Son of the Wind/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
RADER
TO speculate on Rader's character would have been a vain thing, worthy of a philosopher. If Rader's personality was reflected in this hotel on the fringe of civilization, with its patchwork of new upon old, then Rader most probably was a broken-down speculator, clinging to the pretensions of his past. But Carron knew that people are never what they are deduced, and seldom what they are expected to be. It would be time enough to think of Rader's character once he had appeared. The important question now was, where was he?
Doubtless he was away hunting. If that were so, would he be back to dinner? or would he be away several days, and was it a question of hanging on here until he returned? That, Carron thought, would not be so difficult in itself. He felt rather confident of overcoming Mrs. Rader's doubts. But to wait, when time never waits, when everything was so pressing, when this strange latter summer, lingering in the first of September, might at any time chill, and the sky send torrents of rain! And, even if the heat held, what guarantee had he of the stability of his dearly fancied object? If only it had been insensate—a gold mine, anything that could be depended on to remain in one place!
He turned restlessly and shut the outer door. Standing still and awaiting events was a thing he hated. He crossed the room, opened the door into the hall, and stood idly listening. Not a sound of voices, no arrival of wheels, not even the rustle of a woman's skirt! He wandered down the stair, and found the hall below like a dark pocket. While he stood, hesitating, wondering in which direction to grope, and into what sort of place he might precipitate himself supposing he would find a door, one almost in front of him opened, the light of a candle spotted the dark, and beside it Mrs. Rader's face.
At sight of him so close before her she started. The candle flame quivered. "How you frightened me!" she panted.
"I'm sorry," said Carron mildly, "but I'm so hungry!"
"Dinner is ready. I was just coming to call you. You know," she looked at him accusingly, "I told you that I would."
He held open the door for her, and, after a funny flutter, as if she were not sure that her guest ought not to go first, she let him follow her through.
A lamp was on the table—and three places were set. Carron's pulse of anticipation rose; but no third person came to occupy that place, no mention. Of such a one was made, and the meal was not kept waiting. Carron and Mrs. Rader were opposite each other. She had discarded her white head covering, and showed plentiful brown hair, streaked with gray, drawn back smoothly from her small, irregular-featured face. In spite of fine multiplying lines and weathered skin, it still kept a vague hint of the charm of her youth, though just wherein that charm had consisted was difficult to say. Carron had never seen a face so limited to one expression—an impersonal, alert, attentive, practical expression—and he had never seen such uncommunicative eyes. For the sake of enlivening them a little he began a story of some adventures of his two days before on the Sacramento boat. She listened attentively with a faint propitiatory smile; but he thought she was more struck by the fact that he talked to her than by what he said. Her struggle to do her part in the conversation was touching. Her capacity, as he had seen, was prompt enough in practical matters. No doubt she could deal successfully with the more important problems of a hotel, from people trying to leave without paying to people dropping in without baggage. But to keep alive a conversation with a man, and a stranger, was a burden to her. He watched her, bolt upright, wrestling with the problem of his intellectual entertainment as if they were at a dinner of state. He wondered whether her extreme formality was due to shyness on her part, or some idiosyncrasy of his that made her uneasy.
She let her end of the conversation flag and, for lack of his response, fall; and made that scarcely perceptible stir that women do before rising. He had heard it rustle in satin skirts, around far-off dinner tables, as he heard it now in the calico gown of this woman of the broom.
He leaned forward and stopped her with a question that seemed in no way designed to stop her. "Is there much hunting around here, Mrs. Rader?"
"There's lots of game, if that's what you mean," she said, "but almost no one ever comes up so far. If you're going higher up still I'm afraid you'll find it very lonely."
The idea of going hunting for company's sake tickled Carron. "Then perhaps you'll let me stay on here a few days," he suggested.
"Oh, I'm afraid—" she began.
"Perhaps Mr. Rader can take a day off, and give me more points about this part of the country than my guide can."
"But he—"
"I mean," Carron explained, "as soon as he gets back. He's not to be gone long, is he?"
"Why, he isn't away," she exclaimed. "He's here!"
"Oh!" Carron murmured. He looked keenly at her. Involuntarily he glanced at the empty place.
"He often doesn't come in to supper," Mrs. Rader explained.
"Well, then—" he hesitated. Finding himself so suddenly all but upon Rader was embarrassing as well as exciting. "Do you think he's busy this evening?"
In her turn Mrs. Rader was surprised. "He isn't busy, exactly, but I'm afraid," she smiled faintly, "he doesn't know much more about hunting than I do."
"No doubt you both know much more than I do. Do you think perhaps he could spare me a few minutes?"
"Oh, yes." She looked at him more curiously than she had since his first arrival. He thought she was about to offer another objection, but she only said, "Would you like to see him now?"
"If it is convenient." He tried to make the answer sound casual enough, but he was beginning to have the most uneasy expectations of Rader.
She opened the door, and took up one of the lighted candles. "Then you will step this way. He's in the study."
Again Carron recognized the unexpected—that Rader was to be found in a study instead of in an office. It seemed, not only that hotels had lives out of season, but that their owners had lives outside of hotel-keeping. Mrs. Rader's candle led down a long, black passage. The flame threw no smaller light on the darkness than her chance phrases and expressions had thrown on the possibilities of her husband's personality. But there had been glimpses out of the obscurity in passing—such gleams as the candle caught from window-panes, or pine branches beyond them—chance illuminations of words upon individualities, that put edge to Carron's anxiety.
The light, which had led him like a will-o'-the-wisp, stopped now at a door, closing the end of thepassage. This, Mrs. Rader knocked upon, and, after a moment, opened. "Some one to see you," she said to one inside, and Carron stepped over the worn threshold, down a worn step into a little round room; and found himself facing Rader, who had risen from his chair, and, with his glasses gleaming above the high arch of his brow, with his shadow towering on the wall behind him, was looking out at Carron from twilight walls of books.
He seemed bewildered with this sudden introduction into his solitude of a strange presence. His large blue eyes blinked slowly, like eyes just awakening; and though his long face presently collected a sort of courteous attention, his gaze still seemed to focus on some point remote from the present moment and place. If there was any one in the world less likely than the woman to have the certain peculiar information Carron wanted, he thought it was this individual, this long figure of a scholar, roused from meditation. All Carron's unsubstantial hopes were tottering. The man on the road appeared the merest liar, the whole thing the wildest of chases. Yet, in spite of that, he felt he was going to see it through. There was nothing that had ever happened to him that he had failed to see through. The quality in him that never released what it had once taken hold of until all was out of it, that took the last chance and found it more alluring than the first, urged him forward.
"My name is Francis Carron," he said. "There is my card. Mr. Rader, I believe?"
Rader looked a little startled with the rapidity with which the sentences were shot at him. "You came to see about the Bronson folio?" he asked doubtfully.
Carron had it in his heart to laugh when he thought of what a business he had brought to the dry leaves of a library. The idea of introducing himself as a buyer of old editions danced a moment in his brain; but he had spent his life being himself with an intensity which defied the hope of dissimulation now. "I came to see you on business, Mr. Rader," he explained, "but not about a folio—in fact, not about books at all."
The scholar glanced wistfully toward the door which the woman had closed after her. "Then, perhaps you had better see Mrs. Rader," he began. "I—"
But Carron's wits were hard on Rader's second conclusion. "No, it isn't about the hotel either. I am afraid it is you yourself I want to see; but, if I disturb you now—"
The scholar made a deprecatory gesture. "I beg your pardon. Sit down. I am absent-minded, only that—Mr.—" he fumbled helplessly in his memory.
"Carron," the other prompted.
"Carron," Rader repeated, and moved his glasses down his forehead, clamping them upon the high bridge of his nose, and through these, considered the card. The owner of it watched him keenly, but undoubtedly that assemblage of letters on white paper held no idea for Rader beyond the fact that it was a name. With a faint sigh, he let himself stiffly down into his chair again, withdrew his fingers from the leaves of a book, and by that motion seemed to relinquish all hope of waving his visitor aside. The lamp on the desk between them lighted the two men to each other, the scholar leaning a little forward, looking puzzled, but scarcely curious.
Carron knew he was in for it now, on the instant. All his plans for approaching his question gradually, through the common ground of similar interests, hunting and the activities of mountaineers, vanished. It was across a gulf of widely differing thought that he must pitch his question at the scholar, the more flatly the better to hold the attention that seemed each moment to be at the point of deserting him.
"It's not quite a piece of business I want to talk to you about," he said. "It is a favor I want to ask of you. There has been a rumor through the Sacramento Valley, and through the mining towns below here of a stallion at large among these mountains."
Rader's high eyebrows flickered, and his head moved a little forward on his long neck. It was only an intensifying of his look of polite attentiveness. "A horse you have lost?"
It forced a reluctant smile out of Carron. "No, Mr. Rader, not a horse that any one has lost; a horse that has never been found; a horse that I very much wish to find for myself; not a mustang, not a range pony, but a blooded stallion, fifteen hands, black and perfect; not a horse that's been left too long on the range and become wild, but the original wild horse that no one has ever ridden, or ever caught, or rarely, if ever, seen."
He got out the last words with an effort, fully conscious, now that they were spoken and ringing in the air, of how improbable, fantastic and laughable they sounded. He braced himself to meet Rader's ridicule, or, at the best, his amusement. But the scholar, with his long body bent a little farther forward over the table, was only gazing at him with a face of increasing perplexity, with a slow-dawning, troubled look of being aware of something he was going to recognize if only he had a little more time.
Carron watched him, and pushed one sentence further.
"No one seemed to be sure how much truth there was in the story, or whether there was any at all, but they seemed to think, if any one could tell me, you could."
The effect of this was more than he had bargained for. Rader let his relaxed hands fall on the table, and stared in amazement. "I can—they think!" he murmured, seeming to catch at these words as the chief points of his confoundment. "Who told you that? Who do you mean by they?"
"Then you do know about it?" Carron said quietly.
The scholar seemed not to have heard.
"People in different parts of the valley have directed you to me, on this errand?" he persisted.
"Why, that's a strange thing!"
Looking into his candid and bewildered eyes, Carron knew he was going to be frank with Rader at the expense of the man on the road. "For a fact, Mr. Rader," he confessed, "it was one person who directed me here, only one; and he didn't want to. I had to work to get it out of him."
Rader's expression came around slowly from flat incredulity to a fresh query. "Well, why shouldn't he direct you?"
"That was what I thought," said Carron, as puzzled now by Rader as Rader was by the man on the road, "but I supposed it was because you had asked him not to."
"I?" Rader repeated. He seemed to have the greatest difficulty in connecting himself with the matter at all. "Why the deuce should I ask him not to?"
Carron stared. "If you haven't, some one has." The scholar silently confronted this cryptic response, and presently it appeared that his perplexity had lessened, had been transformed into a slow, ruminating consideration. "What makes you think that?" he asked.
"Because he had it badly on his conscience that he ought not to have told it."
Rader gave a slight upward motion of his head, and a lift of his eyebrows as if at a word more he might accept that explanation. "Where did you meet this fellow?"
"I was on my way to the city from Nevada with some horses," Carron said, "when I ran across him in Truckee last night. I got in early in the evening and found the train wouldn't leave until after midnight. This chap was hanging around the livery, when I put my horses up."
"What did he look like?" Rader hastily interrupted.
Carron was aware that he had the scholar interested at last, and the power to speak rose in him to meet the flattery. "Oh, middle height, small jointed, a little knock-kneed, if I remember; black hair, Napoleonic profile minus the strength—young ranchman in his Sunday clothes." Rader ticked off the characteristics on his fingers while he listened. "He had some whisky in him," Carron continued, "and was rather free about disparaging my stock. He handled them all over, not very cleverly, nearly got himself kicked, and then trailed me up to the hotel to tell me he could throw a stone across the road and kill a horse anywhere in the Sacramento Valley that could beat mine at every point. He was rather glib with his tongue, and I had four hours to wait, so I invited him to come in and give me his ideas on horseflesh. There's a little back room in the top story, looking up a stone dump that they call a mountain. I gave him one pony of rye to start him. We sat there for six hours.
"He began by giving his experiences in horse-breaking, though from a sort of callous on his hands, and the way he handled his feet I thought he had been more accustomed to horses in front of a plow than under saddle. Then he got off on famous horses he had seen, most of which had died before he was born; and, finally, of course, he began to wind himself up on a horse he owned that could beat everything in the state of California. Just there it struck me he'd graduated from the lying stage. Something in the way he described that horse—those particulars that a man can't invent—made me think it wasn't a piece of imagination. He built up a stock farm around it in a few minutes, but it was easy to see that the real thing in it was the horse. So I pinned him down, and kept him pinned—and not too much rye—until we'd got rid of the stock farm, canceled the fact that the horse was his, and got down to what looked like bedrock—which is just the story I have told you, that the creature was a wild horse running free in these mountains. The only difference he made then was that he swore on his sacred honor that he was the only man in the state of California who had ever seen it."
Rader took his long chin in his hand and meditated for a moment. "Xenophon," he said, "states that wild horses inhabit countries of plains, travel in bands, and that the stallions are not found separately from the mares."
"Quite right he is," Carron assented, as if Xenophon were easily his contemporary; "a lone stallion is as rare as a singing bird at sea; but still there are exceptions. Once in a while a dry summer brings it about. A horse drifts into the mountains in search of water. And then, there was another thing that made me think perhaps there was something in the fellow's story. If you want to know, it's the thing that brought me here. When he described that horse to me I thought he described a horse that I had seen once myself."
"Ah!" but the word did not express Rader's enlightenment—only a fresh perplexity. "But, I thought you said—"
"One moment. I'm coming to that presently. I only wanted you to see that I wasn't so drunk or so visionary as that poor devil who brought me along, though I own that I was pretty much excited. He wanted a hundred dollars for taking me up country to the place where the creature was supposed to be. I told him I'd give him twenty dollars for that, and a hundred if I found the horse. The end of the business was that I didn't take the midnight for the city. Instead, I put him, and myself, on the overland at one o'clock, and one of my animals into the box-car, because she'd carry us up country faster than these mountain rats; changed at Reno for Beckwith, and, at seven-thirty this morning, I started from Beckwith with him still pretty well under the influence.
"It didn't occur to me that he would turn tail at the last moment. People, once they are with me in a thing, usually stick." He said this without consciousness, merely as a fact which he had seen demonstrated, and the scholar accepted it with the naïveté equal to his own. "At first I thought it was the drink dying out of him, but there was something more in his behavior than that. It was queer! The further we went, the more we got up into the mountains, the sulkier he grew, until finally he denied up and down everything he had told me, ate his words like a sword swallower, and when we got away up the cañon, he insisted on getting out of the buggy and leaving me. Fortunately I hadn't paid him his money yet, and it was on that account I got the two words I did get out of him. 'Try Rader's,' he said and as soon as he had said it you should have seen his face! Scared—scared to death! He looked as if he wanted to kill me."
Rader slowly rubbed one dry hand over the other. He looked troubled, even vaguely distressed. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I thought certainly he would never have spoken of it."
Carron wrinkled his forehead. "I'm sorry, too, Mr. Rader, if he has abused your confidence. But you see the horse is public property. It never occurred to me that there could be any sworn oaths of secrecy about it."
"Oh, he hasn't abused my confidence," Rader said.
"I see!" Carron saw at once a great deal that had been obscure to him. The thing seemed an endless chain. "I suppose you know whose confidence he is abusing, then?"
Rader leaned back in his chair, his head still bent forward, looking up inquiringly from under his brows. "Before I go any further, do you mind if I ask you a question or two?"
"As many as you like. Go ahead."
"I don't know much about horses, very little more about men; I don't know that either have ever mattered much to me, but I wish that I could understand, I wonder if you could make me, why you have come so far, and taken as much trouble to find a single horse as most men take to find a gold mine?"
This time it was Carron who was surprised. "I've gone almost as far, and given almost as much trouble for a good many horses. Why, good Lord, a man has to if he wants to get them!"
"But why want to? There are enough horses in the world!"
"Well—suppose it is the finest horse in the world?"
Rader's high eyebrows went higher in incredulity. "What, with Arabia, and our own thoroughbred stock?"
"Of course, I mean the finest wild horse. That makes all the difference!"
"H'm—yes," Rader agreed. "I can see, there is something in that; but you said you had taken as much trouble in getting other horses!"
Carron knitted his forehead. "I don't know how to explain it—I've always done it. I suppose any
"Oh, he hasn't abused my confidence," Rader said
The scholar's eyes brightened. "Yes, yes! That's true—the very thing." He looked at the books behind him, reached out and touched a volume as though he would have liked to speak of it; then his eyes returned with a bright and almost boy-like interest to his companion. "Do I understand you to mean you are by profession a catcher and breaker of horses?"
"Ever since I was thirteen, though I haven't called it a profession until the last five years. But I know more about it, and care more about it, and can do it better than anything else in the world. Over in Nevada they know my name pretty well. I hold a hundred square miles that are mine for five years, and I save this union of forsaken states about twenty thousand dollars annually in the creatures that aren't killed getting them under saddle."
"You mean you are sort of an official?" The spark of Rader's interest dimmed.
"Lord, no! I only mean I do save horseflesh, and more or less the country profits. So do I, a little, but not much. It's more the fun of the thing. You've no idea, from what you see of bridle-wise horses, what the wild ones are like. You know, a broken horse is like a woman—nervous, brain in a tea-cup, shying at a shadow. But these fellows, the herd leaders, are tough as whip-cord, smarter than a wolf and quicker than a snake. They'll get away from you through a crack in a fence.
"Last spring I got on the trail of a stallion that, I'll take my oath, was a good deal stronger, cleverer and faster than any other horse in the world. The Indians said he was sired by the North Wind. A couple of them claimed to have seen him, and their description made me very curious. I chased him over southern Nevada, saw the tail of the herd once or twice, but never the leader. But we kept them edging over westward until about the last week of last month, a hundred miles short of the state line, I thought I had him. I even got the herd into the runway and stampeded for the corral; but there must have been a weak place in the fence—I don't know now how it happened! I should have said it was impossible; but, just before the first of the corral canvas, the leader swerved and went through the stockade as if it had been paper. His mares were going too fast to stop. We took the whole of them, and he got off alone." Carron moistened his lips. "I saw him. He went close by me: black, not a blemish, star on his forehead, a white fleck on his breast, left foot white and mane like a flag. To watch him take the rise of the rolling ground, and clip into the hollow, and rise again was like watching a flying bird. I saw him, and I named him on the spot, 'Son of the Wind,' because he is the greatest, fastest, loneliest thing that travels over earth—and he's mine!"
Leaning back, his fingers propping his chin, Rader had followed the recital with the same bright, intense gaze with which he might have followed an epic. Now, when the pause came, he smiled and brought down his hand lightly on the arm of his chair. "Diomedes!" he said. His eyes rested on the young man's throat left bare by a soft collar, the lithe line of his back, his hands thrust forward on the table, the sleeves pushed up above the wrists, showing the breadth and sharp lift of the muscle, as if these things were what the story had explained to him.
It was extraordinary to Carron that the real significance of his tale had gone so completely over Rader's head—or perhaps under his feet. "Don't you see," he explained, "I think that horse and this may be the same."
The scholar looked suddenly brought down to earth, and, as always when there, rather at a loss.
"Which one?" he asked blindly.
"The one I lost in Nevada is the one here in these mountains. I lost him only a couple of hundred miles from here. My horse was separated from his herd, so is this one. Then, word for word, the description tallies. At least, I hope"—he looked. anxiously at Rader—"that you are going to tell me it does."
"I? But," Rader objected, "I have never seen such a thing!" The idea of it seemed almost to frighten him.
Carron looked at him hard. It was not possible to construe those deep-set, clear, blue eyes as anything but candid. "But you know some one who has?"
Rader was silent.
"One thing," Carron persisted. "You do know for a fact that there is such a creature?"
The scholar looked down. "Do we, any of us, know for a fact a thing we have never seen?"
The blood flew to Carron's face. He felt held back, baffled, played with! For Rader's manner, with all its frank simplicity, was not the manner of ignorance. "I think you do know quite well," Carron said, "but for some reason you prefer not to say."
"For a good reason," Rader answered. He leaned his head back against his chair, and plunged his hands in his capacious pockets. His long, gray face, and the whole figure of the man, shrunken by reading, seemed slowly expanding, thawing themselves at some genial glow. "In the first place, it is not my business. In the second place, I have no interest in it, except, I confess, what you've given me." Again his eye went over Carron's physical magnificence. "I own I wouldn't mind to see you astride of the finest horse in America, or—pardon me—did you say the world? Unfortunately I can't."
The half interrogatory, half propitiatory look with which he punctuated his negatives took away all the sting. But the negative, nevertheless, was there.
"Couldn't you," Carron urged, "tell me the name of this person who seems to hold a property right on a wild animal?"
"As the fellow on the road told you?" Rader inquired.
Carron, with a reluctant smile, had to admit the scholar's acuteness.
"But don't you think," he argued, "that you ought to give your friend the chance of refusing my offer himself, or accepting it if he wants to?"
Rader shook, and his eyes flashed a thousand twinkles. "That is a pretty keen argument, my boy, but it seems to me you're taking a deal for granted!" He undoubled his length from his old chair. "Suppose we drop my hypothetical friend, and talk about yourself." He stood, with his long legs straddled, looking down upon Carron, who sat at sharp struggle with his temper, exasperation and disappointment descending on him at once. "Suppose you stay over a few days, get a rest and look around. Perhaps you can get a little shooting," Rader suggested.
Carron grinned in spite of himself to hear his own fabrication come back upon him like a boomerang. "Thanks," he said dryly, "I only bargained with Mrs. Rader to stop overnight."
"Well, bargain with me then."
"I have," said Carron. "No use!"
They looked at each other appreciatively. Rader reached a hand and patted Carron's shoulder. "Stay over a few days—stay over!" he said almost gaily. "It may interest you to look around the place! No knowing what may turn up!"
Carron raised his eyes quickly. Rader's manner was significant. His face did not hold a double meaning; 'twas rather as if the inspiration behind had been unconscious.
"If I do," Carron said, "will you go hunting with me?"
Rader looked down at himself. "I haven't been hunting since I left college. But we'll find some one to go with you, certainly we'll find some one."
It may have been a banality, but to Carron's conscious ears it rang like a promise. "Thank you," he said. "I shall be delighted." He rose. "It's been mighty good of you to listen to me. I've taken a lot of your time."
"Have you?" said Rader. "I never know what time it is."
Carron looked at his watch. "Just ten after eleven. See here, if I'm going to stay over for a week I'll have to send a wire. Is there any way of getting one out to-morrow?"
Rader thought. "There's the stage, gets down to Beckwith about noon, passes here at six-thirty. If you'll write out your message to-night, I'll have some one meet them with it in the morning."
"Some one that you can depend on?"
"Oh, no doubt!" Rader said.
The pen was already in Carron's hand. He made a clear space among the papers on the table and wrote. The words presented to the casual eye would have been unintelligible, but the inner meaning of the code was clear, and to the point enough:
"Ship stakes, canvas and small stuff to-day for Beckwith. No delay.
F. C."
As he signed these initials a gentle knock came on the door and a low voice spoke— "Alex, here's your candle. I suppose you will sit up. I'm going to bed."
The scholar glanced at Carron. "I'd better tell her," he murmured. He opened the door. "Hermione!" he called. The flowery sound—name of an ideal woman in a tale—struck quaintly on Carron's ears.
Mrs. Rader was already half-way down the passage. She paused, looking back, lamp in hand, while Rader walked toward her. From the threshold of the study Carron could see them conferring there in the flickering light and shadow. There was something charming, winning in the scholar, in the very slouch of his figure, with its loose-hanging clothes; something pathetic and appealing in the woman's face, tired now at the end of her day's work, and in her brown dubious-glancing eyes. They had been looking up toward her husband; but suddenly she turned them toward Carron with a furtive, half-frightened look—not one she had meant him to see; an involuntary look that had got away from her.
It disturbed him, that any woman should regard him in that way. He had a hasty impulse to reassure her that there was nothing in his presence that need alarm her. The look was withdrawn almost before he could take it in, but the impression of it remained with him. "She doesn't want me to stay, does she?" he inquired after the woman had retreated, and the study door was shut. "Bless my soul," the scholar had declared, "why not? Of course, she's delighted!"
Carron accepted the courteous rebuke, but kept his first opinion on the subject. He liked Mrs. Rader; he liked being liked for its own sake, and that air she had of suspecting him touched his vanity.
She, whom he had thought no problem at all in the beginning, was evidently not confiding. It was the man, the shy, self-absorbed scholar, who had so readily given his allegiance.
Unconscious partisan Rader was! He warmed himself at Carron's vitality as at a fire. Stretching out his long legs beneath the table, lounging on his background of books, "How about some sherry?" he proposed. "I expect to be up for a couple of hours more."
Carron had not realized how strongly his story, or himself, or both together, had touched the scholar's fancy until, after the interruption at an advanced hour, he showed an inclination to resume their companionship. He had pushed aside his solitary self-evolved thoughts for the talk of the horse-breaker just as he had put aside his Greek book to make room for the glasses. Still from a distance, still with detachment, he questioned his companion. He asked first what university, as if for a sign of freemasonry. Carron confessed to not graduating from Harvard. The idea of not graduating, of voluntarily leaving such institution, was difficult for Rader to understand. What college had been his own, and what honors there, he did not volunteer—one of the obscure, austere New England institutions no doubt—but it made no difference about the college. The universal stamp was on him of the man of the world of books. Not scientist, not psychist, not a student of any practical knowledge, but reader of histories in dead languages, dreamer over poetry in archaic forms, pursuer of the derivations of words through volumes; to whom Herodotus was as recent as Guizot, and both contemporary with himself; to whom the Bucolics were more real than the boys driving cattle down the cañon valley.
In such company as this, book company, he sat, lived; and, from such a world he looked distantly at the young man as at a symbol of the other outside active world. It was of this other world only that he inquired; and Carron put aside the questions that were foremost in his own mind, and surrendered himself to satisfying the awakened curiosity.
His adventures, drifting in the north and south of the large west, his present profession—the excitements and the dangers of it—the look of the country there as if hell had blasted it, and the rough life in it, he told them all. The rougher the more it semed to strike Rader's imagination. He had a curious faculty of seeing resemblances in real things, men, horses and mountains, to frescoes, bas-reliefs and palaces; he had, too, a disconcerting way of breaking into a narrative with: "Tell me, what is it in a man that makes him do a thing like that?"
The horse-breaker had never interrogated himself in such fashion, though he had seen, far and wide, the curious, unaccountable things that men will do. He could not answer Rader, though the scholar made a dozen suppositions for himself upon each point, some glancing at what might have been the truth, some wide the possibility. He could only tell still more things to be wondered at, and he perceived the more he told, the more he gave of himself, the more response he had from his companion. He was beginning to understand that he was in Rader's hands like a new book. His interest for the scholar was not on what common ground they could meet, but into what fresh fields Carron could lead him. He had led him a long way to-night.
It was late, one o'clock, when they parted. Carron's brain boiled with the excitements of thirty-six hours. Its fatigues rested on him not a feather. He found his room dark and warm. The fire had fallen to a red spark. Soft branches moved against the window screens. He set his candle down on the table, and wondered how much there was in Rader's promisings. "Wonderful old boy!" he thought. "A man might believe he was deep in the business, but I've half a notion he is only what he claims, an honorary member of the secret, with a practical sense of honor—only practical thing about him!" It was practical indeed, for it hadn't prevented Rader's inviting him to stay, to stay longer and see what would turn up. It hadn't even prevented Rader's throwing in his way a hunting companion, a person nameless, but somehow it had entered Carron's head that it was a person of importance in his affairs. The thing had only been suggested. It had all been done in a tone unaware of its own significance, and it was that which had made the significance so great.
Faint sounds outside caught his ear, neither the shrill crickets nor the broad, soft sound of the awakening wind, but more regular, muffled and mechanical. He puffed out his light and went, cautious-footed, to the window. It was the window looking from the front of the wing, commanding the loop of the drive and the steps. Some one was standing just within the hood of the porch, for from the entrance streamed a narrow shaft of light, shining with the peculiar floating, wavering gleam which is only given by a light held in the hands. From the beat of hoofs and the scarcely perceptible sound of wheels it was a single rig that was approaching. The light shone presently on the horse's head, flashed in his eyes, slipped along his flank as he swung around, and finally stopped as the buggy stopped, resting upon the back part of the wagon body, leaving the hollow between the dashboard and the hood in black shadow.
"You are earlier than I used to be, Bert," Rader's voice spoke from the veranda. Beside his clear, singing tone the replying voice was slovenly in enunciation, and muffled, but Carron heard enough to get its timber and quality, and his heart quickened as the idea shot through his mind. Was this the person, that mysterious third person who had tied Rader's tongue and put the man on the road so much in awe? A young man! Not Rader's contemporary, but his own. Carron saw the difficulty doubled. It would make the stallion harder to come at than buried treasure. He pressed his face to the glass and peered down. A vague form, dark on darkness, was mounting up the steps, slowly, as if encumbered with a cloak. Rader had moved forward. Carron could see his, bent head and his extended hand. A hand was reached out of the shadow, and, for a moment, in the narrow beam of light appeared an arm, long, bare almost to the shoulder, and so shapely, so suggestive of dimples, and, against the black shadows around it, so white that for an instant thought deserted him. An arm, without a clear seen body, suddenly thrust upon him from darkness—a woman's arm where he had expected a man's face! "What in the world!" Carron muttered softly, holding his breath with doubt of what was to follow. "What the devil!" he ended. For Rader suddenly raised the lamp, the arm disappeared in a fold of darkness, the whole form, still unseen, passed and disappeared under the piazza roof, and Carron's eyes, following down the beam of light, discovered at the end of it the figure of a man standing upon the lowest step looking up at Rader, the unexpected and rather amazing sight of "the man on the road."