Son of the Wind/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
THE WINDOW OF THE SPHINX
AT half-past eleven the evening was over and Ferrier getting into his thin overcoat. The pocket hung heavy with something. He drew it out with an embarrassed smile. "I forgot to give you the letters," he said, and handed them to the girl.
"Thank you. I never thought to ask for them." She took them carelessly, standing in the open door a moment after Ferrier had gone, looking out into the gray glimmer of the half-moon and talking to Carron. He wanted to ask her to come out three steps from the house and show him what that floodtide of night that she had spoken of might be like; but then Mr. Rader interrupted him on the verge of it, asking if there were any letters for him.
"Oh, I forgot!" She hastily skimmed the package. "Congressional Library at Washington, that's yours—and that is mine. There you are, 'Pratt's Second-Hand Book Store'—and this is mine—and mine—and here's one for Mr. Carron!" Her voice showed a little surprise. She held it out to him. "I thought you were on a vacation?" she said.
"There has got to be a string to it," he answered, looking at his foreman's writing on the envelope. There was no mistaking that wild, irregular succession of angles and loops. "Pardon me, Mrs. Rader. I am blocking the doorway and I see you want to lock up."
He moved back, and the girl moved back perforce. Her mother gave him a grateful look, but it was not Mrs. Rader's gratitude he was seeking, but the quickest way out of the room. He made his excuses, aware that they must seem abrupt; but a premonition was upon him, sharper than ever, that he had been wasting time, and that from this moment on it would be scant for him. He stopped in the hall, where a lamp had been set high in a bracket, and held the sheet of paper up.
It was dated two days back. The stuff had been sent that day, Morgan wrote, and "Esmeralda Charley" was going down by the morning train to Beckwith to await orders. He hoped the horse was the one Carron thought it was or it wouldn't be worth the trouble. Just as Morgan had said all along the brown stallion of the new bunch had a blind eye, and was dead financial loss; and that half-breed "Buster" whom Carron had thought so fine, had killed the two best mares—entirely unnecessary—and would Carron discharge him by wire, as he wouldn't take another discharge and hung around, drunk, every night. And how about the consignment for the Empire Horse Market? The Empire people swore that it was not up to standard, and they were the ugliest crowd to deal with Morgan had ever seen!
Carron ground his teeth, and consigned Morgan to wretched places. "Damned, pig-headed Welshman! One week more and he'll think he owns the business! He needs me sitting on his neck every minute!" The jar of the business, the tangle and the clatter of it were back upon him with that letter. He realized again dust and plains, and hard work, the eternal drive against time and the importance of it. Morgan and the boys had been "driving," and getting inevitably tangled, while he had rushed off on this wild-goose chase. For what? For nothing but to indulge himself, his fancy for one horse. One horse! True, still if it were the greatest in the world? But that he did not know. He did not know one actual fact. He had not pressed the business, nor pushed it through. He had been mooning among leaves with a girl, filling his head with fancies like a girl, dawdling, blowing hot and cold—and Esmeralda Charley sitting in Beckwith awaiting orders!
He crushed the letter into his pocket and ran upstairs. Entering his room, he groped his way across it, lit the lamp and looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes. His sense of the necessity for action was so keen he did not stop to think about it. His ideas seemed born with the procedure of his actions. His light was a blind to make the Raders believe him still in his room; his room itself was but a route by which he passed to the door of the outside stair. He went softly down. As he reached the foot of it, he saw the light in the living-room was out. He kept as close as he could to the wall, making a detour by the back of the house, and was startled, hurrying up into the pines, to feel the flowered carpet beneath his feet. The edge of it all but tripped him. He shuffled over it, hardly realizing what it was, passed the scholar's study and then, beyond sight of windows, began to run downward. The moon gave him a half shut eye that helped him through the trees, but running at night through a wood, and running of necessity without sound, was no easy business. With his arms now flung up to protect his face, now out to feel where the trees came, expecting each moment a branch to knock the breath out of him, or a sharp edge of rock to catch his foot, his instinct for direction stood him in good stead, carrying him straight in a long, slanting cross-cut for the edge of the road.
He came out upon it, at least halfway down the hill. His chest still labored with rapid breathing, but he struggled to make it slower, shaking pine needles out of his hair, gathering himself together for nonchalance. He had measured time to a nicety. On the dirt road above, he heard the dead, muffled sound of steps. A few moments and the figure of Ferrier came into sight. He was walking quickly, his hands driven into his pockets and his head down. As he came on his face became clear in the half light, eyes lowered, lips moving rapidly, as if he rehearsed words.
Carron very leisurely sauntered up toward him. "Good evening again," he said and was sorry to have frightened the fellow. Ferrier halted as if he thought he was seeing an apparition, the man he had but lately left in the house, now walking up toward him.
"I happened to remember something I wanted to ask you," Carron explained. Inward laughter shook him. The words sounded so unhappily impertinently flippant; but the man he addressed showed no inclination either to laugh or to knock him down. His look glided sidewise. He seemed to meditate a bolt through the trees; then, drawing his elbows a little closer to his body, he slipped past Carron and walked on without speaking.
"I beg your pardon," Carron said mildly, catching step with him, "I would like to explain that it is a civil question." To talk while he could see only a profile, and both hurrying so that their breath came short, was impossible. "There will be no harm in waiting a moment," he said and took him by the He half expected resistance, but Ferrier stopped. He stood holding himself stiffly, as if expecting a blow. Carron waited. The fellow's eyes glanced sidelong on the ground, then at the woods, then upward at the bright face of the sky, finally, sullenly, to his adversary's face. "I wanted to ask you," the horse-breaker said, "if you ever went hunting?"
"I don't think I have the time." Ferrier was trying to resume his air of a young gentleman in society, but it was a failure.
"Because I am going to-morrow," Carron went on, as though the other had not spoken, "and I should like to have you go along."
"No, I can't."
"You'd better," Carron urged. "I am a stranger here. I don't know the country, and you would be doing me a service."
"I am not going to do any more services for you!" Ferrier squared himself obstinately. "You've got all you're going to get out of me."
Defiance was declared between; Carron was glad the battle was to be in the open. It would be sooner ended.
"You promised me a good deal more than that, you know," he said.
"I know, but I didn't mean to tell you anything. I didn't know what I was saying or doing. I—I—was hard up!" he gulped.
"Yes," Carron said, and kept his hand on the man's arm soothingly, as he would upon the halter of a nervous horse. "But you did, you see, and you might as well go along now and tell me the rest of it."
"I won't have anything more to do with you, I tell you!" Ferrier said excitedly. "Look here, didn't I set you on the trail all right? Didn't I tell you where to go and who knew about—"
Carron interrupted. "I know, you told me the story. You described the horse; you said you had seen it; you made a bargain with me and fulfilled only a part of it; and I am here waiting for you to complete it."
Ferrier started. "Why, but I sent you here because she—"
"Understand me," Carron said distinctly, "this is a matter of business between men, between you and me. I know of no one who has this information SON OF THE WIND except yourself. Besides us, there is no one else concerned in it."
"Yes, there is," Ferrier burst out, "and we both know it! She is! You come to me and you pretend it's because you don't want to deal with her—O, no! you've got too fine a sense of honor! You want to leave her out of it? Why, my God," his voice soared, "she won't tell you! Don't I know? Do yer think I'd ever have given her away if I had thought you could fool her into it? But you can't! And now, do yer think I'm going to risk telling you myself, and risk her turning me down? Yes,—wouldn't she, though! She'd throw me over, like a sack of old meal, if I told about that infernal horse! But I'm not going to give her the chance! I'll play second fiddle until it's gone. Won't be much longer till the rains—and then you'll see!"
Carron had involuntarily loosed hold of him and Ferrier was backing away, down the road, step by step, his voice rising as he retreated. "And you needn't think because she was so pleasant and made so much of you this evening, that it means a thing. She's that way with every one. She doesn't care a flip of her finger about you! Hang around, and ask as much as you like. You'll see!" He turned and began to run.
For a moment Carron entertained the idea of following him and shaking the breath out of him. The fellow wasn't worth while knocking down! Dragging forward the woman into the business, shouting out her name! Who had supposed she cared a flip of her finger? Who had supposed she had given Carron a thought? His face was hot in the chilly moonlight. But then the cooler reflection followed, the poor devil was in love with her himself—and jealous. That tirade he had poured out had been the very ecstasy of jealousy; proprietorship, trying to assert itself. But there was more than that in it. There was something strange and contradictory. "If he didn't want me to get the horse," Carron reflected, "why the devil did he give me the right direction in the first place! Why, if he loves her and is afraid of her, why didn't he lie, up and down, to me; lead me astray? He'd have had the twenty dollars just as surely." He slapped his thigh. "But he did want me to get the horse! He did, in the first place. It's his stumbling block. He hoped I would get it out of his way, so she would remember him long enough to look at him." Carron apostrophized the moon. "He's got remorse! Scared! Afraid she'll hear about his part in it; afraid, if I get the horse, the whole thing will come out!" He shook his head. He relinquished the idea of following the fugitive, and at the same time relinquished the idea of Ferrier altogether. "He won't do," he thought, "he's too weak."
The weaknesses of strong men who know what they want and will pursue any means to get it, were always sharp, certain instruments in the hands of whoever cared to use them, but the weakness of this man, who reflected the will of the last person he had talked with might cut in none knew what direction. He had sold the girl's confidence for twenty dollars. He had fallen into an ecstasy of dread of the consequences. Yet even thus, and under her very eye he had not had the moral courage to resist that gold piece. Carron reflected, striding back through moon and shade, that a man did not need to have a very delicate honor to want not to deal with Ferrier. He did not plead one for himself; he only pleaded now the courage of his desires. He was ready for anything that would find him the much desired, fleet and elusive Son of the Wind. Had he met, there and then, the traveler with the cloven foot who stops men in forest ways and offers them the world for their name written in red, he would have been inclined to sign the document. But the devil within was the only one who had ever appeared to Carron, to offer him assistance, and this one was his demon of persistence.
He was up the next day at dawn to be sure of being out of the house before the Rader family were stirring; but it was necessary to intrude in Mrs. Rader's kitchen, previous to trying twenty miles on horseback, and he was still looking helplessly at an array of jars, all different in label and contents, none of which seemed to be either tea or bread, when the door opened and Blanche Rader entered.
He was exasperated. Had not he known how it would be! A woman was always cutting across your trail, not for any interest in you, just for perversity, or to know what was going on. She gave herself away with her first words.
"I was awake early this morning and heard you stirring. I thought perhaps you meant to get an early start." At least she did not ask him where he was going. She began to move deliberately about, lit the little oil stove, took a can labeled "Coffee" from the shelf where it had been glaring in his eyes, and set some bread to toast. The kitchen was filled with the searing and steaming of things cooking. She looked pale and languid, and had less the appearance of a person who is hardly awake, than one who has not slept enough. Her hair drawn up and held closely with a large bow of red ribbon showed the full white sweep of the neck at the back. Her head was carried a little to one side as if weary. She set out his breakfast on the kitchen table, but set it very prettily, on a linen hemstitched cloth, and while the toast was finishing, arranged a bouquet of dwarf chrysanthemums in a tiny vase. Ferrier's words returned hatefully to his mind. Was Blanche Rader "that way with every one?" He preferred to think that only for him had she ever arranged a little bunch of flowers. She sat down with him at the table, and made him uneasy, not eating, but leaning her chin on her hand, keeping her large eyelids persistently down, drawing patterns on the cloth with her forefinger. He ate hastily, for he sensed a question in the wind. He did not escape it. "Are you going to be gone long?" she asked, still intent on her moving finger point.
"All day."
"Oh!" Her eyes came up with a flash. "Are you coming back?"
"Why, of course. Did you think—"
Her lips parted, growing a little more rosy. "I thought you had had bad news last night, that had called you away." Bad news, indeed, he thought, but of a sort to make him stick the tighter. She was blushing faintly. "I wouldn't have come down—I mean I wouldn't have asked you" She laughed at her own embarrassment. "I didn't mean to be so inquisitive."
"All women are," Carron declared rising.
She bit her lip. "All women are different."
"Some are exceptional. It was very kind of you to get up at such an hour, and that was a very good breakfast." He gathered up his guns and his hat and stepped out upon the side veranda. He thought she had taken her dismissal. He had a notion there was a flutter of red and white petticoat behind him as he went down the wagon track, and thought it was because that red and white was somehow getting fixed in his stubborn fancy; but when he reached the stable, he saw she was indeed still with him.
"I only wanted to say," she explained, evidently because his rather grim expression suggested that she needed an explanation, "that you would better take my pony. He is used to the rocks. Nothing can hurt him or lose him in the mountains. He knows all the trails."
She was more thoughtful of him certainly than other women he had known, and not at all insistent upon her own presence. She stood in silence during the more exacting preliminaries of saddling. Then, as he began shortening stirrups, she spoke. "When you get back tonight, if you care to and are not too tired, I will take you over to the largest pine, 'The Witch's Spindle' and show you what I mean by the high tide of night."
The same thought had been in Carron's mind the evening before, had been upon his lips when the letters interrupted him. Now he had forgotten about it. In his mind he was writing a telegram. "I shall be delighted," he said, while his eye measured the leathers.
She did not speak again, and before he looked up he heard her walking out through the old barn in a cloud of little echoes; but when he rode up the drive a few minutes later he saw her just at the edge of the pines, standing on the carpet which still lay spread out on the ground. She looked toward him and waved her hand. The cool sunrise wind fluttered the red ribbon in her hair. Carron remembered her quite too long after he had lost sight of her. The road he followed had memories of a flying figure letting herself be run away with for the joy of wildness. He did not leave that thought quite behind until he had passed through the village of hills and was fairly out in the long dull level valley with Beckwith in sight.
The day was early still when he got in, but his business in this place was trying and various, first to discover Esmeralda Charley, whom he found in a desperate little half-breed hotel. Here he spent the best of an hour, carefully fishing out of the fellow's mind such ideas as he had on certain matters at the 
She looked toward him and waved her hand
The half-breed, returning, reported the stuff too bulky to be stored in the baggage-room, but he had found a good place where it could be under cover and under lock; only the people wanted to know how long it was to be kept there. Carron looked at the ceiling, saw all his adventure still in the air above him. "A week," he said, and wished that he could put a lock on the hours. The day was already half done.
He presented himself to Beckwith's advice as a hunter desirous of the best direction to take for game. They named him roads and trails, but none went in the direction he wanted. The Big Cañon? Lord! They scorned his suggestion. Nothing in there but eagles. None the less he was stubborn. Well then, the only way to get in was by going twenty-five miles back, someway below Raders. There might be a trail turned off there—they couldn't say.
Carron had no intention of retracing his steps so far. Besides, he felt quite sure a trail did not turn off there. He had looked for one too well, four days ago. His thought was fixed on the little window by the Sphinx which had shown him the distance beyond. Esmeralda Charley, listening to the description of this, was not sanguine about it as a point of passage through the hills. In the end they made an expedition straight out from Beckwith to the cañon wall—ten miles across very vile country, and spent the afternoon investigating the chance for an inlet there. Nothing was possible, the hills becoming a high rampart of shard, their bases steep slides of stone. Furthermore, Carron was not prepared to risk the utmost here. It was too distant altogether from Raders to seem a likely place, and to his knowledgeable eye, it was subtlely unlike the creature he was seeking. They returned to the town at dusk. He had no thought of starting for Raders that night. He wished that he might have found some one bound in that direction who could have carried a note; but he was too full of calculations of moonrise, of trails and possibilities of rock formations to reflect long on what the Raders might think.
Through all the night he was wakeful and his mind at work. To go back to the place, twenty-five miles below, where the road turned aside from the cañon, to make his way without a trail, up the difficult Highway of the Gods, through the gates, into the circle of mountains which was the Big Cañon, would be in itself a full day's work. And, once entering it, what then? In it he could not see it. He might waste days, lost among peak and declivity. It would be like entering a maze. But, from this side of the cañon wall, to ascend to the Sphinx's window and look through it, would be looking upon the maze from a balloon. From this place, set high above, he might observe the trend of mountain and valley, the direction of the river, whose voice had reached him from a distance; he might choose, from here, the route best for his compass to follow; perhaps sight certain places more likely than others for the habitat of a horse, some place in the course of the river where a wild creature might go to drink. The window had a look of having been purposely set there by fate. From the top of the watershed, on the following morning, he pointed it out to Esmeralda Charley, just as the sun was getting up over the great head, crowning it with a circlet of terrible gold. The little half-breed, blinking at the sight, let drop unexpectedly the thought of a philosopher. Rocks like that, he observed, that were meant to be looked at, never meant anything more. Carron bit his lip. He knew he was taking a chance as wide as the cañon, but wide chances were all the hope he had in sight.
They would have a little closer look at it anyway, he determined. Here they were at the point nearest to the hills. At the worst they would not have more than three miles. The long back of the watershed stretched with a gentle downward slant out toward the wall of Sugar Loafs, and together the two began to work their way forward along it, among the rocks and bushes. It was not a difficult way, although no trail was visible, but Carron could see from the action of the pony that the animal had never taken this route before. The cautious planting of his feet, the doubtful side to side motion of his head, as if he denied the possibility of getting anywhere, a general air of unwillingness, of having to be pushed along, spoke unfamiliarity with the place. As they went on, the outcropping of rock became more frequent. Great faces of it rose to the surface of the thin soil, and down them the horses footed it daintily or cautiously slid. The sides of the long, extended height dropped away more sharply. On either hand they looked down upon thick tree-tops. His companion murmured that they were running into a sack.
Carron tried to peer over the low pines which were thickening in front, to see into what sort of country the nose of the watershed ran; but the descent was too steep for this to be visible, though by the drop of the land from the buttes opposite he gathered that a hollow, narrow depression lay between. Purple shadows still lay like water at the foot of the hills, but their tops shone yellow, and the new day, beating full upon the Sphinx's face, gave it a bland, almost blank, appearance. The shape of the head and the winged helmet were there, but the haunting expression was confounded in the bright light. He frowned, staring aloft for a hint of it.
The half-breed's voice sang out, shrill and sudden. Carron pulled rein before he looked. These warnings came sometimes on the very verge. He was far enough from the edge on this occasion, but edge there was nevertheless, here where it had been. least expected. The end of the watershed was cut down, sliced off. Years past some mass of water might have run flood full here, and worn it away. But now, at the bottom, wound only a belt of dark sand, with a narrow stream flowing in the heart of it. It had made no murmur to warn them, being summer water. This river bottom was all that lay between them and the cañon wall; but the descent into it was most uninviting, neither a precipice, over which a man might be lowered, nor a possible hillside offering a trail, but a face of rock slanted at forty-five degrees, where a man must use his feet, yet could not keep his footing without a rope. Getting out of the saddle, Carron walked forward and looked up and down the course of the stream.
The power that had cut the watershed had sliced the hills with the same knife. Cliff it was as far as the eye could see. The face presented was irregular, however, now low, now high, as the land ran. The place where he stood must have a height of fifteen feet. Upon the right it scarcely reached six above the river basin; but he saw that to descend the side of the watershed would be more difficult now than to descend its face. He felt as, when a child, he had scrambled to the end of a tree limb and had to take a choice of scrambling all the way back or dropping to the ground. He had always preferred to drop. He was preparing to do that now. It meant leaving the half-breed and the horses on the head of the cliff and voyaging across the stream and up to the window of the Sphinx alone. He was rather glad of that. The long rope was fastened about his body; Esmeralda Charley made a half-hitch around a stout little pine tree and Carron, begining the descent, with the first step, loosed a shower of little stones.
They were not such pebbles as lodge in granite crevices, but particles of the rock itself. It was shale, treacherous stuff. Firm looking projections crumbled away under his feet like cheese. There was not a bush for a hold, not a solid thing anywhere, to grasp. Now he slid, and the rope sprang taut on his body; now on hands and knees he crept, slowly working his way down, backward. Half way down his foot found what seemed not a projection but a crevice, large enough to get his toes into. He tested it, rested weight upon it, felt inclined to trust it, and, without lifting his head, shouted for more rope. Nothing responded. He looked up, thinking perhaps, with his head down, his voice had failed to carry, and for the instant rested full weight on the rope. At that instant Esmeralda Charley threw the slack. Carron felt himself topple back. His foot tore out of the crevice. Then the spring of the lariat around his body all but pulled the breath out of him. He was jerked up again so violently that he was flung flat against the cliff. His last instinct was to protect his face. He felt a blow on the side of the head, and began to drop away into a cold, ringing darkness. At intervals he heard Esmeralda Charley's voice, calling faintly from a great distance. He became aware of intense pain in his head, increasing with the increasing return of light, and the half-breed's voice seemed to be getting louder again. He must be drawing nearer. Carron languidly opened his eyes.
He was looking down into the sand and water, still some feet below. The side of his head that ached still rested upon the face of the rock. Vaguely astonished he rolled his head around and saw before him the mountain as a great silhouette, a wall upon the blinding sky; and opening through it, looking softly upon him, was that blue eye of distance. Within it he saw mountains like a dream, far away, ineffable, another world.
"Are you all right? Are you all right?" the repeated cry grew clearer to his returning consciousness. He looked up and saw the dark face of Esmeralda Charley peering over the edge of the declivity. Half stunned yet, Carron found his voice.
"Yes, I'm all right. I want to lie still a moment." He was getting his bearings, and realizing what had happened—nothing serious, nothing but his own infernal clumsiness and Esmeralda Charley's attempt to jerk him back to his feet, instead of letting him roll down a little way with the slack of the lariat. He sat up in a fine temper, conscious of a throbbing head, but feeling steady enough. "Don't pull me up," he called, feeling the lariat strain around him, "I'm going on. Pay out now when I tell you."
He heard the half-breed warning him to be careful—of what, he couldn't make out. He was too much occupied with not making another slip, and with determining in what sort of place he was going to land. The rock shelved out, perhaps a couple of feet into the sand. Stretching his legs he slid in a shower of fragments, and stood upright upon the level at last. He looked up and down. As far as could be seen the dark gray streak in which the shrunken river made its bed was constant. From above the place where he stood had seemed narrow enough; but now he saw it was wide indeed. He could hardly throw a stone across it, and as far as the dampness of the water spread, the sand had a tremulous, liquid quiver. Carron did not like the look of it. "Nasty going," he thought it. These little half-dry creek beds were sometimes hard to pull your legs through. The best way to take them was with a rush. He loosened the rope from his body, let it swing back behind him, kicked off his shoes, fastened them around his neck, and leaned back against the cliff to get what start was possible.
The impetus of his rush carried him a little way out; then he was in over the knees, still going forward. He was to the thighs before he knew it. The sensation was not of sinking, but of being drawn down. He heaved against the weight that thrust upon him from every side, and advanced not an inch. A crazy conviction took him that somehow he could put forth inhuman strength to combat this resistance; that, to get across, some supernatural power would be given him. But the only thing supernatural he was conscious of was the power beneath his feet. He heard the sing of the lariat passing close to his cheek as the half-breed threw it. It fell too far out to be grasped. It was whirled again, fell, and he reached it. It took some sharp tugging on the half-breed's part, using himself and the tree as a windlass, and some hard workon Carron's before he was dragged by degrees, and with a sucking sound, out of the mouth of the quicksand.
Wet to the arm-pits, trembling with the exertion he had made, perspiration upon his forehead, he reached the little projecting ledge of rock. He had had worse moments of danger. There was no danger worth thinking about, with the half-breed there to throw a rope. The fear of a man, newly escaped death, was not his, but the disgust and the anger of a man who has not succeeded. To have failed by so narrow a margin! To have been kept back by so puny a stream—thumped on the head by a rock and then half swallowed by a wretched patch of sand! He put up his handkerchief, mopped the blood that was running down his neck, and looked up at his enemy, the Sphinx. From where he was the mass of the head gazed over him, and past him. No shadow upon it pointed an eyelash toward him; no quiver on the large front, nothing that recognized him, lying on the ledge, limp as a hooked fish. He waited a little longer, recovering strength; then with throbbing head, throbbing wrists, and a beating determination, he painfully reascended the nose of the watershed and at the top lay down to dry himself in the sun.
His flask and the bread that he had, helped to recover him. He rested while Esmeralda Charley roped himself down one side of the rocky promontory upon which they lay, and set off northward, prospecting the bank of the stream. In the course of two hours the man returned. Perhaps six miles up from the watershed the quicksand made a wide swing across the valley to the hills. But at that point, he said, it would be impossible to get down with the horses, as there was still considerable cliff. He thought that to get around they would have to go back to Beckwith.
Carron looked up at the sun, and then at his watch. Twenty miles from where they were erely to reach the Sugar Loafs? And then to make their way down, ten miles or more over a country obroken stone, and probably involve themselves again in the sand? He suspected a sink somewhere about the base of the hills, where the stream dropped. Such waters flow now above ground, now sunk. That implacable lady, the Sphinx, had surrounded herself with a wall and a moat. He had scaled the one, but he was left on the brink of the other, a thwarted besieger.
The afternoon had drawn toward a close, when Carron and the half-breed parted company, the "Buster" to Beckwith to wait until he had fresh instructions, Carron toward Raders. As he rode, he looked over the country. He had surveyed it before, seen it heavily wooded, deeply gullied, and put it down as improbable. Now he knew it impossible, at least as far as the quicksand went. This must disappear as the country passed from plain to forest, from shallow hollow to precipice; but to travel here without a trail, to chance crossing the transverse ravines, and spend Heaven knows what time at it, for the sake of a mere look into the cañon—that chance was too wide, even for him! There must be another way to come at it. There was always another way. His body innured to hours in the saddle and to great exertions felt the discomforts of the adventure but little. It was in his mind that he suffered. So easy the thing had looked and proved so difficult! In every direction he had tried he had found an obstacle, whether the dead wall of a rock or of a coward's fear of consequences; the quicksand of a river, or of a girl's mind. To say he was defeated, that he had given up, did not occur to him. The higher the difficulty, the higher he looked to meet it. He had gone too far into the thing to dream of failure now.
Approaching the hotel he grew conscious of his dilapidated appearance. He stopped at the foot of Rader's Hill, where the creek crossed the main road, and washed off the blood that was drying uncomfortably upon his neck; but he was obliged to keep his handkerchief bound around the cut that still bled a little, and he was a spectacle of mud to the waist. He looked forward to meeting those people and their questions with an unconscious bracing of capacity. There was nothing extraordinary in a hunter having had hair-breadth escapes; but in a dry and burning season, and in a country of rock, there are few places where a man might drop into a mud-hole. There might be only one quicksand in the county. And what would a hunter have been doing upon a plain on the second day of his hunting? His mind saw the suspicion grow in Blanche Rader's confident eyes. As for Mrs. Rader, she already suspected him of something. And, woman fashion, she would, therefore, be prepared to suspect him of anything. The scholar, of course, would know what he had been about, and the old fellow had dropped him a hint that in his austere conception of the affair, the girl's refusal ought to put an end to the quest. Now, when he saw it had not, perhaps he would consider it his duty to reveal what was going forward. Carron felt he was going forth against antagonists; for, gentle as they were, they seemed all to be against him. Nevertheless, he turned into the loop of the drive with that mixed sense of familiarity and strangeness that one feels, after an absence, upon returning home. The pale, austere front of the house was more welcome to him than ever the classic aspect of his mother's house in Greenwich. This impression of homelikeness was added to by the sight of an expectant figure. It was revealed as that of the scholar. He was moving rather restlessly along the porch of the old wing, now and then stretching his head on his long neck to look out between the vines.
Seeing Carron, his face relaxed into a smile. He raised his hand above his head, in joyful salute, and hurried to the steps, as the young man rode up. "My dear boy, we have been wondering—why, I'm very glad to see you! The women have been quite frightened."
"Frightened?" Carron echoed, feeling mystified.
"Yes, your not coming back last night. Of course, I told them you were all right. Two days, more or less, is nothing—and a man can't send a note out of the wilderness. Still women, you know!" He expressively waved his hand. "Mrs. Rader has gone down to the Ferriers now, to see if perhaps they had heard anything of you."
"Mrs. Rader has?" Carron had become an echo of astonishment.
"Yes," the scholar sighed, and added, "She kept me awake quite a little last night, fussing about it."
Taken aback, flattered, touched, Carron hadn't yet heard the name he most wanted. If Mrs. Rader had fussed, he wondered what Blanche had done.
"You are all right, aren't you?" Rader continued, his manner slowing a little from the unwonted vivacity of excitement. "What is that around your head?"
"I cut myself up in the rocks and then got into the mud. It's nothing at all."
"Ah! well," the scholar surveyed him with an almost affectionate glance, "the women will fix you up. They'll love to." He hesitated, lowered his voice, leaning forward, "You didn't—" The rest of the query was in his eyes. It spoke of the secret that was theirs, between them.
Carron smiled rather grimly. "No, I—" he began.
He stopped, because a door had opened suddenly. Not the one fronting the steps, but one farther down the porch, opening direct out of the livingroom. Blanche Rader stood there. She had taken the step down from the high threshold, but one foot still rested upon it, one hand still clasped the frame of the doorway as if she were there but for an instant. A long piece of white stuff, with needle adangle, trailed from the other hand, dragging, forgotten, on the ground. Her lips were apart, yet she seemed to suspend breath while her intense eyes gazed. They took him in with their wide, startled flash, from the bandage around his head to his deplorable boots. He had not known that the sight of her would waken such a feeling in him. After two days! He thought he had forgotten her. But to see her there, the symbol of his difficulties, fragile, yet triumphant where he had failed, was to arouse the full tide of his anger against her as it had against the Sphinx. She seemed a part of it, perhaps the very core of it, unreasoning, not to be moved, set there in his path, the perverse deity who had led him and then held him back. Yet, with this feeling came another, more subtle and confused. The impulse he had had, when they whirled upon the carpet, to catch her closer, or fling her as far as he could. Oh, to get hold of her; to put her completely out of the way, upon some high shelf of the universe where she could not do any harm, where she could no longer interrupt his thoughts and disturb his affairs, and of ordinary life make a thing of furies and elations. Or else—well, suppose one could—
She had disappeared, she had vanished through the door again, without a word, without a motion of recognition, leaving him only the memory of her gaze that had seemed to appeal to him, to entreat him to tell her that he was safe, that he was unhurt.
He did not very well know what else Rader said to him. His thoughts beat this way and that, boiled up with his exasperations, retreated before the memory of the girl's face, its pity and its panic; bore forward toward success, with all the nature of the man to press them on. He put up the pony in the stable, took off the bandage from his head, and walked back to the house with some vague, surface idea of going up-stairs, cleaning up, getting a bath. The house was still. This time there was no one on the veranda. He walked slowly along to the livingroom door, opened it, went in, with a quickening pulse. No one there. A pair of scissors and a pincushion were upon the table, a thimble on the floor. She had fled. From what? He wondered what she was afraid of. He had not wanted to frighten her. He only wanted to find her. He went out into the hall, that hall of many doors. The late day made it dark, and only by the pale, shining, neutral illumination could he see that one of these doors was half open. He moved it back noiselessly upon its hinge and looked.
He was in the little sewing-room where he had seen her the morning he had proposed their ride. Here, too, twilight was gathered. The walls were dusky, the furniture dim; only at the window a light came; and here, close to it, Blanche Rader was sitting, sewing. Her gown was white, and flowed off into shadow. She did not move when he came in, she did not quiver an eyelash, her hands did not cease their regular motion. Softly, so as not to startle her into consciousness of his presence, he entered and sat down in a chair farthest from her, deepest in shadow.
From here he saw her face in profile. Her head was bent and held a little to one side. The last of the day shone on the curve of her chin, the curve of her lips, lay upon her forehead, found bronze in her hair, and touched the edge of her red ribbon to fire. Her shoulders drawn a little forward by their task and the turn of her long throat lent something wistful and appealing to her aspect. Her hands rapidly drew the thread in and out. He watched her, and the wonder grew. He was weary with exertion, aching with the cut on his head. He was an expert plainsman, had lost two days and was no nearer the object of his search, nor the way of reaching it, than he had been at first. This fragile girl, curled over her sewing, had it all in her head. Deep hidden she kept it and hugged the secret. To her it had been given to see a wonder, rarely seen, even by night-walking foresters or leafy dwellers outside the law. Had she been abroad at moonset, that such a chance had befallen her, or at that bright Greek interval before the sunrise? What way had she followed? What way could a woman follow where he had found none? From what place had she looked—the cap of a mountain, an eyrie of trees, or up, from a hollow in the earth? Her eyes, fixed now on the flashing needle, had looked upon Son of the Wind; had seen him, not in the terrors of flight, but in the splendor of his trampling, unafraid approach. Yes, and they would see him again. That was the thought that spurred. Could one but take her, and break her knowledge out of her, as one would break the wine out of a glass.
He saw her hands were moving faster, with a nervous intensity; her breast was rising and falling with quick, short breaths. There was a quiver of her underlip and she took it between her teeth. The idea came to him that she was aware of his presence. She knew that he was there, sitting and staring at her. She must have known from the very first. The failing light added to the mystery between them. Why hadn't she spoken? Why not speak now? Her fingers shook, but they flew for a wager. What could he say, since something must be said? That consciousness she had of him, the curious dread that tied her tongue, gave him a sense. of power over her. Why not ask her now, while she was trembling, relaxed, expectant of something he did not know of—sweep the whole story out of her? Yes, this was the moment!
He got to his feet. With the movement, the motion of her hands stopped. They held the work up nervously. Her head lifted, dropped back a little. She did not look at him. He started toward her with still the blind impulse to demand the horse. Where that intention went he did not know. He reached her and she was on her feet. Had she risen to meet him, or had he drawn her up by the hands? He did not know. Her hands were in his, both hands in his one. At the touch other thought slipped away from him. He knew himself trembling, and was amazed. With the first breath of her hair—that faint, sweet, personal perfume—he understood the adventure was perilous. He felt the noose of the charm descending upon him. He felt, before he touched her lips, the approach of an unknown emotion. He saw himself in her eyes, before they kissed.