CHAPTER XXIII

The fact that Allston had gone last night and had not yet returned was as convincing proof to Wilmer of some mishap to him as a direct message would have been. Had he accomplished his purpose, he would have been back within three hours--four at the most. Such undertakings are decided quickly. When two strong men meet in mountain country over such an issue, the argument is not long-drawn-out. And the end is apt to be definite.

So for a moment the girl stared at the empty bed as one stares helplessly at the jerky telegrams on yellow paper that are brutally thrust into one’s life. Direct blows between the eyes these, which stun. And however grimly concrete the news, it is difficult to understand because it comes through such a thin medium. All is well--then a bit of yellow paper--and all is over.

Wilmer did not have even as much as a written report; just an opened door and silence. But if the message had been written in burning letters of fire or shouted at her through a megaphone, it could have told her no more. He had gone to meet Bud Childers and he had not come back.

Dazed as the girl was, she held herself well. Facing the little things about his room, she stood straight as though facing something of him. His courage called for her courage. Whatever had happened to him, she knew he had accepted like a man, so that whatever had happened, she must accept like a woman. If some of the color vanished from her cheeks that was not her fault. She could not control this. But she could control her trembling lips and did. Turning from the room, she found her way back downstairs and to the sitting-room. There she saw again his chair--the chair in which he had sat last evening. For a second she tottered. All the little things of him seemed so doubly important now. Every suggestion of him was so vital. It might be--it might be that this was all she had left; traces at a moment when she hungered for a hundred times more than she had ever had when within arm’s length of him.

She pronounced his name below her breath. Just this--

“Ned.”

Then louder as though the name itself could bring him nearer.

“Ned,” she called. “Ned.”

She received no answer. The man who had been here yesterday--who would have responded to her lightest whisper--did not count. And if he could have answered as of yesterday, that would not have counted. It was to-day--now--that she wanted him. It was this minute--this second. She wanted him to come to her and place his arms about her and hold her tight; she wanted the feel of his lips and the sound of his voice. She wanted him in the flesh with all his tousled light hair. She was empty without him--as empty as a mother with an unweighted arm.

Tears started to her hot eyes, and, burying her face in her hands, she knelt before the wicker chair as before a sacred shrine.

“God, give him back to me,” she pleaded. “I want him. I want him so.”

If all the prayers of women were answered, perhaps there would be no need of other prayers. How many go trembling up through the day and through the night!

Wilmer rose again to her feet--steadied and strengthened. It may be that this is the most direct and best answer God can give--strength to endure, strength to act. She moved towards the kitchen--towards the door she had found opened. It was as though this were the beginning of the trail leading to his side. She had no pre-conceived plan, but her feet took her here. This was the path Roxie had taken; the path Ned Allston had taken. It was the path she must take.

Her heart leaped in response to the suggestion. She must follow him. If he could not come to her, she must go to him. In essence the idea was foreign to her nature. She was neither bold nor venturesome. Ordinarily she would have turned to her father, but now this never occurred to her. He played no part in this early morning drama. He slept and he must sleep on. This did not concern him. It concerned her alone--that inner woman who in a sense had never had a father.

The drawer of the kitchen table was open--pulled far out. Her eyes caught the gray sheen of steel. She had never seen these articles except as so many cooking-utensils. But they were more than that; they were weapons. They were knives. And knives were for both defense and offense. She crossed the room and picked out one--a thin-bladed, pointed knife worn down by much use. She thrust this into her bosom and returned to the door. She unlocked it, swung it open, and went out into the dew-wet grass.

The cool of the unwarmed dawn air which met her hot skin and bathed her eyes and refreshed her dry throat as she drank it deep into her lungs, braced her like wine. Down the serpentine drive she went walking with long, steady strides, unhurried in spite of her excited heart and with chin well up. She wore no hat; no coat. She needed none. Her brown hair, which had not been as carefully arranged as usual this morning, soon fell loose until it hung all about her flushed cheeks gypsy-wise. Had any one glimpsed her, he would surely have thought it Roxie who was abroad at such an hour. For though taller she was walking with that rhythmic swing, all from the hips down, which only those acquire who have lived long in mountain country and walked much. And her feet were sure on the rocky ground.

The sky grew pink in the east, but she saw it not. Birds began to stir and sing among the wet leaves, but she heard them not. Squirrels began to chatter--squirrels she loved to stop and tease--but she gave no heed to them. As far as she was concerned this colorful, vibrant world about her was as desolate as the moon surface. Her thoughts were all of the man towards whom she was speeding.

She knew this road well. It was the same she had taken with him after that adventure in the sunlit cove which lay so near the mountain path leading to Bud’s shack. She had laughed at her father’s fears when the latter warned them to avoid that neighborhood. How trivial that whole incident now seemed to her, and yet it had played its part. It was playing its part now. It was leading her with sure feet to his side.

But what was she going to find after she reached his side? It was a question she fought off. And yet, batlike, the question returned to circle again and again around her thoughts.

Leaving the sandy road that skirted the lower end of the valley, her course took her upwards on a trail rough as a stream-bed. It ran like a tunnel through the dark of crowding trees. Laurel and rhododendron and sourwood in a snarling tangle beneath beech and oak pressed close, as though bent upon obliterating this rough gash hacked through their fastness. Overhead the dark branches came together and shut out the sun. It was damp and shaded here and the pungent smell of the earth met her as though she were burrowing. She hurried a little up the steep path with an uncanny feeling that if she delayed too long she might be enveloped. The growing things might seize her, might twine their snaky limbs about her and force her down into this same earth from which they sprang. And the earth was cold and damp. She wanted none of it. She began to feel stifled, and broke into a panic-stricken run that took the breath out of her. Halfway up she had to stop. But she refused to sit down. She did not dare sit down. She stood in the center of the road, her head upturned, her eyes trying to pierce the green canopy above. With her hands hanging limply by her side, she breathed through her mouth because her nostrils did not furnish enough air. Had any one come upon her so, he would have thought her some wild thing fleeing from the hunters.

Up she climbed and up where the dawn did not reach before high noon; up and up and up. Until she saw the end of the tunnel. Then, breaking into a run again, she never stopped until she plunged out upon the top where man had fought the trees to the death and left a summit of upland pasture open to the sky, and made rich farmland covered with blue grass dotted with grazing cattle. She felt like a diver coming up from deep, brackish water. She threw herself prone on her back for a moment, her eyes fixed on the wide expanse of clean blue sky, shot with gold up here. Below her lay the crescent-shaped valley--a picture so serenely peaceful in contrast to what she had just come through that only the psalmist could adequately express it. The lines though unspoken came to her lips:

“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me.”

All her life she had uttered these words without any appreciation save of their rhythmic beauty. Now they were like a voice from the sky itself. They quenched, like cold water, the fever in her veins. They lent a significance to that beautiful valley below which she was never to forget. They made of it, for all time, a resting-place.

But she could not pause here. She kept the road along the ridge-top until she passed the Lutheran church, and then turned down the mountain-side again--into the dark forest again. The valley was behind her now; but it was there. When she faltered she closed her eyes and recalled it--the golden warmth of it and the serene promise of it. It helped her mightily over that last mile; helped her as she dipped down towards Big Laurel Cove--towards the dragon country. It was so she felt--like the lost maidens of the fairy books in the creepy land of devouring monsters. She was terrified, but under some spell she staggered on. The strain of the four miles was beginning to tell on her legs. And the tension was beginning to tell on her thoughts. She became more and more a prey to the vagaries of her excited imagination. A squirrel leaping from one bending oak branch to another made her start and clutch at her knife--the knife which all the way had lain like a bony hand against her white bosom.

Then the clearing before Bud’s shack and the log crossing the stream, and beyond it--the crumpled form of Allston. She saw it from the roadway and took the last hundred yards in a series of bounding leaps like some frantic wild animal.