Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (37 page)

Then Balaam rejoined the old mare, and turned from the middle fork of Sunk Creek. He dashed across the wide field, and went over a ridge, and found his way along in the night till he came to the old trail—the road which they would never have left but for him and his obstinacy. He unsaddled the weary mare by Sunk Creek, where the canon begins, letting her drag a rope to find pasture and water, while he, lighting no fire to betray him, crouched close under a tree till the light came. He thought of the Virginian in the wood. But what could either have done for the other had he stayed to look for him among the pines? If the cow-puncher came back to the corner, he would follow Balaam’s tracks or not. They would meet, at any rate, where the creeks joined.

But they did not meet. And then to Balaam the prospect of going onward to the Sunk Creek Ranch became more than he could bear. To come without the horses, to meet Judge Henry, to meet the guests of the Judge’s, looking as he did now after his punishment by the Virginian, to give the news about the Judge’s favorite man—no, how could he tell such a story as this? Balaam went no farther than a certain cabin, where he slept, and wrote a letter to the Judge.

This the owner of the cabin delivered. And so, having spread news which would at once cause a search for the Virginian, and having constructed such sentences to the Judge as would most smoothly explain how, being overtaken by illness, he had not wished to be a burden at Sunk Creek, Balaam turned homeward by himself. By the time he was once more at Butte Creek, his general appearance was a thing less to be noticed. And there was Shorty, waiting!

One way and another, the lost dog had been able to gather some ready money. He was cheerful because of this momentary purseful of prosperity.

“And so I come back, yu’ see,” he said. “For I figured on getting Pedro back as soon as I could when I sold him to yu’.”

“You’re behind the times, Shorty,” said Balaam.

Shorty looked blank. “You’ve sure not sold Pedro?” he exclaimed.

“Them Indians,” said Balaam, “got after me on the Bow Leg trail. Got after me and that Virginian man. But they didn’t get me.”

Balaam wagged his bullet head to imply that this escape was due to his own superior intelligence. The Virginian had been stupid, and so the Indians had got him. “And they shot your horse,” Balaam finished. “Stop and get some dinner with the boys.”

Having eaten, Shorty rode away in mournful spirits. For he had made so sure of once more riding and talking with Pedro, his friend whom he had taught to shake hands.

—27—

GRANDMOTHER STARK

EXCEPT FOR ITS CHAIR and bed, the cabin was stripped almost bare. Amid its emptiness of dismantled shelves and walls and floor, only the tiny ancestress still hung in her place, last token of the home that had been. This miniature, tacked against the despoiled boards, and its descendant, the angry girl with her hand on an open box-lid, made a sort of couple in the loneliness: she on the wall sweet and serene, she by the box sweet and stormy. The picture was her final treasure waiting to be packed for the journey. In whatever room she had called her own since childhood, there it had also lived and looked at her, not quite familiar, not quite smiling, but in its prim colonial hues delicate as some pressed flower. Its pale oval, of color blue and rose and flaxen, in a battered, pretty gold frame, unconquerably pervaded any surroundings with a something like last year’s lavender. Till yesterday a Crow Indian war-bonnet had hung next it, a sumptuous cascade of feathers; on the other side a bow with arrows had dangled; opposite had been the skin of a silver fox; over the door had spread the antlers of a blacktail deer; a bearskin stretched beneath it. Thus had the whole cosey log cabin been upholstered, lavish with trophies of the frontier; and yet it was in front of the miniature that the visitors used to stop.

Shining quietly now in the cabin’s blackness this summer day, the heirloom was presiding until the end. And as Molly Wood’s eyes fell upon her ancestress of Bennington, 1777, there flashed a spark of steel in them, alone here in the room that she was leaving forever. She was not going to teach school any more on Bear Creek, Wyoming; she was going home to Bennington, Vermont. When time came for school to open again, there should be a new schoolmarm.

This was the momentous result of that visit which the Virginian had paid her. He had told her that he was coming for his hour soon. From that hour she had decided to escape. She was running away from her own heart. She did not dare to trust herself face to face again with her potent, indomitable lover. She longed for him and therefore she would never see him again. No great-aunt at Dunbarton, or anybody else that knew her and her family, should ever say that she had married below her station, had been an unworthy Stark! Accordingly, she had written to the Virginian, bidding him good-by, and wishing him everything in the world. As she happened to be aware that she was taking everything in the world away from him, this letter was not the most easy of letters to write. But she had made the language very kind. Yes; it was a thoroughly kind communication. And all because of that momentary visit, when he had brought back to her two novels,
Emma
and
Pride and Prejudice.
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“How do you like them?” she had then inquired; and he had smiled slowly at her. “You haven’t read them!” she exclaimed.

“No.”

“Are you going to tell me there has been no time?”

“No.”

Then Molly had scolded her cow-puncher, and to this he had listened with pleasure undisguised, as indeed he listened to every word that she said.

“Why, it has come too late,” he had told her when the scolding was over. “If I was one of your little scholars hyeh in Bear Creek school-house, yu’ could learn me to like such frillery, I reckon. But I’m a mighty ignorant, growed-up man.”

“So much the worse for you!” said Molly.

“No. I am pretty glad I am a man. Else I could not have learned the thing you have taught me.”

But she shut her lips and looked away. On the desk was a letter written from Vermont. “If you don’t tell me at once when you decide,” had said the arch writer, “never hope to speak to me again. Mary Wood, seriously, I am suspicious. Why do you never mention him nowadays? How exciting to have you bring a live cowboy to Bennington! We should all come to dinner. Though of course I understand now that many of them have excellent manners. But would he wear his pistol at table?” So the letter ran on. It recounted the latest home gossip and jokes. In answering it Molly Wood had taken no notice of its childish tone here and there.

“Hyeh’s some of them cactus blossoms yu’ wanted,” said the Virginian. His voice recalled the girl with almost a start. “I’ve brought a good hawss I’ve gentled for yu’, and Taylor’ll keep him till I need him.”

“Thank you so much! but I wish—”

“I reckon yu’ can’t stop me lendin’ Taylor a hawss. And you cert’nly’ll get sick school-teachin’ if yu’ don’t keep outdoors some. Cood-by—till that next time.”

“Yes; there’s always a next time,” she answered, as lightly as she could.

“There always will be. Don’t yu’ know that?”

She did not reply.

“I have discouraged spells,” he pursued, “but I down them. For I’ve told yu’ you were going to love me. You are goin’ to learn back the thing you have taught me. I’m not askin’ anything now; I don’t want you to speak a word to me. But I’m never goin’ to quit till ‘next time’ is no more, and it’s ’all the time’ for you and me.”

With that he had ridden away, not even touching her hand. Long after he had gone she was still in her chair, her eyes lingering upon his flowers, those yellow cups of the prickly pear. At length she had risen impatiently, caught up the flowers, gone with them to the open window,—and then, after all, set them with pains in water.

But to-day Bear Creek was over. She was going home now. By the week’s end she would be started. By the time the mail brought him her good-by letter she would be gone. She had acted.

To Bear Creek, the neighborly, the friendly, the not comprehending, this move had come unlooked for, and had brought regret. Only one hard word had been spoken to Molly, and that by her next-door neighbor and kindest friend. In Mrs. Taylor’s house the girl had daily come and gone as a daughter, and that lady reached the subject thus:—

“When I took Taylor,” said she, sitting by as Robert Browning and Jane Austen were going into their box, “I married for love.”

“Do you wish it had been money?” said Molly, stooping to her industries.

“You know both of us better than that, child.”

“I know I’ve seen people at home who couldn’t possibly have had any other reason. They seemed satisfied, too.”

“Maybe the poor ignorant things were!”

“And so I have never been sure how I might choose.”

“Yes, you are sure, deary. Don’t you think I know you? And when it comes over Taylor once in a while, and he tells me I’m the best thing in his life, and I tell him he ain’t merely the best thing but the only thing in mine,—him and the children,—why, we just agree we’d do it all over the same way if we had the chance.”

Molly continued to be industrious.

“And that’s why,” said Mrs. Taylor, “I want every girl that’s anything to me to know her luck when it comes. For I was that near telling Taylor I wouldn’t!”

“If ever my luck comes,” said Molly, with her back to her friend, “I shall say, ‘I will’ at once.”

“Then you’ll say it at Bennington next week.”

Molly wheeled round.

“Why, you surely will. Do you expect he’s going to stay here, and you in Bennington?” And the campaigner sat back in her chair.

“He? Goodness! Who is he?”

“Child, child, you’re talking cross to-day because you’re at outs with yourself. You’ve been at outs ever since you took this idea of leaving the school and us and everything this needless way. You have not treated him right. And why, I can’t make out to save me. What have you found out all of a sudden? If he was not good enough for you, I—But, oh, it’s a prime one you’re losing. Molly. When a man like that stays faithful to a girl ’spite all the chances he gets, her luck is come.”

“Oh, my luck! People have different notions of luck.”

“Notions!”

“He has been very kind.”

“Kind!” And now without further simmering, Mrs. Taylor’s wrath boiled up and poured copiously over Molly Wood. “Kind! There’s a word you shouldn’t use, my dear. No doubt you can spell it. But more than its spelling I guess you don’t know. The children can learn what it means from some of the rest of us folks that don’t spell so correct, maybe.”

“Mrs. Taylor, Mrs. Taylor—”

“I can’t wait, deary. Since the roughness looks bigger to you than the diamond, you had better go back to Vermont. I expect you’ll find better grammar there, deary.”

The good dame stalked out, and across to her own cabin, and left the angry girl among her boxes. It was in vain she fell to work upon them. Presently something had to be done over again, and when it was the box held several chattels less than before the readjustment. She played a sort of desperate dominos to fit these objects in the space, but here were a paper-weight, a portfolio, with two wretched volumes that no chink would harbor; and letting them fall all at once, she straightened herself, still stormy with revolt, eyes and cheeks still hot from the sting of long-parried truth. There, on her wall still, was the miniature, the little silent ancestress; and upon this face the girl’s glance rested. It was as if she appealed to Grandmother Stark for support and comfort across the hundred years which lay between them. So the flaxen girl on the wall and she among the boxes stood a moment face to face in seeming communion, and then the descendant turned again to her work. But after a desultory touch here and there she drew a long breath and walked to the open door. What use was in finishing to-day, when she had nearly a week? This first spurt of toil had swept the cabin bare of all indwelling charm, and its look was chill. Across the lane his horse, the one he had “gentled” for her, was grazing idly. She walked there and caught him, and led him to her gate. Mrs. Taylor saw her go in, and soon come out in riding-dress; and she watched the girl throw the saddle on with quick ease—the ease he had taught her. Mrs. Taylor also saw the sharp cut she gave the horse, and laughed grimly to herself in her window as horse and rider galloped into the beautiful sunny loneliness.

To the punished animal this switching was new, and at its third repetition he turned his head in surprise, but was no more heeded than were the bluffs and flowers where he was taking his own undirected choice of way. He carried her over ground she knew by heart—Corncliff Mesa, Crow-heart Butte, Westfall’s Crossing, Upper Canon; open land and woodland, pines and sage-brush, all silent and grave and lustrous in the sunshine. Once and again a ranchman greeted her, and wondered if she had forgotten who he was; once she passed some cow-punchers with a small herd of steers, and they stared after her too. Bear Creek narrowed, its mountainsides drew near, its little falls began to rush white in midday shadow, and the horse suddenly pricked his ears. Unguided, he was taking this advantage to go home. Though he had made but little way—a mere beginning yet—on this trail over to Sunk Creek, here was already a Sunk Creek friend whinnying good day to him, so he whinnied back and quickened his pace, and Molly started to life. What was Monte doing here? She saw the black horse she knew also, saddled, with reins dragging on the trail as the rider had dropped them to dismount. A cold spring bubbled out beyond the next rock, and she knew her lover’s horse was waiting for him while he drank. She pulled at the reins, but loosed them, for to turn and escape now was ridiculous, and riding boldly round the rock, she came upon him by the spring. One of his arms hung up to its elbow in the pool, the other was crooked beside his head, but the face was sunk downward against the shelving rock, so that she saw only his black, tangled hair. As her horse snorted and tossed his head she looked quickly at Monte, as if to question him. Seeing now the sweat matted on his coat, and noting the white rim of his eye, she sprang and ran to the motionless figure. A patch of blood at his shoulder behind stained the soft flannel shirt, spreading down beneath his belt, and the man’s whole strong body lay slack and pitifully helpless.