Blue Kingdom (24 page)

She insisted with warmth: “I tried every trick. I tried to lose you in the woods, get you brushed off under the trees, tangle you up in the fallen logs, and . . . perhaps see you slip and drop at the gorge. . . .” She paused. Her breath caught.

Dunmore, suspecting a trick and clever acting, ventured a side glance but saw her hand gripped hard, and her eyes fixed straight before her.

“Then . . . I slashed Excuse Me across the face. I lied when I said that it was a chance. It was meant. It was planned. I . . . I couldn't dare to lose.”

Dunmore said genially: “Why, that was nothin'. A
gent'll get carried away. In the middle of a race the best thing to think about is winnin' . . . no matter how short a cut you gotta take. Don't let that bother you none.”

She made a brief gesture. “I didn't dream that there was a horse in the world that could be faster than Gunfire. I didn't dream that I could lose. I knew the way. I knew the tricks of it. But she won . . . you won with her.”

“She's all made of steel and strung with piano wire and piled full of works like an eight-day clock,” he said. “It ain't any disgrace for any horse to be beat by Excuse Me.”

She nodded. “I see that now. But you see how I started the race, and, therefore, I want you to take this money. I want you to take it.” She said it almost desperately.

He knew with certainty that she was not shamming now. All was utterly sincere in her voice, in her eyes, in the tenseness of her body. He began to remember that she was very young, indeed, very spoiled, proud with the pride of one to whom all men have given way. That might explain her faults, and he wondered to what end she was carrying this confession of hers.

She had held out the sheaf of bills before him, once more. He actually reached for it, and then his hand recoiled.

“I couldn't take it,” said Dunmore. “I'd a lot rather take poison than to take that.”

“Do you mean it?” she said.

“Why should that cut you up so much?” he asked.

“Because I know that, if you won't take this, you'll never pay any attention to what else I have to say.”

“Hold on,” murmured Dunmore. “I dunno about that.”

“You never will listen. But I'm trying to confess the whole truth. I didn't realize, at first, how serious it all was. I mean when I bet the ring, besides the money, I didn't realize that you might want the ring for any deep reason . . . that I never could redeem it from you.”

“Well, miss,” said Dunmore, “the way that a gent sticks to what he figgers is his luck is sure a mighty surprisin' thing to. . . .”

“Don't,” she said, and held up a hand.

“Don't what?”

“Don't laugh at me . . . don't make a joke of me. Luck? You know that your luck is in your right hand.”

“Now, there's an idea,” said Dunmore. “In my own right hand. Matter of fact, that's where I've got the ring, just now, so you're right about it.”

She drew a quick breath. In passion, she seemed about to burst out at him, but then controlled herself strongly. “I want to be steady,” she said, in hardly more than a whisper, “and I don't want to be put off as you put everyone off. Carrick Dunmore, Carrick Dunmore, will you try to listen seriously to me?”

She laid a hand on his, a light-brown hand, exquisitely slender and small, made with a tapering delicacy that surpassed all he had seen in his days. From that hand he looked hurriedly away, and saw the tall ranks of the mountains swelling beyond the trees, and the blue gorges that crossed them, the bluish clouds beyond. This was his kingdom, and in it he must act as a strong king. But, king or not, he was very glad that the talk of Jimmy Larren had somewhat prepared him for this encounter.

“I'll sure be serious if I can,” he said.

“Did I tell you that Rodman Furneaux gave me that ring?” she said.

“Why, he's a fine, upstandin' boy,” said Dunmore.

“He is, he is. And when he sees it on your hand, do you know what he'll do?”

“You figger he might make trouble?”

“Oh, let me tell you everything. We were afraid that he'd . . . that he'd go away. I was to try to hold him . . . I talked to him. He seemed very excited . . . he said that he wanted to marry me . . . somehow, I let him give me this ring. . . .”

“And a promise?” said Dunmore.

She pressed her hands against her breast, and he could see it rise and fall.

“Now, how much do you despise me?”

“Why,” said Dunmore, “the way that things is pretty nigh always lined up, it appears to me that a gent has gotta cut a lot of corners to get anywhere, as maybe I've said before.” He added: “But you had no idea that maybe he would leave you?”

“He said that he was going away and. . . .”

“Him? Away?” Dunmore laughed. There was in this a peculiar irony that struck something in him and made a sudden vibration through his heart.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“They ain't a dog in the world,” said Dunmore, “that don't howl and holler when it hears the wolves bayin'. But mostly they stay home. They got the smell and the savor of the bacon in their throats, and they can't leave it. And you're home to Furneaux. Leave you? He could leave his own skin a lot quicker. The thought of you
would pull him across the ocean faster'n a flyin' bird. Yep, he'd fly to you like a bird flies south when the autumn gets cold. You had to take his ring to keep him here with you?”

He laughed, and, at that laughter, she began to tremble.

“You mean that it wasn't necessary?” she asked.

“To do that? To keep him? My dear child,” said Carrick Dunmore, “there was no more need of it than there would be to ask the tides to follow the moon, or the blow sand to rise in the wind, or the bird's wing to beat in the air, or the stone to roll down the mountainside.” He paused.

She was looking rather wildly at him. “That's all a farce, too?” she asked. “The rough talk and the bad grammar?”

“Hello!” said Dunmore. “Why, I never thought of that. But the fact is that the school days, they come back over me when I'm least thinkin' of it.”

She looked away. “I never can do anything with you,” she said in a dead voice. “I know that you're beyond me. You're up here for some purpose that I can't fathom. Why should I try? It would be like trying to reach my hand to the bottom of a well. I could talk . . . I could spread out my heart in my hand, and you wouldn't care to even look at it. I . . . I . . . and yet . . . to whom can I talk now except to you? Oh, I wish I were never born.”

Dunmore stood up.

She rose before him. She was crying, as Jimmy Larren had said she would cry, but there was no hysteria. Only, out of sheer anguish, the tears forced themselves
into her eyes, and then down her cheeks. She spoke softly, as though she were sufficiently ashamed of the tears, and did not wish to allow her voice to shake. “I think you're right,” she said. “He would have stayed. He never would have left. It all was useless. And now he's no better than dead.”

“Oh, come, come,” said Dunmore. “You're makin' a lot of fuss about this young chap. Are you cryin' because you got engaged to him, or why?”

She shrank away from him. “You are cruel,” she said. “Cold and iron-hearted, and cruel, and you'll murder him without a second thought.”

“Not a bit,” said Dunmore. “I'm a businessman, Beatrice. I'm for sale. What can you offer by way of a good price?”

So greatly was she surprised, that she almost forgot the emotion that had been tormenting her just the moment before, and with parted lips she stared at him. “What have I . . . ?” she asked him. “What do you mean?”

He looked suddenly away from her. Edging between two slender tree trunks, he saw the mischievous face of Jimmy Larren, but he almost forgot the child the next instant. For he was glancing into the very heart of his problem, and it seemed to him clearer than ever that he never could take young Furneaux away without using Beatrice as the lure.

“Why, I mean what I say,” he said. “I'm a merchant. I go where I can get what I want.”

“And so you've come to me for what? For compliments?” she asked him suspiciously.

“What else would've brought me up here into the mountains?” asked Dunmore in turn.

Again she looked fully at him, and again she winced. “Of course, this is another way of laughing at me,” she suggested.

Dunmore picked a leaf from a shrub and puffed it off the palm of his hand. It spun and floated in the air, then winked down into the water. “I can't be too serious,” he said. “You're free to laugh, and I'm free to laugh, if I can. But what else could have brought me up here, except you?”

She said instantly: “The hope of getting into power here . . . of becoming the king up in the edge of the sky.”

This was so close to the truth and so fitted in with what the other Carrick Dunmore, that first of the race, had said, that he could not help starting.

“I knew it was the truth,” said the girl. “You'd really try to shoulder Tankerton off his throne.”

“I wouldn't mind the job, perhaps,” agreed Dunmore. “But there comes along a time when a man gets to the marrying age, eh? So that age came along and found me.”

She laughed outright. “So you went up into the mountains to find a girl, and there you found her. Lucky, lucky Carrick!” She added: “You never had seen her. But that didn't make any difference.”

“You ever hear of the Red Pacer?”

“You mean the mustang?”

“Yes.”

“He was captured by somebody, I think.”

“Yep. He wore a halter for five years. That was a friend of mine that caught him, and he had never seen the Red Pacer, either. But he went out and worked for eight months to get him, and get him he did. Spent thousands of dollars on hired men, used up hosses like water, to capture the Pacer.”

“And that's the way with you and me?” said Beatrice ironically. “You hear about me, and you just can't keep away, eh?”

“Well?” said Dunmore.

“Stuff!” she said. “I've heard men say such things before, and every one of them said it a lot better than you've done. Why, Carrick, there's no more love in you than there is blood in a carrot. D'you think I'm only about five years old?”

“No, no,” answered Dunmore, “I'd say that you're as old . . . as the blue in the bottom of that canon, over yonder. Do you want me to rant like a fool, Beatrice? Because I can, if you'd rather have it.” He turned closer to her as he spoke. He could see in her face doubt, bewilderment, and amusement. At this moment a breath of wind furled the collar of her blouse about her brown throat and gathered her whole body into gentle arms. Something leaped in Dunmore and rushed out strongly toward her.

“Ah!” she said, and caught her breath. Then she struck her hands together and laughed again. “You're simply the grandest actor in the whole world,” she said. “I see that you could even do a love scene.”

He smiled at her. It was plain that she would recoil from a display of emotion, and that only an intellectual interest, as it were, would keep her amused by him. So he thrust back the tumult of feeling that had been in him and kept his smile impersonal.

“You won't believe that I'm wildly in love with you, Beatrice?”

“Oh, tush,” she mocked. “We'll let it go at that. But what under the heavens do you want of me?”

“Are you interested?”

“Interested? Would you be interested if a mountain lion came and stretched himself up the trunk of a tree in which you were sitting?”

“Hello,” answered Dunmore. “That's pretty hard on me.”

“I don't know whether you're more ghost than panther,” she said, “but I'll bet that you know how to ride on the wind and how to walk through walls, all right. And now you're coming after me, d'you wonder that I'm all chills and fever?”

“It's good to be noticed,” said Dunmore. “It's the first step to any business deal.”

“This is to be a business deal, is it?”

“Certainly!”

“Very well, then. What do you offer me?”

“Furneaux's life,” he said shortly.

She shrank, then faced him again. “You'll not kill Furneaux . . . I wish to heaven that I knew what makes you hate him so.”

“Because,” said Dunmore, “I'm jealous of him. You've shown so much interest in Furneaux that I'd like him a lot better with his head off . . . or a hole in it.” He smiled at her again with a white flash of teeth, and she actually turned pale.

“You make me dizzy,” she said more than half seriously. “You can stand and smile and laugh, here, but all the while you're as ready to murder as a cat is for mice.”

“Not murder, Beatrice. I never take an advantage.”

“Because other men have no chance against you. No, no, I suppose you'd go hunting trouble for the sake of the danger in it? I think you would.”

“You look as if you were in a haunted house,” he said. “Am I as bad as all that?”

“That's how I feel,” she said. “As though the house were haunted and . . . ghosts were behind me.” She tried to smile as she said this, but her eyes remained very round and still.

“You'll not hurt Rodman,” she summed up, “who you say you hate because you're envious . . . jealous, I mean to say.”

“Of course, that's it,” he said.

“It isn't at all,” she retorted. “But let's go ahead. You'll let Furneaux alone if I'll give you what?”

“Your company for ten days,” said Dunmore.

“My company . . . for ten days?” she cried.

“That's it.”

“To do what?” she demanded.

“To ride down out of the mountains with me.”

“Where?”