by Max Brand
The heat, the stimulus, instantly helped him. But still he dared not stir from his chair, for an odd sense of emptiness occupied his brain, and his body was weak. Weakness, like a sensible thing, ran in his nerves and in his blood.
“Why did you do it?” Marian asked. He shook his head, a convulsive shudder rather than a controlled sign. She came close beside him. “I know,” she said. “You wanted to crush me with one last, gigantic act. You wanted to make me see that even the marshal was nothing to you.” She touched his hair. “This is where his bullet clipped. Oh, David, David, to risk that for the sake of overwhelming poor Marian Lane, who keeps a country store! That was childish, David.”
He found her with his hands, for he dared not open his eyes just now. “Don’t talk for a moment,” Duval said. “Whatever you say is true. But I’m sick. I want to keep you here this moment. That’s all.” He had her wrists and drew her hands in against his face. Out of the touch of their softness, calmness poured in upon Duval, out of the perfume, too, with which they were scented, and of which he breathed.
“So,” Duval said at last, and stood up before her. He was completely recovered, one would have said, from that instant of utter weakness, though still the girl watched him with a judicial air.
“Childish,” he admitted. “That was it...plainly childish. But, after all, it worked, you see.”
“Not well enough to put you at ease, though,” she said. “When I saw you fold your arms, I knew what you’d do, and I wanted to scream a warning, but it was much too late. I...there wasn’t much left to me by that time.” She smiled a wan smile.
“In every way,” Duval said, “I was contemptible.”
“Hush,” said the girl. “You saved a life. Is that contemptible?” Then she added: “As for me, I deserved all the pain that came to me, I suppose.” She closed her eyes and shook her head a little to drive the picture of the horror away from her. “But now that it’s over, it won’t have to be repeated. And you’re going away, David?”
“No,” he said.
“Is it worth your while?” she asked him, half sadly and half curiously. “Is it worth your while to stay here, when you know that Dick Kinkaid will not stop with this one trial, but will surely come at you again? Is it worthwhile, for the sake of the little game that you’re playing in Moose Creek?”
He smiled at her, and, smiling, she felt his eyes travel over her face slowly, like the glance of a painter who will remember what he has seen.
“How little is the game, Marian?” he asked.
“Only you can tell that, of course...Mister Smith...Jones...Brown...or Van Astorgrand, or whatever your name is, David.”
“But don’t you know,” Duval said, “that you’re carrying with you the proof of who I am?”
“The proof?” she said.
“The very name,” he answered. “In the little chamois bag that our friend Kinkaid left with you.”
Old Henry, who had just returned, cried in a strange voice: “Are you tellin’ her that? Are you tellin’ her that?”
“Why, Henry,” Duval said, “you heard me say before the world that this is the girl I love. This is she who I intend to marry, if I can. Would you have her marry anything but a true name?”
“Only...only...,” gasped Henry.
Marian had drawn from the bosom of her dress the small chamois sack, and, holding it for a moment in both hands, she stared at Duval. He nodded at her.
“Kinkaid has no right to ask you to keep that shut, if I ask you to open it.”
She, with a little faint cry of excitement, drew open the mouth of the bag and spilled upon the table’s face — a creamy flow of big pearls!
She stood frozen with amazement, so that she made no attempt to prevent several of them from rolling from the table top.
Old Henry caught them with lightning hands, whispering to himself so rapidly that it was like a continued hissing sound. Then he replaced them gingerly, with a touch that hated to leave their beauty.
He had ended and stepped back when Duval said gently: “I think one of them escaped into your vest pocket by accident, Henry.”
The old man drew it forth with the same enchanted touch and laid it among the rest, a huge pearl of price.
But Marian Lane had looked up, at last, from the jewels, and stared straight at Duval.
“That wild, wild story you told me...,” she said. “That fairy tale...that impossible thing....”
“It was all true, word for word.”
“And you weren’t hiding yourself away from me?”
“I was laying the naked truth in your hands to see.”
“But you didn’t protest.”
“Why should I protest? I saw that you wouldn’t believe a word that I had to say. I was right, I think.”
She raised both hands to her face, and when she slowly lowered them, she was crimson with emotion. “After that,” she said, “it seems that everything you said may have had some truth in it. It wasn’t quite all a game, then?”
“Do you think that any syllable was a game, Marian?”
“I don’t know. I’m dizzy. I’m so dizzy, I can hardly see you at such a great distance.”
He came swiftly to her.
“I’m sure you see what it means,” he said. “And that instead of being possibly an honorable Mister Smith, or Jones, or Brown, I’m only David Castle, the jewel thief?”
Tears came up in her eyes. “Stuff!” she said. “It means that you are my David. And there’s no riddle at all.”
“You can bring the horses around, Henry,” Duval said. “Then go down to Miss Lane’s stable and get her own horse out, and ride it up the northwest trail. We won’t be going very fast, and you can overtake us.”
“But the store, and everything in it?” she said.
“You can settle that later on.”
“And the scandal?”
“We’ll put that right at the first minister’s house. Because, if I’m to have you with me, do you think that I’ll stay here another moment in danger of that juggernaut, Kinkaid? Shall I take one single step that will put me in the danger of the law, Marian? Not from this minute forward.”
Henry, tiptoeing, overcome with awe, went through the door, but paused outside long enough to see that which made his old heart young, and sent him off hastily through the dark, chuckling to himself.
“I have to go back for clothes!” protested Marian.
“You can be a boy for a day. I have clothes that will more than fit you.”
“But....”
“Shall I let you go back to Moose Creek, where they may be waiting and watching for you?” He took her in his arms. “Not a step without me. Not a step!”
“Wait,” she said. “I must think....”
“Will you tell me that you love me, Marian, and do your thinking a little later on?”
“But there’s so much to work out.... I’ll have to think for two, now.”
“Only answer me, first.”
She stepped suddenly close to him, and stood on tiptoe to bring her face closer to his.
“As if you didn’t know,” she said, “from the first moment, that I was only fighting against an overlord.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Still, when the morning came, they were toiling upward and northward through the mountains. Their horses were tired. The riders were no less, and Marian Lane swayed a little in the saddle whenever her mount stumbled. She could still smile at Duval when he glanced at her, but it was a faint, twitching smile that strove to be reassuring, and was not.
He called a halt, therefore, in the pink of the dawn, for they had found an ideal spot. The lodgepole pines formed a thin fencing around a shoulder of the mountain where the grass grew well for grazing, and where a small spring welled up into a white sandy basin, then sent a silver trickle winding down the slope.
Where the trees would throw their shadow, Duval and Henry made two hasty beds of young boughs, and spread the blankets. One would stand watch while two slept, and Duval took the first turn, while Henry and the girl wrapped themselves in the blankets and were instantly asleep.
The horses lower down on the hill shoulder, but still where the trees protected them from view, were busily, hungrily grazing.
Then Duval began his beat, walking slowly up and down. When he came to one end of his round, he looked back down the winding valley up which they had come to the heights, with its verdure, its soft green haze of meadowlands and the stream in its midst, now shadow covered, now flaring like fire beneath the young sun of the day. At the other end of his pacing, he stood on a cliff from which the eye dropped faster than a rock could fall to a profound ravine below. All was different here. Grass grew only on precarious ledges of crumbling stone. The trees found only a scant footing here and there in crevices where a little soil had been formed by slow-growing lichens that had caught the dust. Everywhere was naked rock. Yet it was not barren.
To the eye of Duval, there was an epic story in the enormous folds of strata, and in the great bald cliffs that had been cleft in the range by the insignificant trickle of water that ran beneath, shaken at the head of the cañon into a thin breath of mist as it fell from a height to the lower valley floor. There were colors, too. Not only those of the dawn as they turned the waterfall to a rainbow, or as they poured rose or gold upon the upper heights of the peaks, but colors in the bare rock itself, yellows and dingy reds, and yonder the strike of a vast porphyry dike, and yet farther beyond this, a pale form distinct in its whiteness, but ghost-like in distance.
Duval, as he watched, threw back his shoulders, half smiling and half fierce, then hastily went back to the place where the girl slept. She was troubled in her sleep. He saw her frown and one hand moved outside the blanket as if in protest.
It troubled him more than he cared to say, and when he saw her lips move, he kneeled to listen, ashamed of such eavesdropping, but humbly and hungrily intent in learning what her sorrow could be. He only heard an indistinct murmur, but still he leaned above her.
She had no need, he thought, to pretend childishness, for she was child enough in fact. It hurt him to the heart to see the slenderness of her hand and the delicacy with which it was fashioned, so that he was on the verge of taking it in his, when she looked straight up at him, wide awake.
“It’s your turn to sleep, David,” she told him, and tried to sit up.
He held her back. “Hush,” he said. “You’ll be waking Henry, for he’s a light sleeper. You’ve hardly been here ten minutes asleep.”
“An hour and a half. I’m made over by such a sleep.”
“Not that long.”
“Look at your watch.”
He saw that she was right. “I’ve been coming by and looking at you from time to time,” he said. “You’ve had a troubled sleep, my dear.”
“I dreamed,” she said, “that I was swimming toward a beach, and you were standing on it, and just as I came to the verge of the sand, just as I could put down a foot and touch it, a strong current took hold of me and drifted me far out to sea.” She blinked, and then went on: “You were true to character, even in the dream, David.”
“What did I do?”
“Just stood there, and asked me if I were trying to play baby-face again and be rescued from the bold, bad sea.”
“May every sea take you no farther away than this,” said Duval.
“You look serious,” said Marian. “You look actually frightened over my dream.”
“Because it gives me gloomy thoughts, my dear. Suppose we love each other to the end, and are married, yet how many hours at the end of the years will we really have been together as we are now, on the mountainside here? For all of these mountains, do you see? And this sunrise, and this wind, and the clouds that are blowing across the sky, and the breath of the pines, and all the picture, Marian, are only a background and setting for you. Do you understand? We’ll be like others, and leave happiness and love to cool their heels in a darkened room along with the poets on our shelves, while we give ourselves to the important business of the butcher and baker and the candlestick maker. And yet the mountains and the clouds and the wind and the morning are all full of joy simply because we love one another. And if....” He stopped. “I’m becoming romantic,” Duval said. “The practical fact is that you must stop my talking by going to sleep again.”
“I’m not going to sleep again,” she said. “I’m going to lie awake, unless you’ll let me get up and mount guard.”
“A grand guard you’d be,” said Duval.
“Are you going to make the old mistake and think that I have to be tied up in pink ribbon like a stick of candy for a baby? You won’t try to make me a picture on the wall, David, will you? Because I’ll everlastingly step out of the frame, and rip about, and make trouble, if I can’t make good.”
“You’ll do as you please,” said Duval.
“You’ll find I can work,” Marian said. “Whatever you do, I’ll find a way to help you.”
“Of course you will,” Duval agreed, “but you won’t have to work to keep the wolf from the door. The poor old wolf will have to howl in the dim distance. Why, Marian, in that little chamois sack there’s enough to banish him forever.”
She nodded. “But not for us, I suppose?” she said.
“Not for us?” frowned Duval.
“You see,” she explained, sitting up again, “I don’t complain of what you did before, as long as we don’t live on it now.”
“Wipe it all out?” Duval said, his breath taken. “Millions are what you’re talking about. Millions, child!” Then he added, almost roughly: “It’s better to let me worry about how the money is made. Now, you go back to sleep.”
She did not argue or protest, but lay back again in the bed of boughs with the faintest of frowns, and as she lay, looking up at him and past him, he saw her hand make the same slight motion of protest that he had watched in her sleep.
Duval was instantly on his knees beside her. “You’re right,” he said. “And I’m an ass. To think that I could keep you with stolen goods. To be fool enough to think that. It goes back to the right owner, and it goes at once. Here, take the stuff. I won’t be tempted with the beauties.”
She took them. “I wanted to say...,” she said, and paused.
“Yes,” said Duval.
She took his hand and pressed it. “I wondered how hard it would be, but if this is so easy, I’ll never have another thing to ask of you, David. Do you believe that?”
“With all my heart.”
“And...,” she said.
“Yes?” murmured Duval, after a moment.
But her hand gradually relaxed and fell away from his, and when he looked down at her again, he saw that she was profoundly asleep and smiling in her slumber.
It was much later when she wakened again. The cracking of a twig underfoot had roused her, and as she sat up, blinking, she saw old Henry standing in the meadow looking anxiously about him on all sides.
When he saw that she was awake, he said eagerly: “Did he tell you where he was going?”
“No,” said the girl. “Not a word. Going? David? He’s not really gone, Henry!”
The old man pointed. “There’s the other two horses. Where’s Cherry?”
She was on her feet by this time, all sleep startled from her mind.
And then Henry stretched out his long arm and pointed down the valley.
“Is that David coming back?” he asked.
Chapter Forty-Three
She got her glasses out of her pack. Strong field glasses, they picked up distant objects with wonderful detail. And when she focused them on the far-off rider, it was to exclaim immediately: “A gray horse, that one...not Cherry! Looks like a big horse an
d a big man...only I can’t be sure.”
“A gray horse? Like Kinkaid’s?” asked Henry. And then clapped a hand over his mouth as he saw what he had suggested.
She lowered the glasses to give Henry one keen glance. Then she raised them again and spoke with them at her eyes.
“Now that you’ve given me the idea, it seems to me that you may be right. A big man on a large gray horse...riding hard...I can see the way he rounds the curves in the trail. Who else would be coming up against the grade so hard and fast? Dick Kinkaid.” She lowered the glasses and added: “David has seen him long ago. He’s gone down to meet Kinkaid.” She passed the glasses to Henry and walked out a distance.. “You try to find him, will you?” Then she leaned one hand against a tree trunk and waited, her eyes closed, as the old man searched the upper ravine.
Suddenly he cried out: “I’ve got him! I see him now!”
“Are you sure?”
“I know Cherry’s stride even at this distance! Look, look!”
She ran to him and snatched the glasses away. “Look down into the lower cañon,” said Henry, uselessly pointing. “There where the boulder nest begins. You’ll see Cherry galloping, and who but him would be ridin’ her?”
She found him almost at once. “Get my horse!” she cried to Henry, still with the glasses glued to her eyes.
“It’s too late to do any good,” Henry said with great decision. “There ain’t any use. Because he’ll be sure to crash ag’in’ Kinkaid in another few seconds...now, maybe?”
“He’s out from the rocks,” said the girl. “They’re riding straight at each other. They’re meeting near a grove of trees...pines, I think...they....” Her voice choked away, then she began again, chattering the words out rapidly. “I thought he was down, but he’d only slipped down alongside his horse, I suppose...that old Indian trick. And now he’s up again. I thought I saw the glint of the sun on the guns. I can’t be sure...they’ve closed. They’re both down.... Henry, Henry, they’re both down, and Dick Kinkaid has those huge hands on David!”