Over the Pass Part 26

"It will be dark before we reach Little Rivers!" she protested.

"Ten minutes--only a step!" and he was appealing in his boyish fas.h.i.+on to have his way.

"Nonsense! Besides, I do not care for canyons."

"You still fear, then, to look down from walls? You--"

And this decided her. On another occasion she had gone to the precipice edge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; he should not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely of the imagination.

The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab of granite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, a thrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately.

Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition, while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling into the chasm!

"Don't!" she gasped, and blindly tugged at his arm to draw him back.

As he looked around in surprise and inquiry, she withdrew her hand in a reaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it out with fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regarded her for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, while the still light of confidence was in his eyes, he locked his arm in hers.

Before she could protest or resist he had drawn her to his side.

"It is just as safe as looking off the roof of a porch on to a flower garden," he said.

And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite and settled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph of mind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked down into that gulf of shadows--looked down for a thousand feet, where the narrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness.

From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with no movement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wrist distinctly. He had her fast, a p.a.w.n of one of his impulses. A s.h.i.+ver of revolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shown weakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to prove that she was not.

"Thank you. My little tremor of horror has pa.s.sed," she told him. "I can stand without help, now."

He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flas.h.i.+ng her independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and triumphantly back at him.

"You need not keep your arm up in that fas.h.i.+on ready to a.s.sist me. It is tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the barrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddy turn--probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of the desert."

He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she looked back into the abyss.

"I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness; "courage to master my revulsion against shadows."

"Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answered uncomprehendingly.

Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly persistence. Some pa.s.sing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had in a desert basin beside a water-course.

"The little pine has courage--the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How green it is--greener than they!"

"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make controversy.

"Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!"

"In a crowd and waiting for the axe!"

"And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there was nothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of the stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward of a look and a word of praise!"

"But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in reb.u.t.tal, "the big pines give us the masts of s.h.i.+ps and they build houses and furnish the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!"

"The little pine makes no pretensions. It has done more. It has given us something without which houses are empty: It has given us a thought!"

"True!" he exclaimed soberly, yielding. And now all the lively signals of the impulse of action played on his face. "For your glance and your word of praise it shall pay you tribute!" he cried. "I am going down to bring you one of its cl.u.s.ters of spines."

"But, Jack, it is a dangerous climb--it is late! No! no!"

"No climb at all. It is easy if I work my way around by that ledge yonder. I see stepping-places all the way."

How like him! While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinking how to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty. Already he had started despite her protest.

"I don't want to rob the little pine!" she called, testily.

"I'll bring a needle, then!"

"Even every needle is precious!"

"I'll bring a dead one, then!"

There was no combatting him, she knew, when he was headstrong; and when he was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way. He was laughing now as he took off his spurs and tossed them aside.

"No climbing in these cart-wheels, and I shall have to roll up my chaps!"

She went back to the precipice edge to prove to him, to prove to herself, that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone at her side, and found that she could. She had mastered her weakness. It was as if a new force had been born in her. She felt its stiffening in every fibre as she saw him pa.s.s around the ledge and start down toward the little pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mount them with an invulnerable guard.

How would he get past that steep shoulder? The worst obstacle confronted him at the very beginning of the descent. He was hugging a rock face, feeling his way, with nothing but a few inches of a projecting seam between him and the darkness far below. His foot slipped, his body turned half around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt when waiting for the sound of Leddy's shot in Bill Lang's store. She saw his outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. But they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his way out on a shelf.

He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at him. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to be subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beaming up at her rea.s.suringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her face return in a hot flood. It brought with it anger in place of fear.

"I don't want it! I don't want it!" she cried down.

"And I want to get it for you! I want to get it for you--for you!" His voice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of pa.s.sionate declaration.

So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had the power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There is nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like to pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to go on doing things for you forever!"

There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to her now that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his, the iridescent house of gla.s.s had fallen about them in a confused, dazzling shower of wreckage. He had found an opening. He had broken through the barrier.

Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside the pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and, with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of her wishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her--this garland of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at her feet from the lists.

"No, no, no!" she said, half aloud.

She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he would be crunching the gla.s.s of the house under that confident tread; in the ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken in the barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. His pulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, his artery-beat in the _arroyo_, was hammering in her temples, hammering out a decision which, when it came, brought her to her feet.

Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the Eternal Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of rich, blazing gold through the pa.s.s and lay across the trail. It enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she went, she hurried toward the other side of Galeria.

When Jack Wingfield came up over the ledge, a pine ta.s.sel in his hand, his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphant intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio was there to welcome him.

"Senorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very late, she said."

Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in abstraction.