Backwoods Girl

by Peggy Gaddis

  “Well, thanks!”

  She put down her glass on the table with a little thud and faced him, head erect, eyes straight. “Well, are you going home?” she demanded.

  Jim got quickly to his feet, flushing at the brutality of the dismissal. “Sorry, I hadn’t realized I’d been such a bore,” he said and reached for his windbreaker.

  “Because if you’re not,” Lorna said, “I won’t need any more of this liquor. It’s only when I sleep alone that I need to drink myself to sleep.”

  She met his eyes coolly for the startled instant it took Jim to realize what she was saying. Then he laughed, put down his glass and pulled her up into his arms, holding her tightly, his mouth seeking and bruising her own with the intensity of his kiss.

  After a long moment she drew a little away from him and looked up at him, her eyes green fire, her face white beneath its deft makeup.

  “Then I take it you’re staying?” Her tone was thick with passion, but there was a mocking glint in her eyes.

  “You couldn’t drive me away with a double-barreled shotgun,” he told her, his voice far from steady.

  “Then what are we waiting for?” demanded Lorna, and holding his hand, she drew him with her into the tiny bedroom, where there was scarcely room for them to walk between the bed and the dressing table.

  Her arms went about him, drawing him down to her, and she gave herself fully. She took his ardor with a wild abandon that was delightful but startling in its violence.

  She was, as he had known instinctively that she would be, a deft and expert lover. Experienced was the word that came to him, but in the mad enchantment of the moment, he thrust it from him. He had known women before, of course, but never one who gave herself to the ardent demands of a blazing desire with such stormy passion. Time and everything else, except this tumultuous giving and taking of desire and its fulfillment, ceased to be.

  When at last their transports had lifted them to the peak of fulfillment and their mutual crisis ebbed, they lay still, clutched in each other’s arms. Then she slid away from him, and lay relaxed in the breathless limpness of the aftermath. He propped himself on his elbow and looked down at her, his eyes delighting in the beauty his body had so completely possessed.

  She looked like a gorgeous cat, sunk in a delicious languor. She opened her eyes at last, sea-green and sleepy, and grinned at him. “Boy, will I give the office hell on Monday!” she murmured and seemed to fall instantly asleep.

  Jim lay beside her, too emotionally aroused to find sleep easy, and for some crazy reason, his mind went to that girl on the mountain in whose cabin he had found shelter last night, the girl who had barred him from her side by a vicious dog and a shotgun. He wondered what it would be like to possess her young, exquisite body as he had possessed Lorna’s fully mature charms. That was a thought that he put aside, ashamed that he could think of Cindy in that light. After what that old bitch, the Haney woman had said about her, knowing the suspicion and contempt in which she and Marthy held Cindy he felt that he, too, had betrayed her by even holding such thoughts about her. By the time he had reached that point in his thoughts, sleep swept over him.

  In the coldest, darkest hour before the wintry dawn, Lorna awoke him. “Time you were stirring your bones, my fine friend, and hiking it down to the cabin Storekeeper’s got all fixed up for you,” she told him.

  Jim stared at her in the pale-yellow light from the shaded bedlamp. “Hey, you’re not going to throw me out of this snug, warm bed into the cold? Want me to catch pneumonia?” he protested and reached for her with eager arms.

  Lorna evaded him, slipping away from him as she slid to the foot of the bed and stepped out, reaching for a robe to wrap about herself.

  “The man doesn’t live who’s going to see me in the cold grey dawn of the morning after, Jimmy darlin’,” she assured him, and though her voice was light and mocking, he sensed that she meant it. “I look like death warmed over after one of these little sessions. You can come back for breakfast, not before twelve o’clock, when I’ve managed to pull myself together and got my face on. Scoot, now!”

  “You look beautiful—,” he protested.

  “Beat it, lad—or I won’t even let you come back for breakfast,” she threatened and went out into the living room.

  Swearing, he pulled on his clothes, and when he went into the living room, he found her waiting for him. Though she smiled at his angry scowl, there was no hint of relenting in her manner.

  “With Marthy so damned sure I’m an abandoned woman, and a first-rate hussy, I can’t afford to have them know you spent the night here,” she pointed out. “They’ll have the cabin ready for you, and the first thing the old bitch will do when she gets up is to go out and see if you’re there. See?”

  Reluctantly, Jim nodded and erased the scowl. “Sure,” he agreed. “It’s just that I was sleeping so warm and snug and in such wonderful company. You’re right, of course.”

  “There can be lots of other nights, if you like,” she told him, studying him through the smoke of her cigarette.

  “If I like!” Jim reached for her, but she laughed, stepped back and swung open the front door, drawing her robe about her, shivering in the icy blast of air that swept in.

  “Breakfast at twelve sharp, and it might be waffles,” she promised him, and as he stepped through the door, it swung shut behind him. Then he heard the click of the key in the lock.

  He stood on the steps, shivering in the bitter cold, until his eyes had adjusted themselves to the darkness, and he could see the pale glimmer of the creek, and could feel his way beside it on the trail.

  A feeble light shone through a window of the cabin Storekeeper had said would be his. Jim managed to reach it, and to creep silently up the steps, knowing that sounds would carry a long way in that still, cold night. He was most anxious not to rouse Marthy and her husband and be seen coming in at this hour.

  A kerosene lamp burned dimly on a rickety table, and the fire in the small sheet-iron stove had died down to glowing embers. There was a wood box full of short, thick, well-dried logs. Jim carefully fed the embers until the stove once more glowed with a gratifying warmth. He blew out the lamp, and looked through the one small window at a thin greying in the sky. Not so much the coming of light as of the fading of thick darkness. Then he tumbled into bed, and as he once more grew warm, he fell into a dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER 6

  When Jim awoke it was mid-morning. There was a pale, watery sunlight in the room, and the fire had once more died down. As he was rebuilding it, there was a knock at the door, and he opened it to find Marthy standing there, bundled up in a thick old coat, a woolen scarf about her head. Her eyes were mean and spiteful.

  “We wuz ‘bout to git worried ‘bout you,” she told him sharply. “You not comin’ fer breakfai’. Jake thought maybe you hadn’t got back yit.”

  “Thanks for your concern,” said Jim, coldly polite. “I had a wonderful night’s sleep.”

  “Glad t’ hear it,” said Marthy sourly. “You want any breakfas’—hit’s on the stove, an’ the coffee’s b’ilin’ hot. Me an’ Jake’s goin’ to church.”

  “Have a good time,” said Jim pleasantly.

  Marthy glared at him over her shoulder. “Up hyer in these parts, stranger, folks don’t go to church to have fun. They go to have the word o’ God preached to ‘em. They’s a heap o’ folks don’t go to church that had sho’ oughter.”

  “How right you are,” Jim agreed with her, anxious only to have the old harpy go on her way. “But don’t worry about breakfast for me. Miss Blake has very kindly asked me to eat at her place.”

  “Then it didn’t hardly pay ye to come back here last night, did it?” she sneered. “As late as ye got hyer.” With that parting shot she was off, her head held high, the fantastic flowers on her incredible hat bouncing spitefully as she
walked.

  Jim shrugged and shut the door. He felt too good this morning to allow the old girl to upset him. He should have known, of course, that she would spy on him and know as well as he did what time he got back. Or was her remark a shot in the dark? It might well be, and who the hell cared, one way or another, he reminded himself as he rummaged in the shoulder-pack for his last clean shirt.

  ####

  It was five minutes of twelve when Jim rapped on the door of Lorna’s cabin. She opened the door, slender and trim in the green jodhpurs, a yellow cashmere sweater snug about her lovely bosom. “Hi, there!” She greeted him casually, not at all though she had routed him out of her bed a few hours before. “I like punctuality in people, and besides the waffles are just about ready. Come on in.”

  She handed him a glass of orange juice, and he asked, “Is that all the greeting I get?”

  Lorna raised her eyebrows. “Nights are made for lovemaking, didn’t you know?” she said. “I never kiss a man until after six in the evening.”

  “That’s a fool rule if I ever heard one,” he protested and reached for her, but she fended him off expertly, a bubbling percolator held between them.

  “Take it easy, pal! Down, boy, down!” she said. “Not before breakfast! Not even a married man should kiss his wife before breakfast, and for a lover to—.” She shuddered delicately and laughed as she motioned him to the table.

  Over second cups of coffee, he said in an awed tone, “And you can cook, too!”

  Her eyebrows arched delicately. “I can read directions on the packages,” she assured him. “And I’m a master hand at using a can-opener. What else does a woman need to be listed as a good cook?”

  “Another illusion gone,” he mourned.

  She looked at him level-eyed. “Are you staying up here, Jim?” she asked quietly.

  His eyes avoided hers. “I’m taking each minute as it comes and not trying to plan for the next one,” he told her.

  “But that’s just silly, Jim. You and I could have an awful lot of fun back in Atlanta.”

  He shook his head. “No!”

  She tapped the ash from her cigarette carefully into an ashtray beside her coffee cup and sat silently thoughtful for a moment. “Will you be here next weekend?” she asked.

  He looked up at her swiftly. “Will you?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Then so will I!”

  She gave him a brief, flashing smile. “It’s a date,” she said, and once more she was silent and thoughtful, while Jim watched her curiously.

  “I suppose you’re planning to cultivate the acquaintance of the Indian maiden while you’re here,” she said at last, her tone carefully expressionless.

  “Would you mind?”

  “Of course not. I’m strongly in favor of it.”

  “Are you now? And here I was, being fool enough to hope jealousy prompted that question,” he said.

  She looked at him in honest surprise. “Jealous? Why the hell should I be?” she asked. “Oh, you and I have fun together, but we both know that’s all it is. I’m sure you have no more intention of getting seriously involved than I have.”

  “Then why did you ask whether I meant to see Cindy again?”

  She hesitated, and it was obvious that she was not sure just what she wanted to say. He waited, curious, amused, until suddenly she stood up and walked into the living room. She stood there for a moment, looking out of the window, before she turned and came back to stand behind her chair, looking down at him.

  “I told you last night that this place was rather expensive,” she said slowly. “Having things carted over here from Marshallville and battling with these thick-headed carpenters and plumbers and the like. I also told you I did not pay for it by sleeping around here and there.”

  “I remember,” said Jim and waited.

  “Well, don’t look so damned smug!” she snapped at him. “Whether you want to believe it or not, I didn’t. I’m not sure even yet that I can trust you, though, with the truth about how I did pay for it.”

  “Then maybe you’d better not tell me. I haven’t asked you. Somehow, I seem to have an idea it’s none of my business,” Jim pointed out.

  She was frowning in the effort to make up her mind. “Yet, since you know this Indian girl, it might not be a bad idea,” she murmured half-aloud.

  Jim was not only bewildered, he was exasperated. “I haven’t the damnedest idea what the hell you’re talking about,” he said sharply. “Or what that poor little devil has to do with all this. You claim you’ve never even seen her, yet now you hint she had something to do with your getting this place and fixing it up.”

  “Oh, she had nothing to do with my fixing the place up, or even with my buying it. I’d bought it before I heard the story about her,” Lorna told him quickly. Then, with the air of having reached a decision, she dropped back into the chair, leaned her elbows on the table and began talking rapidly. “I bought the cabin because I found gold in the creek.”

  Jim laughed frankly. “Oh, come now, Lorna—.”

  “Damn you, it’s the truth!” she flashed at him. “It was the first time I came up here, for a two-week vacation. The summer crowd was here, oh, only a half a dozen of them, but they were a pest and a nuisance, and since I was only renting the cabin, I couldn’t very well chase them away when they began fooling around in the creek over there. I started going out for the day, taking a couple of sandwiches with me for lunch, and exploring the creek. I was trying to find the spring where it rose, and I did.”

  He was caught by the growing excitement that she tried hard to suppress, and he was watching her curiously.

  “It’s way up between two folds in the mountains, and it’s a hellish place to get to,” she went on after a moment, and there was memory in her eyes that said she was back at that spot on a blazing July afternoon, not here in the cabin on a bitter January day. “I was hot, and tired and scratched by briars. I had killed a rattlesnake, and my nerves were not at their best. I decided to take off my boots and go wading—and that was when I found it.”

  In spite of himself, Jim was brushed by the excitement that spoke in her heightened color and in the emerald-fire of her eyes. “You found what?” he asked swiftly.

  “A nugget, Jim. A gold nugget as big as the end of your thumb,” she told him softly.

  “You’re kidding!”

  She waved her hand in a gesture that took in the cabin. “Does this look like it?” she drawled, mastering the memoried excitement.

  “You’re trying to tell me that nugget paid for all this?”

  “Of course not, silly. There were others. Look!” She rose swiftly and went to a corner beside the fireplace where she knelt and moved a large flat stone. From it she brought to him a thin, suede-leather bag, loosening the draw string as she up-ended it beside his plate. A dozen or more nuggets, from the size of a pea to some that were considerably larger, spilled out on the printed linen cloth, and the thin sunlight seemed warmed by their raw yellow.

  Jim touched them with his finger as though to assure himself that they were real, and then he looked up at her, puzzled yet excited by that old, old fever that has plagued men since the world began, the fever for gold.

  “You found all this!” he marveled.

  “Darling, don’t be a goof! This is what I found last summer,” she told him impatiently. “There’s lots more, Jim. I know there is. What terrifies me is that someone else will find it before I can get it all out. It’s what they call surface gold, I think. You don’t have to dig for it. You just use a miner’s pan and wash it. I believe it comes from a cave, or something hidden somewhere above where I found it. There are a lot of small caves all up and down the creek, all the way to the spring where it rises. I believe that some of these caves may hide real wealth, lots of it, and I believe th
at this gold I’ve found may have been washed out of some of these caves by the tiny streams that spill from them into the creek”

  Jim studied her curiously. Her eyes were bright and greedy, and as her fingers touched the small store of nuggets, he thought she looked like a mother caressing her child, though derision killed the thought before it was fully born.

  “You really are excited about all this, aren’t you?” he said at last.

  “Excited? Well, why wouldn’t I be?” she defended herself sharply. “Jim, this cabin and all its improvements cost me over two thousand dollars, and every penny of that money came from gold I washed up there at the head of the creek!”

  Jim’s eyes widened, for the sum, when he looked down at the small store of nuggets, sounded impressive.

  “Don’t you see, Jim? If it’s true what the natives say about this Cindy girl, there may easily be thousands and thousands in that cache she has hidden on her property somewhere.”

  Before he could answer, Lorna burst out eagerly, “That’s why I think it would be wise for you to cultivate her. Get to know her better. Win her confidence. Get her to tell you where the cache is.”

  His expression silenced the eager spatter of her words, and for a moment they regarded each other, his eyes cold, hers bright and eager, but gradually turning as icy as his.

  “That’s a pretty thought,” he said at last. “Here’s this girl who hasn’t a friend in the world, apparently, so you and I are to pretend to be her friends so that we can rob her.”

  “Oh, don’t be a sanctimonious fool!” she snapped at him. “What good is it doing her, hidden in the earth somewhere?’ Why shouldn’t we persuade her to dig it up, turn it into cash? Naturally, we would let her keep part of it. There’s more than enough for all of us.”

  Jim’s eyes did not warm. “That’s big of us, isn’t it? Letting her keep part of her gold.” His voice was tight with hostility. “And what makes you so sure she has any gold, by the way?”

  Sulkily she answered him. “It’s part of the legend of this place. When the Indians were driven out, Old Man Grady—only, of course, he wasn’t an old man then—was married to an Indian girl. He fought tooth and nail to keep her from being sent away with the others. He claimed that as his wife, all married legally and properly according to the white man’s law, she was white. It didn’t set too well with the other white people, but Grady seems to have been quite a lad. He and his wife were isolated on that mountain top, and he was a dead-shot. They were afraid of him, so they finally gave in.”