strength
and human honesty which lay at the foundation of his
whole, simple nature. Joan sighed, and it was
an acknowledgment of his success.
“Thank you, Buck,” she
said gently. “You are always so good to
me. You have been so ever since I came.
And goodness knows you have little enough reason for
it, seeing it is I who have turned you out of this
home of yours ”
“We got your money,” interrupted
Buck, almost brusquely. “This farm was
the Padre’s. You never turned me out.
An’ say, the Padre don’t live a big ways
from here. Maybe you’d like him to tell
you about cusses an’ things.” His
eyes twinkled. “He’s sure great on
cusses.”
But Joan did not respond to the lightness
of his manner, and Buck realized that her trouble
was still strong upon her.
He waited anxiously, watching for
the signs of her acceptance of his invitation.
But they were not forthcoming. The deep violet
of her eyes seemed to grow deeper with a weight of
thought, and gradually the man’s hopes sank.
He had wanted her to see his friend, he had wanted
his friend to see her. But more than all he had
wanted to welcome her to his own home. Nor was
the reason of his desire clear even to himself.
At last she rose from her seat and
crossed over to the window, just as the sound of voices
heralded the return of Mrs. Ransford and the hired
man. It was at that moment she turned to him,
speaking over her shoulder.
“They’ve got back,”
she said. “What are you going to do?”
“Send those others on
into camp.”
“Yes.” Joan shivered.
Then she came back to him, and stood
with one hand resting on the table.
“I I think I should
like to see the Padre. Will you take me to him
one day?”