Beyond the Law/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
VIRGINIA GETS A LETTER
THE night dragged by, bringing little sleep to Dick Farley, and Virginia Dalton's father did not return. It was the longest night Dick had ever known. Hour after hour he sat propped up against the wall, the pillows behind him, and smoked, staring out through the open door at the shadows the moon made. They were deep black shadows, and his spirit was caught in them, strangely troubled. But at last, when the tardy day was breaking, the spark in his pipe-bowl died and he slipped down in his pillows and slept.
When he awoke, the sun was flinging its light through the tree-tops into the cabin. Nature's was a soft mood this morning—smiling, fragrant, audible with many low, harmonious woodland notes. And through the weave of still music, rising suddenly, clearly, sweetly, a girl's voice floated in to him in an old song. He watched the open door expectantly.
In a little while she came in, her voice hushed, walking tiptoe not to wake him, a rod in one hand, a string of lake-trout swinging from the other. Her smile was as gloriously a radiant thing as the morning itself when her eyes met his expectant ones.
"Good morning!" she greeted him, coming to his bedside. "Awake at last, are you? I was afraid I should have to breakfast alone."
"Good morning," he answered, his eyes filled with the rosy beauty of her glorious youth. "You have been fishing already!"
"I have been down to the lake—for my morning plunge primarily, to tell the truth. And in the second place for something for my sick man to eat. Hungry?"
As she went to set the rod in its place in the corner he looked after her approvingly. Her hair hung as yesterday in two long braids, one flung over her shoulder. Her brown arras were bare from the shoulder.
"Yes," he answered her, "I think I am hungry. While you are starting breakfast I think I'll get up"
"You'll do nothing of the kind," she retorted positively. "I'll put a table close to your bunk, and we'll eat here. After breakfast, when the sun is a little higher and it's good and warm, maybe I'll let you try to get up."
As she moved toward the kitchen with her string of fish, he called after her:
"Your father? He hasn't come in yet?"
"No. But we'll look for him before long. Dear old Daddy has dreadfully irregular habits!"
Then he heard her clattering with pots and pans, heard her singing broken snatches of songs; and soon the aroma of coffee and the sizzling of the trout told him that breakfast was ready. She came in then, removed the objects from the table across the room—he saw with a little surprise that they were several books carelessly scattered—pushed the table to his side, dragged her own chair up to it, and brought in the fish and coffee and biscuits with tin cups, tin plates, heavy iron knives, forks and spoons.
"There is no sugar, no butter, no cream," she laughed at him. "But you won't mind, will you?"
While they ate she told him more of herself; how she fished, or used the rifle to bring down a squirrel from a pine, or to get a deer, sometimes; how from her lookout, a peak a mile behind the cabin, she mused over the pale, shifting shades of daybreak or the vivid splashes of color in the west before the dusk came; how she let her eyes go far out to the furthermost rim of the vague, distant mountains and dreamed of the other side—the land of men and women, of cities where the cañons were streets, and the peaks many-storied buildings. She was not lonely because no one had taught her the word, because she had known no existence but this. She did not know unrest, because she had not lived in cities.
"But sometimes," with a sudden wistfulness, "there is something here which talks; and I can't quite understand it!" She pressed her two hands tightly upon her breast. "When I have everything here, how can there be anything lacking? When the world is so big, how can it seem so little? When the day is so filled with good things, how can it seem so empty? When I am so happy, how can I be, all of a sudden, so sad? When I am laughing, why do I want to cry?"
He told her, too, of his own life; of the schools he had gone to; of his work in cities of the East; of the command to go West for his health as her father had done; of the fever of gold. But he said no word of his partner—he could not speak of that, yet. Nor did he mention the Cup of Gold, saying merely that he had pushed into these mountains, into her valley, prospecting.
"But you said," she reminded him frankly, "that you were looking for some one?"
"Yes," he admitted, turning from her clear eyes to the door. "I will tell you about that some other time."
HE QUESTIONED her about her father; and she, glad to find other ears than the inattentive ones of her woodland friends, spoke unreservedly.
He was a wonderful man, this James Dalton, this "dear old Daddy." A wonderful man to look at: big, mighty of his hands, handsome, a full-bearded giant. With a great tender heart, too, forgetful at all times of self, striving only for his daughter's good and happiness, doing all of the thousand and one little things to please her, to make life run smoothly and brightly for her.
He had filled the long hours with instruction, had taught her to read and write, had read to her from the few books which had come with them into their exile. He had drawn pictures of busy cities with their factories and hotels, their churches and stores, and he had promised her that one day he would take her with him to see these marvelous things with her own eyes.
"And now," she ended, her eyes luminous with the dreaming of a golden fairyland whose gates were to be thrown open to her, "now we are going to see it all, very soon."
She fell suddenly silent, looking beyond the far horizon where her fancies led her.
"It is worth being raised like this," Farley was thinking, "just to be able to walk out into the other life—the life filled with the things man has done. To wander through it a little—and then to come back, to stay."
When all of the chill of the mountain morning had gone, drunk up by the warm, thirsty sun, she allowed her sick man to get up. Farley found that his wrist was more swollen, more painful than it had been last night, but began to hope that there were no bones broken in it, that he had sprained it badly and that in a few days it would mend itself. His right side was very nearly useless to him, the shoulder, lower ribs and leg being sore and stiff; but with a cane which she cut for him from a sapling in the grove he was able to hobble around slowly.
He realized, as he worked his way unsteadily to the door, that it would be many days before he could take up the trail which he had vowed over his dead partner's body to follow until he found its end.
The morning passed, and they had lunch together out under the trees at the edge of the grove. Still Dalton had not come in. But the girl seemed in no way surprised, saying lightly that her father often was gone a day or so without warning, that perhaps he had found and was following the tracks of a bear.
"I am going for my mail," she told him, laughing at his wonder. "Do you feel strong enough to come with me?"
"Mail?" he demanded incredulously.
"Yes! There may be a letter from Daddy. The post-office is over yonder, across the lake. If you think that you can walk down to the canoe, we can paddle over."
With the help of his cane, with the aid of her hand when they came to the rude steps in the cliff side, he finally reached the edge of the lake where they had left the canoe yesterday. Leaving him here for a little, she disappeared into the trees and came back presently, carrying the light boat upon her shoulders.
Helping him to get into it, she pushed out from the shore, jumped in and paddled out into the water, heading straight for the western side a half-mile away. Upon a little beach there, sandy and strewn with white pebbles she grounded the canoe; and with a word to him to wait while she asked for her letter, hurried to a big rock, flat-topped, set back a little from the water's edge.
Turning so that he could see what she did, she tossed toward him five pebbles which she had picked up from the rock. And then she came back to him.
"No letter?" he asked.
"Didn't you see it?" she laughed into his puzzled face. "Of course there was! Daddy has gone over yonder," pointing to the ridge of hills sweeping upward into the westward mountains. "How do I know? Those pebbles were in a row, pointing east and west, with the biggest one at this end, the littlest, our 'pointer,' at the west end. And since there were five pebbles, he means to be gone about five days. No, he didn't add a postscript saying what he was going for. We need sugar, and we need ammunition. Also—" with a little glance, purely feminine, at her skirt—"I shall want a new dress!"
"But," suggested Farley, "there is no town, no camp near enough for him to get those things and be back in five days?"
"He is generally gone longer," she admitted as she got back into the canoe and pushed off. "But it doesn't matter what he went for, does it? You'll have to put up with my sole company for the five days."