Part 11

He got to his feet a little unsteadily as she came toward him. It seemed to him that there was a blue veil across his eyes, but he winked it away quickly enough, shook the ache out of his shoulders, put down the shoe-string that he was making out of a squirrel's skin, and stood in front of the shack waiting, with his hat in his hand. He had on a mud-stained corduroy hunting suit and big buckskin leggings, and there was a week's growth of beard on his face. He looked not unlike a highly civilised bear, and he felt his looks. She did not seem to see him until she was close upon him.

"Oh," she cried, "I was not expecting to find you here," and when that sounded a little bald, added quickly, "I heard that you were sick and I thought it likely that you were up in Canaan."

"Oh, no, I am not sick," he told her, hastening down to the trap, the delicious excitement that possessed him well restrained, "and since you have found me here, won't you get out and have some,--well, let me see,--some coffee and bacon? And I can make a lovely corn-dodger. Also I have some kind of good stuff in a can, though I can't get the can open. Do please stop and dine." Steering, sick, gaunt, gay, mocking at hardship, hope deferred and far-reaching disappointment, was at his best. Her eyes slipped away from his as he pressed his invitation. Then she laughed softly, with the little shake of her laughter when a notion appealed to her happily.

"I'm going to accept," she said, "I'll cook things and you can eat them."

"I'll make a sacred duty of my part," he promised gravely; he was lifting her from the buggy; her hands were on his shoulders; for a little delirious minute she was in his arms; he could not keep his hands from closing about her sweet body lingeringly as he lifted her; her eyes were looking into his, her face was coming down close to his; he had a wild fleeting hallucination that she----

"Don't imagine," she began, and his senses came back to him and he set her down, "don't imagine that I can't cook. Where's your range?"

He showed her a scooped-out place in the side of the bluff. "There are two bricks in the back, two on each side and two on the top," he explained with some pride.

"I am afraid you have brought foolish habits of luxury out of the East with you," was her reply. She made him build her a fire and bring some water and meal and then she took things entirely out of his hands.

"It's a picnic," she said. Her gown she had folded back and pinned up until a little tangle of silk and lace frou-froued beneath it bewilderingly; her sleeves she had rolled back until the creamy tan of her round slim arms showed to the elbow; her hat she had taken off, and the sun danced in the gold lustres of her hair. She was all aglow; she belonged out in the fresh air and the sunlight like this; she could stand it; that dusky-gold radiance played from her like a burnish. Steering sat down on the log bench and watched her, hypnotised by her into haunting fancies of something, somebody, somewhere. She was one of those beings whose rich magnetism of face and personality brings them close to you, not only for the present, but also for the past, one of those people who are apt to make you feel that you have known them before, forever, a feeling that flowers into elusive fragrances, suggestions, reminiscences, flown on the first stir of a thought to catch them.

"What a long time since I even so much as saw you," he sighed happily, happy because here before him in the body again she was exactly the girl he remembered, exactly the girl he had dreamed of all winter. "What have you done all winter?" he asked.

"Nursed Father. He has stayed at home with me a good deal. It was a lovely winter, wasn't it?"

Steering thought of the long, quiet, lonely days, the weeks, the months during which he had seen her only to bow to her. Then he thought of the calendar inside his office. Every day that he had seen her on his rare trips up river to Canaan was marked with an imitation of the rising sun. There were only eight rising suns for the whole winter. Then he thought how the memory of those sun days had stayed with him and made him feel blessed. Then he answered, "Yes, it has been lovely,--nice, open weather. I have been out on the Di in a skiff almost every day." He did not add that every day his journey had been to the upper water near Madeira Place; but he might have.

"Once or twice I have seen you." She did not add that she had stood at her window, behind a partly drawn blind, gazing after him through slow tears; but she might have. "What a very long time indeed since we saw each other,--and talked to each other!"

"Oh, about two thousand years," he answered with careful calculation.

"I wonder if you remember the ride across country into the sunset?"

Should he ever forget it? Then the spring wind blew up to them from off the Di with a coolish, dampening touch. "What do you hear from Elsie?" he asked, heeding the wind's touch.

"She is in love. What do you hear from Mr. Carington?"

"That same. It seems very right and fit. Carington and Elsie are well mated. The wedding will happen in July. Carry wants me to come back to him for it."

She was stirring the meal and water together briskly, with her back half turned to him. At his words she stopped in her work and put her hand up to her heart with her strange little pushing gesture, as though she must push her heart down. "And you will go, I suppose?"

"No, I shan't go."

She took her hand down and laughed lightly. He could not hear the joyful relief in the laugh, but she could. "My, but you have become attached to Redbud, haven't you? Hasn't it been lonely for you here?"

"Well, the cherry hat little girl up above Sowfoot has been a comfort. And then I've studied a heap."

"Studied what?"

"Mizzourah!"

"Redbud and Sowfoot are good teachers," she laughed; then her face sobered quickly, "but I don't think you should stay down here by the river when you are ill," she said. Her sweet, wistful interest was balsamic to him. For a moment he tried to look sicker than he was.

"Oh, it's nothing, nothing," he protested in a gone voice.

"Yes, it is something," she had the corn-dodgers going over a slow fire and was dubiously regarding a second skillet that he had brought her. "Don't you ever try water for it?" she interrupted herself to ask. He admitted that he was not as careful of the skillet as he should be, and she went back to her first anxiety, "Why do you stay here when you are ill?"

"Oh, I'm not ill a bit, not really." He had forgotten to be ill. Regarding her dreamily from his bench he was wishing that the moment could be eternity, that he could be hungry forever and that forever she could make corn-dodgers for him.

"I think you are sick. _Something_ is the matter with you?"

"Yes," he changed his position a little on the bench, "something is the matter with me."

"Well, why don't you go on and say what?" She put the skillet on some of the coals and the coffee-pot on the skillet, being too busy to look around at him.

"Oh!"--he wanted to tell her, but his pride saved him in time. She was in rich in gold and land and cattle, in ore, too now; and he? He didn't know how he was going to fill his meal sack the next time it was empty. That was where matters had got with him. "I think I won't go on and say what, after all; let's not bother. Let's just be happy for the minute. That's something I have learned out here in Missouri, just to be happy when you get the chance, minute by minute, no matter what sort of hours are to come after. This, now, is so much more than I had hoped for. I hadn't really hoped to see you again before----"

"Before what?"

"Well, a fellow can't go on like this forever, can he? I expect I am going to cut all this."

"_What!_ And leave Uncle Bernique?"

"Uncle Bernique can hold the claim alone, you know. And I'm wasting hope and energy here. What's the use in staying longer?"

She was very busy with the bacon now and he did not see her face. There was a wild quiver on it, of grief, fright, dismay.

"You ought not to leave Uncle Bernique and Piney, I am sure of that," she said at last earnestly, almost commandingly.

"Heigh-ho! I think Bernique is getting restless, too. He will be drifting off soon on that tidal wave of ore fever that comes over him; Piney has been gone for a great while. It's pretty lonely. It's getting on my nerves. Of course I shouldn't pet my nerves if I had any hope about the run here, but I haven't. I think that the work we have carried on is fairly conclusive."

"But wait a minute, didn't you buy this land? Didn't you put some money in it?"

Steering laughed blithely. "Not much," he said. The thing that made him laugh was the fact that though it was not much it was all that he had, and it was, in a way, amusing to consider how he was to get away from Canaan. Looking at Sally Madeira, who suggested luxury nonchalantly, trouble about ways and means was bound to be untimely and laughable. Indeed, looking at Sally Madeira all troubles were more or less laughable.

"You haven't gone to Europe?" he reminded her, after he had drunk her health in the coffee.

"No! I haven't gone."

"Are you going?"

"Not unless Father's health improves."

"Isn't he well?"

"No," her face clouded sadly, "he is over-working. Oh, you don't know how sorry I am," she began, and faltered.

"Sorry? for him?"

"Yes. And for you. And for m-- and because things have come around like this."

"Let's not be sorry just now," said Steering. "Won't you, please, talk about glad things now. It's so pleasant to have you here." Since she was unhappy, he took charge of her unhappiness, and would not be serious any longer about anything. When she brought him his corn-dodger on a shingle and more coffee in a tin dipper, he was foolish with happiness, kept his own spirits high and overcame every little disposition to seriousness on her part until their picnic had to come to an end, and she must be starting back down the river road.

"Do you feel like doing something for me?" she asked, her hand in his, as she made ready to go.

"Something? Everything."

"Then wait just as long as you can, will you?"

"Yes, I will, gladly, since you ask it, just as long as I can." Steering's voice sang as he answered.

She would not let him accompany her on her homeward journey, but went on down the river road alone, and Steering returned to the shack, and carefully measured the amount left in his meal sack, and carefully counted the money in his wallet. There was just about enough in the sack to last ten days, flanked by the potatoes and the bacon, and there was so little in the wallet that any kind of emotion about it seemed a waste. Still, he did not appear to appreciate the extremity of the situation as yet. His face was all lit up and the sound of his own voice pleased him.

"I will wait, just as long as I can," he repeated at the end of his calculations, "and I can till the meal gives out."

_Chapter Fourteen_

WHEN THE MEAL GAVE OUT

Steering sat on his bunk in his shack with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and his eyes upon an empty bag that hung from the bough of a weeping-willow tree. He had just written Carington to explain that it could not be said that he had conquered Missouri, and that he was leaving next day for Colorado to try his luck at gold on the Cripple Creek circuit. He had not explained to Carington that he would walk the greater part of the way. By some strange perversity of pride a man never does explain a thing of that kind to anybody, least of all to Carington, best friend and close sympathiser.

Arrangements for his journey were about complete. Before he had left New York he had turned everything into ready cash that could be so turned, so that even when he first reached Missouri his personal effects had not made travel a burden to him. During the past weeks all the balance of his belongings that possessed any negotiability whatsoever had been turned into meal. And his meal sack was empty! By no sort of foreknowledge can a man accustomed to enough money for current expenses,--a goodly budget as recognised by the class of which Steering was an exemplar,--imagine, during his easy circumstances, how he would feel if ever things should so go against him that he would be left staring into an empty meal sack. Steering felt an awkward incompetence to realise the case now. He had looked at the sack at close range, patted it, as though to mollify its consequences to him, pooh-poohed it, taken it philosophically, taken it smilingly, but he had been all the time unable to get his eyes off it, even though he had finally carried it down to the river's edge and hung it upon the bough of the weeping willow tree. His eyes were still upon it, he was still regarding it at long range, through the shack door, getting the foreshorten of it, getting the middle distance, getting the perspective, utterly unable to stop his ceaseless staring into the emptiness of it, stop wondering what next and how next.

He got up and went to the door of the shack and looked out. By and by it occurred to him that the case would be much worse if there were anyone besides himself concerned. All the vague fleeting sympathies that had ever been aroused within him by newspaper stories of starving families, the nearest he had ever come to the actuality of starving families, quivered and stirred within him. The first thing he knew, he was feeling infinitely relieved that he had no starving family. He had a sensitive and active imagination, and, as he pictured the hungry little children that he did not have, tears of gratitude came into his eyes, and he blew gay kisses to those airy little folks.

It was glorious weather. Wild spring flowers were abundant, and there were cheerful whiskings among the trees where the birds and squirrels were busy again. The young shoots strained with the urge of the sap, making little popping noises. Steering started now and again and held his head waitingly. He had been watching and hoping for Piney for days, and was on the alert. Every noise, however, resolved itself into the noise of bird, squirrel, or sapling. There was never the voice nor the footfall of the human. Once that very afternoon, he had been so sure that he had heard Piney's pony up on the bluff that he had gone up there searchingly, joyfully. But except for a little scatter, that he took to be the lift of a covey of quail somewhere off in the Gulch bushes, not a sound or sign came up to the bluff. Steering mourned for Piney. If the tramp-boy had not gone away, things might have been more bearable. But the lad's jealousy and his love for Steering were in battle royal now, and Piney kept far from his hero, on the misty hills. Uncle Bernique was off on the hills, too, almost all the time; at the moment of this present crisis Bernique had been away for days. It was the merciless loneliness of the effort there at Redbud that had been most effective in dulling Steering's endurance. If he had been less lonely he might have devised ways of standing Missouri yet longer. Up at Dade farm they kept telling him, when he went up there for one of his visits to the little girl with the cherries on her hat, that he had "malary." It did not seem to him a very able diagnosis, but, as he had admitted to Miss Madeira, something was the matter with him, and it had now become his notion that the quicker he got out of Missouri the quicker he would be cured of the something. He was all ready to commence his treatment; he had corn-dodgers for supper that night, and for breakfast next morning, and with the morning sun he meant to travel on. The only reason that he did not start now, this minute, was because--well, she had come up the river road about this hour once, and he was waiting. Circumstanced as he was now, with the only three people whom he could count as friends in Missouri almost always away from him, life had come to mean little but this feverish, alert waiting. He went out and sat down by the shivering Di for his very last wait for any of the three.

It was there that old Bernique came upon him. Steering was shivering a little, too.

"Dieu! You have the malaria!" was the Frenchman's greeting.

"Go 'long, I have no such thing; I'm only as lonely as the devil." Steering got up and shook hands with the old man with so much energy that Bernique made a grimace of pain. "Come up here and talk," cried Steering, his eagerness to hear the sound of a human and friendly voice making him overlook the excitement under which Bernique laboured. He tied Bernique's horse to a bush and drew the old man up the bluff. "Where have you been this time? Where is Piney? Hello! what's the matter with you anyhow? struck another lode?"

Old Bernique spread out his palms avertingly. "You go fas'," he protested. "Wait, I beg. I have again had those exper-r-ience that so much disturb me. But no, I have not found anothaire lode, though I have been on the hills vair' long time. Thees day I come a-r-round by the way of Canaan. At the pos'-office I am stop'." The old man was talking now with his eyes burning into Steering's eyes, an expression of horror flattening his face; he held the four fingers of one lean hand pressed to his mouth, so that his words came out inarticulate and broken, though they seemed to scorch his throat like balls of fire. "At the pos'-office one say to me, 'Here is lettaire for you!' I take the lettaire and read.... Now, I ask you, Mistaire Steering, to take it and read." Bernique drew forth a letter from his pocket and thrust it into Steering's hand with a finely dramatic gesture. He had the appreciation of his race for climax.

The letter, Steering saw at once, was in the same gnarled handwriting as that letter which Crittenton Madeira had given him to read on the first day of his arrival in Canaan, and its contents made evident the same gnarled personality that had been made evident by that first letter.

"Read it aloud," said Bernique, and Steering read:

"'Deep Canyon, Colorado, September 23rd, 1899,' hey! what's the matter with the date, where's the slow-boy been?"

"Read on, Mistaire Steering," said Bernique grimly. But Steering looked at the post-mark on the envelope in his hand before he read on.

"Post-mark's dated April 23rd, 1900--why----"

"Read on!" cried old Bernique. "It is explain'," and Steering read on.

"'My dear Placide:--You and I were good friends in the days that we spent in prospecting over the Canaan hills, and, even though I incurred your displeasure when I abandoned the hills, I am depending upon the old friendship to influence you to do a last friendly act for me. It is not necessary for me to acquaint you with the detail of humiliations and persecutions to which I have been subjected by the man of whom I was once so foolish as to borrow money, any more than it is necessary for me to condone to you the desire that has developed within me to make him bite the dust, even as he has made me bite it. I am not remorseless in this. I gave him his chance to escape me, but, quite as I anticipated, he has fallen into the trap that I set for him; else would you not be reading this letter to-day, nearly a year after it was written.

"'Look close now, friend Placide. Nearly a year prior to the date that you will get this, that is to say on the 23rd of last September, the same day that I write this letter to you, I wrote Crittenton Madeira that I should be dead when my letter reached him, dead under an assumed name, in a strange land. It was the God's truth. I was dead when the letter reached him. You are reading a letter from the dead now, friend Placide.'" Steering stopped for a moment with a little shiver, but Bernique urged him on, and he read again--"'Placide, in that letter to Madeira were my instructions to turn over the Canaan Tigmores to Bruce Steering, because, I being dead, the hills were due to pass on to my heir. Well, Placide, has Madeira done that? Has he carried out my instructions? Has he fulfilled his trust? Has Steering possession of the Canaan Tigmores?

"'Like the thief that he is, Madeira has not done his part. Had he done it, you would not be reading this letter to-day. I wrote it and placed it with the clerk of Snow Mountain County, the county in which I died, to be mailed to you on the 23rd of April, 1900, only in case no inquiry had ever come from Madeira to verify my death. No inquiry has ever come! So the clerk of the county, who is my executor, mails this letter to you. This letter, Placide, is to attest that for seven months Crittenton Madeira has been in unlawful possession of the Canaan Tigmores, defrauding my heir and holding land under my name after being advised of my death and of the means of verifying the advice. There are now, in the keeping of the clerk of Snow Mountain County, two sealed envelopes, to be delivered by him, the one to you, the one to Crittenton Madeira. Madeira's has never been called for. See that yours is. In it you will find the credentials of my identity, my sworn statements, and the documents that prove my late encumbency of the entail. I am buried in the pauper's field in the cemetery of Deep Canyon. The stone slab that I have directed to be put over me bears the inscription, "James Gray, Died September 23, 1899."