A Master's Degree Part 14

"But it will fail without you. You pulled us to victory a year ago at the Thanksgiving game, and last fall the Sunrise goal line wasn't crossed the whole season with 'Burleigh! Burly! Burlee!' for a slogan.

We must win this year. Then it will be a complete champions.h.i.+p: football, basket-ball, and baseball. We won't do it though unless we have 'Burleigh at the bat'."

A shadow crossed his face and he looked away to where a tiny film of blue smoke was rising above the rough ledges beyond the river.

"I'm getting over my stage fright now," Elinor said, the pink deepening on her fair cheek, "and I'll tell you what I want."

"Command me!" he said, gallantly.

"Well, it's awful, and the girls are too mean to live. But they are getting even with me, they say, for something I did last fall."

"All right." Vic was waiting, graciously.

"A lot of us have broken some of the rules of the Sorority and it's decreed that I must go over the route we came home by on the night of the storm down in the Kickapoo Corral. They are having a 'spread' down there at five o'clock and we are to get there in time for it, going by the west side of the river, and they'll bring us home. They said I should ask you to go with me, and if you would n't go for me to ask Mr.

Trench to go. They are too silly for anything."

"Trench was executed for manslaughter at two forty-five today. It's three o'clock now. Let's go." He lifted her to her feet and stooped to pick up her hat.

"Do you really mind going with me, Victor?" Elinor asked.

"Do I mind? I've been waiting two years for you to ask me to go." His voice was very deep and there was a soft light in his brown eyes.

Elinor's pulse beat felt a thrill. A sudden sense of the sweetness of the day and of a joy unlike any other joy of her life possessed her.

Down on the bridge they stopped to watch the sunlit waters of the Walnut rippling below them.

"Are we the same two who crept up on this bridge, wet, and muddy and tired, and scared one stormy October night eighteen months ago?" Elinor asked.

"I've had no reincarnation that I know of," Vic replied.

"I have," Elinor declared, and Vic thought of Burgess.

Up the narrow hidden glen they made their way, clambering about broken ledges, crossing and recrossing the little stream, hugging the dry footing under overhanging rock shelves, laughing at missteps and rejoicing in the springtime joy, until they came suddenly upon a gra.s.sy open s.p.a.ce, cliff-walled and hidden, even from the rest of the glen.

At the farther end was the low doorway-like entrance to the cave. The song-birds were twittering in the trees above them, the waters of the little stream gurgled at their feet, the woodsy odor of growing things was in the air, and all the little glen was restful and quiet.

"Isn't it beautiful and romantic--and everything nice?" Elinor cried.

"I don't mind this sentence to hard service. It is worth it. Do you mind the loss of time, Victor?"

"I counted it gain to be here with you, even in the storm and terror.

How can this be loss?" he answered her. His voice was low and musical.

Elinor looked up quickly. And quickly as the thing had come to Victor Burleigh on the west bluff above the old Kickapoo Corral two Octobers ago, so to Elinor Wream came the vision of what the love of such a man would be to the woman who could win it.

"Do you really mean it, Victor? Was n't I a lump of lead? A dead weight to your strength that night? You have never once spoken of it."

She looked up with s.h.i.+ning eyes and put out her hand. What could he do but keep it in his own for a moment, firm-held, as something he would keep forever.

"I have never once forgotten it," he murmured.

The cave by daylight was as the lightning had shown it, a big chamber, rock-walled, rock-floored, rock-roofed, in the side of the bluff, but little below the level of the ground and easy of entrance. It was cool and damp, but, with the daylight through the doorway, it was merely shadowy inside. In the farther wall yawned the ragged opening to the black s.p.a.ces leading off underground. Through this opening these two had crept once, feeling that behind the wall somebody was crouching with evil intent. They peered through the opening now, trying to see the miraculous way by which they had come into the cave from the rear.

But they stared only into blackness and caught the breath of the damp underground air with a faint odor of wood smoke somewhere.

"Elinor, it's a good thing we came through here in the night. It would have been maddening to be forced in here by daylight. We must have slipped down through a hole somewhere in our stumbles and hit a pa.s.sage leading out of here only to the river, a sort of fire escape by way of the waters. You remember we couldn't get anywhere on the back track, except to the cliff above the Walnut. It's all very fine if the escaper gets out of the river before he reaches Lagonda's whirlpool."

He was leaning far through the opening in the wall, gazing into the darkness and seeing nothing.

"Somewhere back in there, while I was pawing around that night, I found something up in a c.h.i.n.k that felt like the odd-shaped little silver pitcher my mother had once--an old family heirloom, lost or stolen some time ago. I came back and hunted for it later, but it was winter time and cold as the grave outside and darker in here, and I couldn't find anything, so I concluded maybe I was mistaken altogether about its being like that old pitcher of ours. It was a bad night for 'seein' things'; it might have been for 'feelin' things' as well. There's nothing here but damp air and darkness."

And even while he was speaking close beside the wall, so near that a hand could have reached him, a man was crouching; the same man whose cruel eyes had stared through the bushes at Lloyd Fenneben as he sat by the river before Pigeon Place; the same man whose eyes had leered at Vic Burleigh in this same place eighteen months before; the same man whom little Bug Buler's innocent face had startled as he was about to seize the money box at the gateway to the Sunrise football field; and this same man was crouching now to spring at Vic Burleigh's throat in the darkness.

"It's a good thing a fellow has a guardian angel once in a while," Vic said, as he hastily withdrew his head and shoulders. "We get pretty close to the edge of things sometimes and never know how near we are to destruction."

"We were pretty close that night," Elinor replied.

"Shall we rest here a little while, or do your savage sorority sisters require you to do time in so many minutes?" Vic asked, as they left the cave and came again into the sunlight, and all the sweetness of the April woodland, and the rugged beauty of the glen.

"I'm glad to rest," Elinor said, dropping down on a stone. Her cheeks were blooming from the exercise of the tramp, and her pretty hair was in disorder.

Far away from the west prairie came the faint note of a child's voice in song.

"Victor," Elinor said, as they listened, "do you know that the Sunrise girls envy Bug Buler? They say you would have more time for the girls if it wasn't for him. What you spend for him you could spend on light refreshments for them, don't you see?"

"I know I'm a stingy cuss," Vic said, carelessly, but a deeper red touched his cheek.

"You know you are not," Elinor insisted, "and I've always thought it was a beautiful thing for a big grown man like you to care for a little orphan boy. All the girls think so, too."

Burleigh looked down at her gratefully.

"I thought once--in fact, I was told once--that my care for him was sufficient reason why I should let all the girls alone, most of all why I should not think of Elinor Wream."

"How strange!" Elinor's face had a womanly expression. "I've never had a little child to love me. I've been brought up with only AEneas's small son Ascanius, and other cla.s.sical children, on Uncle Joshua's Dead Language book shelves. I feel sometimes as if I'd been robbed."

"You? I didn't know you had ever wanted anything you did n't get."

Victor had thought all things were due to her and came as duly. The womanly look on her face now was a revelation to him. But then he had not dared to study her face for months, and he did not yet realize what life in Dr. Fenneben's home must mean to her character-building.

"I'll tell you some time about something I ought to have had, a sacrifice I was forced to make; but not now, Tell me about Bug."

There was no bitterness in Elinor's tone, yet the idea of her having the capacity to endure gave her a newer charm to the man beside her.

"I have never known whose child Bug is," he began. "The way in which he came to me is full of terrible memories, and it all happened on the blackest day of my life--the hard life of a lonely boy on a Kansas claim. That's why I never speak of it and try always to forget it. I found him by mere accident, helpless and in awful danger. He was about two years old then and all he could say was 'bad man' and his name, 'Bug Buler.' I've wondered if Bug is his name, or if he could not speak his real name plainly then."

Burleigh paused, and a sense of Elinor's interest brought a thrill of joy to him.

"Where was he?" she asked.

Vic slowly unfastened his cuff and slipped his coat sleeve up to his elbow.

"Do you remember that scar?" he asked. "It is not the only one I have.