CHAPTER XXI

Allston did not minimize the danger of his situation. He knew that the odds were against him and that those odds increased with every passing hour. After dawn his chances of getting out alive would be ten to one against him. But his only alternative was to make a dash for it with Roxie, and that would be to risk her life as well as his own. Bud would shoot at anything that moved from either door. He must wait until Bud could distinguish clearly between them.

Allston accepted his lot like a gentleman. He even appreciated the grim irony of his plight--the sardonic humor of it. He had come up here to save Roxie and had succeeded in doing nothing but endanger her; she in her turn had come here to save him and had only placed his life in jeopardy. Both had been actuated by the highest motives, but these had worked only for their doom.

There was something wrong about that. Though helpless, Allston was by no means resigned to any such outcome; neither for Roxie nor for himself. There was too much good in this girl to have any misfortune come to her. As for himself, life had never seemed sweeter. He did not mean to let go of it without a struggle.

Yet, too, life had never been more confused. Roxie clung to him now like a child in alarm. After her confession, she abandoned herself utterly to her emotions--quite trustfully, without a trace either of fear or reserve. Yet she did not seem bold. Her sincerity saved her from that.

They had retreated into the far corner to the left of the fireplace, out of range of any window, and here they sat down upon the floor. This child-woman snuggled up to him kitten-wise, her head upon his shoulder. And he placed his arm about her, knowing her as half child and half woman; more child than most children, more woman than most women.

So, a thousand years ago, he might have sat in some cave guarding his woman against the entrance of wild beasts. Inhaling the incense of her hair, feeling the quick beating of her heart, conscious of the love which had already sacrificed so much for him, which was ready to sacrifice so much more, it was difficult to drag himself back to the present; difficult to see straight.

Yet that is what he must do--whether he lived on or not. To see straight while he did live was more important than living on. And in this crisis the calm, steady brown eyes of Wilmer Howe came to help him.

He had not forgotten her. Something of her presence had been with him all the evening. He had felt it again and again, though in the turmoil of vivid details which followed so swiftly one after another he had not always visualized her. And it had not been easy either to tell just what part she was playing in this isolated drama up in these black hills. Their relations had been so purely intellectual that it was difficult to fit her into action so largely physical--the clash of body against body rather than mind against mind.

But now, it seemed almost as though she were standing before him, a silent onlooker. The suggestion was startling enough at first. It sent the blood to his cheeks. And then he found himself meeting her imagined gaze quite coolly. There was nothing here of which he need feel ashamed even before her.

It was very quiet inside the shack. Outside the wind was still reeling in and out among the trees boisterously as a drunken sailor, but distinctly it was outside. The doors were safely barred. The gale scarcely stirred the dark within save when occasionally it puffed down the chimney and revived into a glow the dying embers. And the girl in his arms lay very still like one not daring to move for fear of breaking a spell.

It was only a few hours ago that Allston had left Wilmer, but he felt as though days must have passed. Yet less than five hours before, she had lighted her candle and excusing herself had gone upstairs to her room. He had watched her pretty feet as they twinkled out of sight. A half-hour later, he had no doubt, she was sound asleep.

Perhaps, in her dreams, she had followed him up here; perhaps, in her dreams, she was now looking to see what he was about. The continued silence began to rouse his imagination. It did so even in the face of the startling reality he was still confronting. With Roxie’s heart beating against his arm, it was not of her he thought, but of this other.

If Allston had been timid in his mental approach to Wilmer before, he was bold enough now. With a possible margin of only five hours of life ahead, a man must needs be bold if ever. True values assert themselves willy-nilly in such a crisis.

He had realized from the moment of Bud’s escape that never had the desire to live been so keen in him, and in the next few hours he learned why. In France he had faced death even more intimately than he was doing to-night and had done it with a certain indifference. Not that he was either dulled or depressed; not that he was insensitive to what life meant or that he sought escape from its responsibilities. He was then in an utterly negative state with the issue completely out of his hands. And he had seen so much of death that it had lost its horror. About the only distinction he made between live men and dead men was that the former were still able to move. The latter lay quietly where they crumpled up--sometimes for days. He had passed groups of such immobile forms as unemotionally as he passed broken tree branches.

On his mission up here to-night, he had not considered death either one way or the other, although he had sensed his danger. Roxie herself was the one who finally brought him face to face with a full realization of the issue. It was she who had finally forced the fatal situation. And she had done this, unwittingly and unconsciously, in the name of love. Humbly and out of a full heart he drew his arm tighter, and she opened her eyes and looked up into his face and smiled.

Lord, what was this thing called love? It was symbolized as a winged cherub and expressed in terms of June roses, and yet it drove men relentlessly to the very brink, and over, of death. And women, too; young women scarcely out of girlhood.

And it drove men on to life when death would be simpler. Allston did not want to die. He wanted to get back to Wilmer. Give him one more hour alone with her and he would beat down her reserve--would sweep her into his arms and hold her there. He had been playing with love. He had not realized the bigness of his passion. It had seemed to him some dainty, fragile emotion to be handled as cautiously as a delicate vase. And love was one of the two vital things of a man’s being. There were only two; love and death. Everything else was trivial. And love was neither of the intellect nor of the heart. It was of the soul.

That day in the cove when he had seized Wilmer’s hand, his soul had spoken. It had bid him take, then and there. She had drawn back from him--yes. But that was because he was half-hearted. He had not pressed on.

Roxie moved a little.

“You’re cold?” she asked anxiously.

“No. Are you?”

“Cold--here?”

“The fire is going out,” he answered. “I’ll poke around and see if I can’t find a blanket.”

“Please don’t,” she pleaded.

But he rose abruptly. He needed to be on his feet. Instantly she rose, too.

“He’ll git yuh through the winder.”

“You stay here,” he ordered.

“Mister Allston!”

He moved down the hallway towards one of the side rooms. She followed.

“Stay where you are,” he commanded.

She obeyed, but her lips began to tremble. She did not want to let him out of her sight. She was afraid lest the dark might swallow him up forever. She was none too sure of him now. The fairy book might close at any moment and the story end.

But he came back with his arms full of blankets torn from the bed--clean new blankets which Bud had bought within a week. He spread one down upon the floor for her to lie on.

“Perhaps you can get a little sleep in the next few hours,” he suggested.

“Only I don’ wanter sleep,” she answered.

“Lie down, anyway.”

“What you goneter do?”

“I’m going to cover you up.”

“And then?”

“I’m going to think, Roxie. I’m going to think hard.”

“Here?”

“Here beside you.”

“All right.”

She lay down prone upon her back and he covered her as he might have covered a child.

“You’ll save one blanket for yuhself?” she asked.

“I don’t need any.”

“Please. It’ll be cold afore mornin’.”

To quiet her he threw one over his shoulders and resumed his place near her. She reached for his hand, found it, and grasped one finger. So she thought she held him safe.

It was well enough for her to think so during those next few hours. It brought her comfort and did no harm to any one. Yet, tight as she gripped that finger, he--though she did not know it--instantly slipped away. She had no more of him than a few hours before Bud had had of her.

But it was the feel of her warm hand that made Allston realize that the difference between life and death is not so crudely simple as the difference between mobility and immobility. That distinction satisfied the God of War. He was content with incapacity. Ineffectiveness was death. He even preferred total disability because it turned a man from an asset into a liability, though still able to feel and to think.

But the God of Peace, when He marked a man, did not stop here. He demanded annihilation. With the body must go all the emotions and all the thoughts. A man to be dead must be dead all over--must be resolved into his elements. Nothing must be left of him on this planet except a memory. And that faded as rapidly as an unfinished print.

Allston did not propose to submit to any such programme without a struggle. Before such a contingency every sense became doubly acute. He was as alert to sounds as a squirrel. He jumped at every creak, not in fear, but in readiness. The automatic in his hand responded subconsciously, finding direction with sureness. His eyes pierced the dark so that he saw even into the far corners of the room where before he could not see. Once a rat crept out of the hallway and before he knew what he was about Allston had fired--and killed. Roxie sprang up quivering from head to foot, and it took him ten minutes to quiet her.

But if Allston was alert to the present, he was even more alert to the future. His thoughts ran ahead like galloping horses in response to the call of new needs. He had, all these years, merely scratched the surface while he thought he had been digging deep into the very bowels of the earth. Before he was out of college he had in an academic way been ready to grapple with life. On top of that he had, through war, been brought into deadly contact with life itself--with what he had considered the big basic elements of existence. He had been plunged from poetry into prose. So he had completed the cycle. There was little left for him to know. His own problem was to classify and card-index his wide experiences--to put them in order for use.

Only one element had been left out of the past few years--a relatively unimportant element. That was the element of love--a distinctly peace-time element. He had even touched upon that superficially. And he had more or less expected to go into it more fully at his leisure. But not until the noise of the big guns was out of his ears; not until the ghastly realities had faded away; not until the little mounds had flattened down and the trenches been filled in; not, in brief, until--if ever--he was able to get away from actuality into that pleasant poet’s paradise of dreams. There would be time enough then for the pretty drama of love.

So he had thought of it. So he had stepped forward lightly to meet the little winged cherub. So he had challenged him to shoot his swiftest and straightest. Even after he had felt the first sting of the dart, he had smiled on. The wound smarted, but it was by no means serious.

Then this night had come--the second act of a whimsical Barrie comedy. There was heightened action at the rise of the curtain, but that might be significant or not. He had held himself ready to laugh at any moment. As the scene progressed, it had not been as easy, but still he would have followed any cue Wilmer had given him up to the moment she lighted her candle and disappeared for the night.

The succeeding scenes followed quickly, and they had ranged from melodrama to genuine tragedy, all based on this one theme of love. Not, however, love as he had conceived it. This had been no affair for winged cherubs to indulge in. And it had ceased to be a play. It was too serious--too grimly real for that. This had been a man’s game. And a woman’s game, too. But the stakes were terribly high.

Sitting there in the corner of this darkened shack waiting for the dawn (which for all he knew might turn out to be night), with this other palpitating human being so curiously involved with him, Allston began to sense something of what love really is. As he vibrated to the dynamic power of this mighty force, he began to sense something of what life really is. And the two were one.

The two were one; that was the full significance of both love and life. A man floundered on trying to separate the inseparable until he discovered this. Neither prose nor poetry; reality nor dreams; man nor woman, had any real existence apart from the other. When they did unite, their potentiality was akin to that of God. Out of that union came all the big things that are; came life itself.

Concretely this meant for Allston that woman with whom he had been in such light contact during these last few weeks. It meant Wilmer Howe. And yet it did not mean the Wilmer who in her pretty setting had been acting her dainty comedy--the idyl of the winged cherub--but the real woman back of her; the woman of flesh and blood whom for a few brief seconds he had felt when he grasped her hand; the woman who was, if she was at all, in the secrecy of her room. And how he hungered for her now in this crisis! How, had she been near, he would have dragged her out of herself--brutally if necessary! How, had she been as close to him as this other was, he would have covered her hair and forehead with kisses, kisses both sacred and burning. His lips grew hot and dry at thought of it.

Roxie opened her drowsy eyes.

“Yer warm enough?” she asked with the tenderness of a cooing dove.

Allston started.

“Yes,” he answered.

“I feel’s though I was goin’ asleep.”

“That’s the best thing you could do,” he replied.

“I’ve dreamed a dream like this,” she smiled gently.

“You might as well keep on dreaming--till morning.”

That was the best thing she could do. And he was entitled to his dreams, too, until morning. So he gave himself up to them riotously, but with his eyes wide open and his brain clear--as though they were not dreams at all. It was as though Wilmer had come to him here and made herself an integral part of him--blending into him until she became one with him.

It was Roxie who was dreaming. Her eyes were closed and her breathing regular. Yet from time to time she stirred uneasily in her sleep. Then Allston, fearing lest she take cold, slipped the blanket from his shoulders and threw it over her--very gently so that she would not awake. Her face in repose appeared even younger. It was quite untroubled. He thanked God for that. If only she were sleeping safe in her own bed as she should be!

Allston became aware of the approaching dawn even before there was light. The wind died down so that it was quite still all about the shack. But within, the air became fresher with the clearness of atomized spring water. When the light did begin to come, it came subtly. It was more as though the dark were being diluted. Without moving, Allston watched the process with weird fascination. He wished the girl to sleep as long as that was safe, but he knew this could not be for long. The sun was coming up behind those dark ridges, and it was only a question of a very brief time when it would enter here and leave them as exposed as though the wall of the shack were torn down. Every window would be a menace. There would not be a corner left in which they could hide.

He did not wish to hide. Light was what he was waiting for--light that would allow Bud to distinguish between him and Roxie. Only he must time himself nicely; it must be clear enough not to permit of any mistake on Bud’s part, but not clear enough to allow the man to shoot through the windows.

On the shelf over the fireplace there was a row of crocks. As soon as he was able to count these, Allston would rouse the girl. That time came within five minutes. He made out four of them--one, two, three, four. He placed his hand on Roxie’s head and whispered her name. She started to her feet, staring about wildly.

“Steady,” whispered Allston. “It’s morning.”

The girl was confused. It was difficult for her to grasp the situation.

“Listen,” he commanded. “I’m going out before he can see us here. It’s the only way. You’re to stay behind until I get across the clearing. Then you follow. You’ll be safe.”

“I’ll be safe!” she cried. “But you?”

“I must take my chances.”

“Then I wanter take mine--with yuh.”

“You’ll only spoil mine,” he frowned. “I can get across there alone, and once in the woods I’ll wait for you. Straight from the house and across the road. You understand?”

“No-o-,” she whimpered.

“If he tries to stop you, I’ll have him covered. Straight across and into the woods.”

Already the crocks on the shelf were becoming too visible.

“You’ve been game till now; be game to the end,” he whispered.

Beseechingly she stood before him with uplifted face. He stooped and brushed her forehead.

“God bless you--whatever happens,” he choked.

Then, before she could catch her breath, he swung open the door and, crouching a little, dashed out. He had not gone ten feet before a rifle cracked from the spring-house.

Allston crumpled up like an empty sack.