by B. M. Bower
“It ain’t a mite uh trouble in the world. That’s what I’m fur—to help folks out along my rowt. Don’t you worry a mite about that.” Often as he said it, he yet gave it the tone of sincerity and of convincing freshness, as though he had never before given the matter a thought. Helen May did not know what she would have done without that stage driver to bridge the gulf between Sunlight Basin and the world.
But this was not stage day. That is to say, the stage had passed to the far side of its orbit, and would not return until tomorrow. From San Bonito it swung in a day-long journey across the desert to Malpais, thence by a different route to San Bonito again, so that Helen May never saw it returning whence it had come.
A cloud of desert dust always heralded its approach from the east. Sometimes after the first dust signal, it took him nearly an hour to top the low ridge which was really one rim of the Basin. Then Helen May would know that he carried passengers or freight that straightened the backs of the straining four horses in the long stretch of sand beyond the ridge and made their progress slow.
But today there was no dust signal, and the macaroni box was but a dismal reminder of her exile. The world was very far away, behind the violet rim of mountains, and she was just a speck in the desert. Her high laced boots were heavy, and the dust settled in the creases around her slim ankles, that could be perfectly fascinating in silken hose and dainty slippers. Her khaki skirt, of the divided kind much affected by tourists, had lost two big, pearl buttons, and she had no others to replace them. Her shirt-waist had its collar turned inside for coolness, and the hollow of her neck was sun-blistered and beginning to peel. Also her nose and her neck at the sides were showing a disposition to grow new skin for old. So much had the desert sun done for her.
But there was something else which the desert had done, something which Helen May did not fully realize. It had put a clear, steady look into her eyes in place of the glassy shine of fever. It was beginning to fill out that hollow in her neck, so that it no longer showed the angular ends of her collar bones. It had put a resilient quality into her walk, firmness into the poise of her head. It had made it physically possible, for instance, for Helen May to trudge out into the wild to hunt nine goats that had strayed from the main band.
Though she did not know it, a certain dream of Peter’s had very nearly come true. For here were the vast plains, unpeopled, pure, immutable in their magnificent calm. At night the stars seemed to come down and hang just over Helen May’s head. There was the little cottage of which Peter had dreamed—only Helen May called it a miserable little shack—hunched against a hill; sometimes a light winked through the window at the stars; sometimes Helen May was startled at the nearness and the shrill insistence of the coyotes. Here as Peter had dreamed so longingly and so hopelessly, were distance and quiet and calm. And here was Helen May coming through the sunlight—Peter never dreamed how hot it would be!—with her deep-gold hair tousled in the wind and with the little red spots gone from her cheeks and with health in her eyes that were the color of ripe chestnuts. When her skin had adjusted itself to the rigors of the climate, she would no doubt have freckles on her nose, just as Peter had dreamed she might have. And if she were walking, instead of riding the gentle-eyed pony which Peter had pictured, that was not Peter’s fault, nor the fault of the dream. There was no laugh on her lips, however. Dreams are always pulling a veil of idealism over the face of reality, and so Helen May’s face was not happy, as Peter had dreamed it might be, but petulant and grimly determined; her ripe-red lips were moving in anathemas directed at nine detested goats.
Peter could never have dreamed just that, but all the same it is a pity that, in order to make the dream a reality, Peter had been forced to deny himself the joy of seeing Helen May growing strong in “Arizona, New Mexico, or Colorado.” It would have made the price he paid seem less terrible, less tragic.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOONLIGHT, A MAN AND A SONG
Just out from the entrance to a deep, broad-bottomed arroyo where an automobile had been, Starr came upon something that surprised him very much, and it was not at all easy to surprise Starr. Here, in the first glory of a flaming sunset that turned the desert to a sea of unearthly, opal-tinted beauty, he came upon Helen May, trudging painfully along with an old hoe-handle for a staff, and driving nine reluctant nanny goats that alternately trotted and stood still to stare at the girl with foolish, amber-colored eyes.
Starr was trained to long desert distances, but his training had made it second nature to consider a horse the logical means of covering those distances. To find Helen May away out here, eight miles and more from Sunlight Basin, and to find her walking, shocked Starr unspeakably; shocked him out of his shyness and into free speech with her, as though he had known her a long while.
“Y’ lost?” was his first greeting, while he instinctively swung Rabbit to head off a goat that suddenly “broke back” from the others.
Helen May looked up at him with relief struggling through the apathy of utter weariness. “No, but I might as well be. I’ll never be able to get home alive, anyhow.” She shook the hoe-handle menacingly at a hesitating goat and quite suddenly collapsed upon the nearest rock, and began to cry; not sentimentally or weakly or in any other feminine manner known to Starr, but with an angry recklessness that was like opening a safety valve. Helen May herself did not understand why she should go along for half a day calmly enough, and then, the minute this man rode up and spoke to her sympathetically, she should want to sit down and cry.
“I just—I’ve been walking since one o’clock! If I had a gun, I’d shoot every one of them. I just—I think goats are simply damnable things!”
Starr turned and looked at the animals disapprovingly. “They sure are,” he assented comfortingly. “Where you trying to take ’em—or ain’t you?” he asked, with the confidence-inviting tone that made him so valuable to those who paid for his services.
“Home, if you can call it that!” Helen May found her handkerchief and proceeded to wipe the tears and the dust off her cheeks. She looked at Starr more attentively than at first when he had been just a human being who seemed friendly. “Oh, you’re the man that stopped at the spring. Well, you know where I live, then. I was hunting these; they wandered off and Vic couldn’t find them yesterday, so I—it was just accident that I came across them. I followed some tracks, and it looked to me as if they’d been driven off. There were horse tracks. That’s what made me keep going—I was so mad. And now they won’t go home or anywhere else. They just want to run around every which way.”
Starr looked up the arroyo, hesitating. On the edge of San Bonito he had picked up the track of Silvertown cord tires, and he had followed it to the mouth of this arroyo. From certain signs easy for an experienced man to read, he had known the track was fairly fresh, fresh enough to make it worth his while to follow. And now here was a girl all tired out and a long way from home.
“Here, you climb onto Rabbit. He’s gentle when he knows it’s all right, and I won’t stand for him acting up.” Starr swung off beside her. “I’ll help get the goats home. Where’s your dog?”
“I haven’t any dog. The man we bought the goats from wanted to sell me one, to help herd them, he said. But he asked twenty-five dollars for it—I suppose he thought because I looked green I’d stand for that!—and I wouldn’t be held up that way. Vic and I have nothing to do but watch them. You—you mustn’t bother,” she added half-heartedly. “I can get them home all right. I’m rested now, and there’s a moon, you know. Really, I can’t let you bother about it. I know the way.”
“Put your foot in the stirrup and climb on. You, Rabbit, you stand still, or I’ll beat the—”
“Really, you mustn’t think, because I cried a little bit—”
“Pile on to him now, while I hold him still. Or shall I pick you up and put you on?” Starr smiled while he said it, but there was a look in his eyes and around his mouth that made Helen May yield suddenly.
By her awkw
ardness Starr and Rabbit both knew that she had probably never before attempted to mount a horse. By the set of her lips Starr knew that she was afraid, but that she would break her neck before she would confess her fear. He liked her for that, and he was glad to see that Rabbit understood the case and drew upon his reserve of patience and good nature, standing like a rock until Helen May was settled in the saddle and Starr had turned the stirrups on their sides in the leather so that they would come nearer being the right length for her. Starr’s hand sliding affectionately up Rabbit’s neck and resting a moment on his jaw was all the assurance Rabbit needed that everything was all right.
“Now, just leave the reins loose, and let Rabbit come along to please himself,” Starr instructed her quietly. “He’ll follow me, and he’ll pick his own trail. You don’t have to do a thing but sit there and take it easy. He’ll do the rest.”
Helen May looked at him doubtfully, but she did not say anything. She braced herself in the stirrups, took a firm grip of the saddlehorn with one hand, and waited for what might befall. She had no fear of Starr, no further uneasiness over the coming night, the loneliness, the goats, or anything else. She felt as irresponsible, as safe, as any sheltered woman in her own home. I did not say she felt serene; she did not know yet how the horse would perform; but she seemed to lay that responsibility also on Starr’s capable shoulders.
They moved off quietly enough, Starr afoot and driving the goats, Rabbit picking his way after him in leisurely fashion. So they crossed the arroyo mouth and climbed the ragged lip of its western side and traveled straight toward the flaming eye of the sun that seemed now to have winked itself nearly shut. The goats for some inexplicable reason showed no further disposition to go in nine different directions at once. Helen May relaxed from her stiff-muscled posture and began to experiment a little with the reins.
“Why, he steers easier than an automobile!” she exclaimed suddenly. “You just think which way you want to go, almost, and he does it. And you don’t have to pull the lines the least bit, do you?”
Starr delayed his answer until he had made sure that she was not irritating Rabbit with a too-officious guidance. When he saw that she was holding the reins loosely as he had told her to do, and was merely laying the weight of a rein on one side of the neck and then on the other, he smiled.
“I guess you’ve rode before,” he hazarded. “The way you neck-rein—”
“No, honest. But my chum’s brother had a big six, and Sundays he used to let me fuss with it, away out where the road was clear. It steered just like this horse; just as easy, I mean. I—why, see! I just wondered if he’d go to the right of that bush, and he turned that way just as if I’d told him to. Can you beat that?”
Starr did not say. Naturally, since she was a girl, and pretty, and since he was human, he was busy wondering what her chum’s brother was like. He picked up a small rock and shied it at a goat that was not doing a thing that it shouldn’t do, and felt better. He remembered then that at any rate her chum’s brother was a long way off, and that he himself had nothing much to complain of right now. Then Helen May spoke again and shifted his thoughts to another subject.
“I believe I’d rather have a horse like this,” she said, “than own that big, lovely take-me-to-glory car that was pathfinding around like a million dollars, a little while ago. I’ll own up now that I was weeping partly because four great big porky men could ride around on cushions a foot thick, while a perfectly nice girl had to plough through the sand afoot. The way they skidded past me and buried me in a cloud of dust made me mad enough to throw rocks after them. Pigs! They never even stopped to ask if I wanted a ride or anything. They all glared at me through their goggles as if I hadn’t any business walking on their desert.”
“Did you know them?” Starr came and walked beside her, glancing frequently at her face.
“No, of course I didn’t. I don’t know anybody but the stage driver. I wouldn’t have ridden with them, anyway. From what I saw of them they looked like Mexicans. But you’d think they might have shown some interest, wouldn’t you?”
“I sure would,” Starr stated with emphasis. “What kinda car was it, did you notice? Maybe I know who they are.”
“Oh, it was a great big black car. They went by so fast and I was so tired and hot and—and pretty near swearing mad, I didn’t notice the number at all. And they were glaring at me, and I was glaring at them, and then the driver stepped on the accelerator just at a little crook in the road, and the hind wheels skidded about a ton of sand into my face and they were gone, like they were running from a speed cop. I’d much rather have a nice little automatic pony like this one,” she added feelingly. “You don’t have to bundle yourself up in dusters and goggles and things when you take a ride, do you? It—it makes the bigness of the country, and the barrenness of it, somehow fit together and take you into the pattern, when you ride a horse over it, don’t you think?”
“I guess so,” Starr assented, with an odd little slurring accent on the last word which gave the trite sentence an individual touch that appealed to Helen May. “It don’t seem natural, somehow, to walk in a country like this.”
“Oh, and you’ve got to, while I ride your horse! Or, have you got to? Is it just movie stuff, where a man rides behind on a horse, and lets the girl ride in front? I mean, is it feasible, or just a stunt for pictures?”
“Depends on the horse,” Starr evaded. “It’s got the say-so, mostly, whether it’ll pack one person or two. Rabbit will, and when I get tired walking, I’ll ride.”
“Oh, that makes it better. I wasn’t feeling comfortable riding, but men are so queer about thinking they must give a woman all the choice bits of comfort, and a woman has to give in or row about it. If you’ll climb up and ride when you feel like it, I’ll just settle down and enjoy myself.”
Settling down and enjoying herself seemed to consist of gazing out over the desert and the hills and up at the sky that was showing the deep purple of dusk. It was what Starr wanted most of all, just then, for it left him free to study what she had told him of the big black automobile with four coated and goggled men who had looked like Mexicans; four men who had glared at her and then had speeded up to get away from her possible scrutiny.
For the first time since she had seen it from the spring seat of a jolting wagon from the one livery stable in Malpais, Helen May discovered that this wild, strange land was beautiful. For the first time she gloried in its bigness and its wildness, and did not resent its barrenness. The little brown birds that fluttered close to the ground and cheeped wistfully to one another in the dusk gave her an odd, sweet thrill of companionship. Jack rabbits sitting up on their hind legs for a brief scrutiny before they scurried away made her laugh to herself. The reddened clouds that rimmed the purple were the radiant shores of a wonderful, bottomless sea, where the stars were the mast lights on ships hull down in the distance. She lifted her chest and drew in long breaths of clean, sweet air that is like no other air, and she remembered all at once that she had not coughed since daylight. She breathed again, deep and long, and felt that she was drawing some wonderful, healing ether into her lungs.
She looked at Starr, walking steadily along before her, swinging the hoe-handle lightly in his right hand, setting his feet down in the smoothest spots always and leaving nearly always a clear imprint of his foot in the sandy soil. There was a certain fascination in watching the lines of footprints he left behind him. She would know those footprints anywhere, she told herself. Small for a man, they were, and well-shaped, with the toes pointing out the least little bit, and with no blurring drag when he lifted his feet. She did not know that Starr wore riding boots made to his measure and costing close to twenty dollars a pair; if she had she would not have wondered at the fine shape of them, or at the individuality of the imprint they made. She conceived the belief that Rabbit knew those footprints also. She amused herself by watching how carefully the horse followed wherever they led. If Starr stepped to the right to avoid a ro
ck, Rabbit stepped to the right to avoid that rock; never to the left, though the way might be as smooth and open. If Starr crossed a gully at a certain place, Rabbit followed scrupulously the tracks he made. Helen May considered that this little gray horse showed really human intelligence.
She realized the deepening dusk only when Starr’s form grew vague and she could no longer see the prints his boots made. They were nearing the brown, lumpy ridge which hid Sunlight Basin from the plain, but Helen May was not particularly eager to reach it. For the first time she forgot the gnawing heart-hunger of homesickness, and was content with her present surroundings; content even with the goats that trotted submisively ahead of Starr.
When a soft radiance drifted into the darkness and made it a luminous, thin veil, Helen May gave a little cry and looked back. Since her hands moved with the swing of her shoulders, Rabbit turned sharply and faced the way she was looking, startled, displeased, but obedient. Starr stopped abruptly and turned back, coming close up beside her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked in an undertone. “See anything?”
“The moon,” Helen May gave a hushed little laugh. “I’d forgotten—forgotten I was alive, almost. I was just soaking in the beauty of it through every pore. And then it got dark so I couldn’t see your footprints any more, and then such a queer, beautiful look came on everything. I turned to look, and this little automatic pony turned to look, too. But—isn’t it wonderful? Everything, I mean. Just everything—the whole world and the stars and the sky—”