The Voice of the Pack Part 10

"But you can't. And I'll pound that milksop of yours to a jelly every time I see him. I'd think, s...o...b..rd, that you'd want a _man_."

He started up the trail; and then she did a strange thing. "He's more of a man than you are, right now, Bert," she told him. "He'll prove it some day." Then her arm went about Dan's neck and lifted his head upon her breast; and in Cranston's plain sight, she bent and kissed him, softly, on the lips.

Cranston's answer was an oath. It dripped from his lips, more poisonous, more malicious than the venom of a snake. His late calm, treasured so much, dropped from him in an instant. His features seemed to tighten, the dark lips drew away from his teeth. No words could have made him such an effective answer as this little action of hers. And as he turned up the trail, he called down to her a name,--that most dreadful epithet that foul tongues have always used to women held in greatest scorn.

Dan struggled in her arms. The kiss on his lips, the instant before, had not called him out of his half-consciousness. It had scarcely seemed real, rather just an incident in a blissful dream. But the word called down the trail shot out clear and vivid from the silence, just as a physician's face will often leap from the darkness after the anesthesia.

The whole scene in an instant became incredibly vivid,--the dark figure on the trail, the girl's white face above him, narrow-eyed and drawn-lipped, and the dark pines, silent and sad, overhead. Something infinitely warm and tender was holding him, pressing him back against a holy place that throbbed and gave him life and strength; but he knew that this word had to be answered. And only actions, not other words, could be its payment. All the voices of his body called to him to lie still, but the voices of the spirit, those higher, n.o.bler promptings from which no man, to the glory of the breed from which he sprung, can ever quite escape, were stronger yet. He tugged upward, straining. But he didn't even have the strength to break the hold that the soft arm had about his neck.

"Oh, if I could only pull the trigger!" she was crying. "If I could only kill him--"

"Let me," he pleaded. "Give me the pistol. I'll kill him--"

And he would. There was no flinching in the gray eyes that looked up to her. She leaned forward, as if to put the weapon in his hands, but at once drew it back. And then a single sob caught at her throat. An instant later, they heard Cranston's laughter as he vanished around the turn of the trail.

For long minutes the two of them were still. The girl still held the man's head upon her breast. The pistol had fallen in the pine needles, and her nervous hand plucked strangely at the leaves of a mountain flower. To Dan's eyes, there was something trancelike, a hint of paralysis and insensibility about her posture. He had never seen her eyes like this. The light that he had always beheld in them had vanished. Their utter darkness startled him.

He sat up straight, and her arm that had been about his neck fell at her side. He took her hand firmly in his, and their eyes met.

"We must go home, s...o...b..rd," he told her simply. "I'm not so badly hurt but that I can make it."

She nodded; but otherwise scarcely seemed to hear. Her eyes still flowed with darkness. And then, before his own eyes, their dark pupils began to contract. The hand he held filled and throbbed with life, and the fingers closed around his. She leaned toward him.

"Listen, Dan," she said quickly. "You heard--didn't you--the last thing that he said?"

"I couldn't help but hear, s...o...b..rd."

Her other hand sought for his. "Then if you heard--payment must be made.

You see what I mean, Dan. Maybe you can't see, knowing the girls that live on the plains. You were the cause of his saying it, and you must answer--"

It seemed to Dan that some stern code of the hills, unwritten except in the hearts of their children, inexorable as night, was speaking through her lips. This was no personal thing. In some dim, half-understood way, it went back to the basic code of life.

"People must fight their own fights, up here," she told him. "The laws of the courts that the plains' people can appeal to are all too far away. There's no one that can do it, except you. Not my father. My father can't fight your battles here, if your honor is going to stand.

It's up to you, Dan. You can't pretend that you didn't hear him. Such as you are, weak and sick to be beaten to a pulp in two minutes, you alone will have to make him answer for it. I came to your aid--and now you must come to mine."

Her fingers no longer clasped his. Strength had come back to him, and his fingers closed down until the blood went out of hers, but she was wholly unconscious of the pain. In reality, she was conscious of nothing except the growing flame in his face. It held her eyes, in pa.s.sionate fascination. His pupils were contracting to little bright dots in the gray irises. The jaw was setting, as she had never seen it before.

"Do you _think_, s...o...b..rd, that you'd even have to ask me?" he demanded.

"Don't you think I understand? And it won't be in your defense--only my own duty."

"But he is so strong--and you are so weak--"

"I won't be so weak forever. I never really cared much about living before. I'll try now, and you'll see--oh, s...o...b..rd, wait and trust me: I understand everything. It's my own fight--when you kissed me, and he cried down that word in anger and jealousy, it put the whole thing on me. No one else can make him answer; no one else has the right. It's my honor, no one else's, that stands or falls."

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it again and again.

And for the first time he saw the tears gathering in her dark eyes. "But you _fought_ here, didn't you, Dan?" she asked with painful slowness.

"You didn't put up your arms--or try to run away? I didn't come till he had you done, so I didn't see." She looked at him as if her whole joy of life hung on his answer.

"Fought! I would have fought till I died! But that isn't enough, s...o...b..rd. It isn't enough just to fight, in a case like this. A man's got to win! I would have died if you hadn't come. And that's another debt that I have to pay--only that debt I owe to _you_."

She nodded slowly. The lives of the mountain men are not saved by their women without incurring obligation. She attempted no barren denials. She made no effort to pretend he had not incurred a tremendous debt when she had come with her pistol. It was an unavoidable fact. A life for a life is the code of the mountains.

"Two things I must do, before I can ever dare to die," he told her soberly. "One of them is to pay you; the other is to pay Cranston for the thing he said. Maybe the chance will never come for the first of the two; only I'll pray that it will. Maybe it would be kinder to you to pray that it wouldn't; yet I pray that it will! Maybe I can pay that debt only by being always ready, always watching for a chance to save you from any danger, always trying to protect you. You didn't come in time to see the fight I made. Besides--I lost, and little else matters.

And that debt to you can't be paid until sometime I fight again--for you--and win." He gasped from his weakness, but went on bravely. "I'll never be able to feel at peace, s...o...b..rd, until I'm tested in the fire before your eyes! I want to show you the things Cranston said of me are not true--that my courage can stand the test.

"It wouldn't be the same, perhaps, with an Eastern girl. Other things matter in the valleys. But I see how it is here; that there is only one standard for men and by that standard they rise or fall. Things in the mountains are down to the essentials."

He paused and struggled for strength to continue. "And I know what you said to him," he went on. "Half-unconscious as I was, I remember every word. Each word just seems to burn into me, s...o...b..rd, and I'll make every one of them good. You said I am a better man than he, and sometime it would be proved--and it's the truth! Maybe in a month, maybe in a year. I'm not going to die from this malady of mine now, s...o...b..rd. I've got too much to live for--too many debts to pay. In the end, I'll prove your words to him."

His eyes grew earnest, and the hard fire went out of them. "It's almost as if you were a queen, a real queen of some great kingdom," he told her, tremulous with a great awe that was stealing over him, as a mist steals over water. "And because I had kissed your fingers, for ever and ever I was your subject, living only to fight your fights--maybe with a dream in the end to kiss your fingers again. When you bent and kissed me on that hillside--for him to see--it was the same: that I was sworn to you, and nothing mattered in my life except the service and love I could give to you. And it's more than you ever dream, s...o...b..rd. It's all yours, for your battles and your happiness."

The great pines were silent above them, shadowed and dark. Perhaps they were listening to an age-old story, those vows of service and self-gained worth by which the race has struggled upward from the darkness.

"But I kissed you--once before," she reminded him. The voice was just a whisper, hardly louder than the stir of the leaves in the wind.

"But that kiss didn't count," he told her. "It wasn't at all the same. I loved you then, I think, but it didn't mean what it did to-day."

"And what--" she leaned toward him, her eyes full on his, "does it mean now?"

"All that's worth while in life, all that matters when everything is said that can be said, and all is done that can be done. And it means, please G.o.d, when the debts are paid, that I may have such a kiss again."

"Not until then," she told him, whispering.

"Until then, I make oath that I won't even ask it, or receive it if you should give it. It goes too deep, dearest--and it means too much."

This was their pact. Not until the debts were paid and her word made good would those lips be his again. There was no need for further words.

Both of them knew. The soldier of the queen must be tried with fire, before he may return to kiss her fingers. The light burns clear in this.

No instances of degeneracy, no exceptions brought to pa.s.s by thwarted nature, can affect the truth of this.

In the skies, the gray clouds were gathering swiftly, as always in the mountains. The rain-drops were falling one and one, over the forest. The summer was done, and fall had come in earnest.

VIII

The rains fell unceasingly for seven days: not a downpour but a constant drizzle that made the distant ridges smoke. The parched earth seemed to smack its lips, and little rivulets began to fall and tumble over the beds of the dry streams. The Rogue and the Umpqua flooded and the great steelhead began to ascend their smaller tributaries. Whisperfoot hunted with ease, for the wet shrubbery did not crack and give him away. The air was filled with the call of the birds of pa.s.sage.

All danger of forest fire was at once removed, and s...o...b..rd was no longer needed as a lookout on old Bald Mountain. She went to her own home, her companion back to the valley; and now that his sister had taken his place as housekeeper, Bill had gone down to the lower foothills with a great part of the live stock. Dan spent these rainy days in toil on the hillsides, building himself physically so that he might pay his debts.

It was no great pleasure, these rainy days. He would have greatly liked to have lingered in the square mountain house, listening to the quiet murmur of the rain on the roof and watching s...o...b..rd at her household tasks. She could, as her father had said, make a biscuit. She could also roll up sleeves over trim, brown arms and with entire good humor do a week's laundry for three hardworking men. He would have liked to sit with her, through the long afternoons, as she knitted beside the fireplace--to watch the play of her graceful fingers and perhaps, now and then, to touch her hands when he held the skeins. But none of these things transpired. He drove himself from daylight till dark, developing his body for the tests that were sure to come.

The first few days nearly killed him. He over-exercised in the chill rain, and one anxious night he developed all the symptoms of pneumonia.

Such a sickness would have been the one thing needed to make the doctor's prophecy come true. But with s...o...b..rd's aid, and numerous hot drinks, he fought it off.

She had made him go to bed, and no human memory could be so dull as to forget the little, whispered message that she gave him with his last spoonful of medicine. She said she'd pray for him, and she meant it too,--literal, entreating prayer that could not go unheard. She was a mountain girl, and her beliefs were those of her ancestors,--simple and true and wholly without affectation. But he hadn't relaxed thereafter.

He knew the time had come to make the test. Night after night he would go to bed half-sick from fatigue, but the mornings would find him fresh.

And after two weeks, he knew he had pa.s.sed the crisis and was on the direct road to complete recovery.