Son of the Wind/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
WILD THINGS AND TAME
A SIGNAL and a smile through the window. They had taken few words to understand each other, he thought. The promise of a morning among the hills with this responsive girl whetted anticipation sharp. The way his adventure led was going to be pleasant and very easy, the merest short-cut. If only he did not feel so deadly uncertain that there was anything at the end of it! He tried to make himself believe that what she had seen was indeed the thing he wanted; but he doubted that women saw things as they were. He knew he himself desired the perfect material object; that he was sensitive to every failure of what he saw to fulfil this, recognizing defect and perfection and calling them by name. But he suspected that around any sort of object a woman could fold her imagination and transform it to herself. He had seen miserable figures of men thus translated, and how would it be in the lesser matter of a horse? Those large imaginative eyes of hers looked very ready to believe wonders. No doubt they were starved for things wonderful, the thrill given to the nerves by the sight of unwonted beauty or strength—all the quicker to be credulous because of that. Had she seen a plow pony by moonlight? He smiled to think of her as she would be with her bright intensity leading him to the place where she had seen her vision, some place of water, no doubt, where the creature, whatever it was, came to drink, where sooner or later—perhaps to-morrow, perhaps the day after—he would see it.
The nearness of discovery made him restless. It would be hard to close his eyes before they had held that revelation. His sleep that night was thin, a veil across his consciousness. It dissolved with dawn, and he wondered whether they might not make an earlier start than half-past eight.
Getting away for a morning's ride seemed a simple business. As far as himself was concerned, the preliminaries were something to eat and saddling. But, for the girl, it appeared they were far more complicated, involving a multitude of employments and errands around and in and out of the house. As early as half-past six, when he first got up, looking through his curtain he saw her in the pale ruddy light, already intent with haste, a long lock of hair falling across her cheek, laying out mattresses and pillows to air on the ground. Later, hurrying down the outside stair with the thought of helping her at this task for which her back looked too slender, he found himself alone in a dead sea of ticking. The windows of the scholar's study were open, and through them he heard the sound of a hummed song, and saw her figure moving to and fro. Later yet, on his way through the hall, he glimpsed her in a room, sweeping vigorously, the center of a haze of dust which the new sun transformed to a golden vapor.
"You haven't forgotten, have you?" he asked looking in the door.
She formed "No," with her mouth through the thick, bright, floating atmosphere. She had this to do first, she explained, and advised him that breakfast was on table. She came into the dining-room herself presently, stayed long enough to drink some coffee and find the scholar's pipe for him, then was away. Carron heard the rattling of tins in the kitchen as if the preliminaries of dish-washing were hers. With verve and incredible despatch she seemed to be crowding her responsibilities for the day into an hour and a half, and only for the sake of a morning at liberty among the hills.
He saddled the two horses, putting the side-saddle on the chestnut, and brought them around to the steps of the old wing. He hoped to find Blanche Rader waiting there for him, but, as he rode up, he saw her standing on the side piazza talking to the boy George.
This individual started up to sight and memory like a gnome. He was standing close to the girl. She had hold of a button of his coat, establishing that communication of touch which seemed necessary to get his understanding, and the creature was looking up at her with eyes like a dog's. It set Carron's teeth on edge to see them thus. She was talking with him, not as Mrs. Rader had, but conversationally, with a sweet familiar vivacity. She gesticulated, seeming to employ the sign language as well as the language of words, finally waved her hands toward the drive and the trees, like Ariel dismissing some undersized, unassuming Caliban. He moved off down the steps, dragging his feet. She turned, saw Carron, nodded promisingly and ran in at the door.
He waited, fretting hotter than the chestnut. The whole front of the house seemed to have fallen asleep. But, from the back, presently he thought he heard voices. He thought they came from the other side of the door which closed the inner end of the front hall. He was not listening. The talking reached him as impersonally as the running of water or the flowing of wind; but, as it continued, wearing in on his consciousness, the sound of it grew on his ears as an argument. He sensed discordances in it. He fancied long questions and short answers. He got out of saddle and stood restively, every moment glancing behind him. It was monstrous to take time for discussion of domestic problems now with the golden point of the morning already turning pale.
At last the door at the end of the hall opened and let through immediate and near the sound of Mrs. Rader's voice. Blanche Rader was coming out, her hat pulled hard on her head and drawing on her gauntlets. But her mother had followed her, was still speaking to her, and had made her pause to listen by the natural expedient of clasping a hand around her daughter's arm. Held, arrested, the girl stood, still fronted for the door, but with head flung back, to give her mother an ear. Mrs. Rader was arguing. The girl listened perforce. Her expression was icy obstinacy, disclaiming everything said before it was heard. She made an inaudible, rapid answer, freed herself with the impetuous motion of a colt breaking through a fence, and came on toward him. A little of the fretted, haughty look which the interruption had brought stayed like a blush upon her face and darkened in her eyes, giving her a momentary beauty.
"Headstrong, touchy little devil," he thought, fancying her for the qualities he deplored. She stood in the doorway, this time with leggings covering her slender ankles, her old brown skirt aswing to her light motion, youth on tiptoe, inquisitive and filled with the conviction that life is joy. She had ruthlessly turned her back on her mother and had approached the stranger confidently, as if from him she expected all pleasant happy things.
"Am I to ride the pretty one?" she asked.
"She's yours, but look out for her. She hates the side-saddle. Why do you use such an antiquated piece of furniture?"
"I always have; I've had it since I was a little girl. Besides, I like it better." She slipped nimbly into her place. "All right," she said.
He released the bridle, and immediately the chestnut was half-way across the loop of the drive. He watched a moment to make sure that she was equal to the mare's dancings and side-glidings; then turned, and looked over his shoulder at the woman standing in the dark end of the hall. "It's all right," he said; "the mare is perfectly safe. I broke her myself."
Mrs. Rader looked at him with a dumb anxiety. Her smile, assumed as if by main force, from the conviction that she must, intensified the unconscious appeal she fixed on him.
"I'll bring her back safe and sound!" he declared. cheerfully, putting toe in the stirrup. "Queer thing," he thought as the mustang, with quick little feet, carried him abreast the mare's limber stride. He looked critically at his companion. She had coerced the chestnut from curves and gambits into a forward and sufficiently rhythmical motion, and was so occupied with the continuance of this that she did not feel the scrutiny. She had the body of the rider, supple back, thinking hands and wiry thighs. He thought he recognized in her the rider's mind, intuition before thought, and a sublime confidence.
"Your mother ought to have faith in your horsemanship," he remarked.
"Why, but she does! what makes you think she doesn't?" The question was shot at him with surprise.
"She seemed so mighty anxious when you came out, and afterward when we went off together I got the idea she was afraid of something."
"Oh," said Blanche Rader, "oh, I see!" and began laughing. "Perhaps it was on account of having a strange horse," she suggested, and looked at him with bright eyes of amusement.
He felt sulky. He could stand being laughed at, but to be surveyed as if his appearance somehow had a part in the joke was irritating.
"I feel very frivolous this morning," she explained. "There is nothing really to laugh at. It is only that mother thought I ought not to run off for a whole half day, and leave everything on her shoulders."
Carron understood that this did not fully account for Mrs. Rader's expression, but if the girl wanted to offer it as an explanation he could take it as such. "She expects you to have some time off, doesn't she?" he asked.
"Oh, yes, and of course I do." She was silent for a moment, manœuvering the chestnut between the white gate-posts—"but now, when we are so busy with the house, it is hard. We have to do everything ourselves. There is only George to help, and when I am away he doesn't help so very well."
"Doesn't understand much of anything that is said to him, does he?" Carron asked.
"Oh, yes, he understands a great deal, a great deal more than any one supposes. But if he doesn't want to do a thing he seems not to know anything; or else he hides. He has a little burrow down below the barn, and he goes into it like a rabbit. Lots of times I've pulled him out of it. He's very sharp." She bent her head broodingly, and light and shadow fluttered in an unending procession of curious little shapes across her face. "It's hard to tell sometimes just where his understanding begins and ends," she said. "Mother tries to reason with him, but you can't reason with George. He hasn't any. You have to persuade him to do things."
"I suppose he'll do anything for you?"
"He'll do more for me than for any one else; but that is only because he feels that we are friends, and then I take more time with him. I spent twenty minutes this morning persuading him to scrub down the stairs. I couldn't have come if he hadn't, but I felt wicked to do it. Poor George hates housework as much as I do!"
"I wish you wouldn't compare yourself to that half-witted lump."
"Why?"
"He's hideous."
"Is he?" She seemed to meditate the matter. "I know, of course, that he is different from us, but I know him so well, and when you do you don't notice people's faces—that is, you don't notice them if they are not pretty."
"No doubt," Carron said grudgingly. "Beauty being only skin deep, and all that, I suppose is all very beautiful, but I feel uncomfortable every time that boy comes near me—or you."
"How queer that is! I don't mind a bit. I suppose it's because I'm not reasonable."
Carron looked at her. The horses were moving slowly side by side, and the flicker above their heads had become a warm and constant shadow of branches which let through the influence of the sun without its positive light. It was thus her face should be seen, he thought, under translucent shades of leaves, where her skin looked paler and more perfect, and her eyes darker. "Of course, you are not reasonable," he affirmed. "I hope you are not even sensible. I've enough sense and reason myself to keep me bored for the rest of my life."
This thrust at her weaknesses, far from antagonizing her, seemed to please her to the edge of laughter. "What do you expect me to supply?" she asked, "the madness?"
"Yes, and the zest. Which way are you going to take me to-day?"
"Which way do you want to go?"
There was no hesitation in Carron's mind. He felt himself invited to his fate. "How about getting into the mountains?"
"Half a day," she mused. "It isn't enough time for them, but we can go toward them. We can get into the hills."
The horses quickened pace as the road drew downward, carrying them into the chilly shadow, with no sun behind it, that still covered the gulch. The smell of earth before sunrise was here, making them shiver and hurry. They turned into the main road, not retracing the way Carron had ridden two days before, but to the left, continuing along a grade that followed the course of the creek bed for a little, and then climbed higher, left the empty stream behind, and lifted them into the joy of open spaces and full sun. With the horses at hard trot, now drawn apart, now side by side, each wild with a desire to outstrip the other, the communication of the riders was no longer by words, but by community of looks, and in mutual sensation, feeling the same rhythm of motion, seeing the same shadows running toward them and flitting backward, with expanded nostrils taking in the same dry, pure air, and facing together the bright north. The sky was the color of pale turquoise and promised heat, but the sun still struck yellowly from the east, and where for a little way trees closed in about the road a chill lay in the shadow. They descended into shallow hollows; they breasted the baldish tops of long waves of land, each seeming to lift them a little higher than the last. On the left they saw flitting glimpses, now of a bit of blue sky-line, now the pale brown glimmer of a valley; on the right a rougher country, of forest; and beyond, the sharp, high heads of the chain of sugar-loafs, which marked the course of the cañon, were constant against the sky. Sometimes, with a wave of the arm toward them, she pointed out a peak, a tree, or a contortion of stone giving them their names. "There is Mount Wendel! That is Barney's Sword over there! That is the Witches' Well!" But she did not cry out upon their beauty or strangeness, nor call upon him to admire, any more than she would have remarked upon the appearance of friends she was introducing to him. She only looked at these things, and seemed to become more informed with their beauty, and more happy. She put back her hat, and the wind loosened the short locks of her hair. Her riding-skirt fluttered like a little flag.
Upon the curtain of the male landscape, sculptural, angular, definite, whose subtleties were of mass, and the relation of mass, so large they escaped the eye, she, with her flowing lines, and the curl of her body in the side-saddle, looked like a small runaway wisp. To see her now he could not believe that she had ever rattled dishes in a pan, or bound a dusting-cap around her head. She had changed like the dryad escaped from her tree, and the farther they entered into the wilderness of hills, the more wildly she seemed to enter into the mood of motion. They raced on the level, and around the sharp lips of declivities, the chestnut—the swifter—forging steadily to the front, until what Carron saw of his companion was a view of back-thrown shoulders, the back of a head, and flying horse's hoofs. So she drew ahead of him, dropping down into the shallow valley, and took the rise at an increasing speed.
He had had the feeling she was getting beyond him and away from him, and now he began to fear the mare was getting away from her. He noted this anxiously. It was useless to hope to catch up with her now. He rose in his stirrups and shouted her name, at the same time thinking that he might as well call to a bird. The brow of the hill was bare and sharp where the road curved over, and he saw the little figures of horse and woman poised there as if about to launch forth and take flight into the pale blue sky.
Flight was the illusion. They were stopping. He could see the rocking motion in the mare's head and shoulders as she came down in her pace. He saw they were turning and finally had stopped just upon the summit. There they stood, waiting for him. The girl was shading her eyes with her hand. "What do you want?" she called.
"To keep you from breaking your neck!" Her docility in halting at a word from him astonished him, but he was rather indignant at her coolness. "If you had let her keep that gait she would have been past handling," he said as he rode up.
"Oh, I don't think so."
"I do," said the horse-breaker with the air of concluding an argument.
She seemed quite unimpressed. "Anyway, we got up the hill quickly. See over there, that's where we're going."
Their way, which had carried them upward over long undulations of land, had finally led them out on the backbone of a watershed. He looked around the circle of the landscape, over hills and tops of trees. His glance followed where her finger pointed down the road, indefinitely descending in front of them, bending a little toward the left through a blind and lumpish-looking country. It had an appearance of having been sandpapered off with no edges left, nor characteristic excrescences in sight, nothing to catch the eye. He looked to the right. There lay the thing worth seeing, the line of eminences, the outriders of the cañon, visible now from heel to head. They were so near that he could count the trees on their sides and note the varying yellows of the earth. They made a wall, their feet in cairns of stone, their shoulders interlocked, only their crests—turret-like, steeple—like, cap-like—appearing separate on the sky. Each succeeding group seemed a little higher, a little more pronounced and dramatic in form, until the two just opposite the watershed appeared the commanders of the column.
One showed an almost perpendicular cliff, a waterfall of rock; the other was but half its height, a slide of earth, topped by a collar of sandstone, which in turn was crowned by a shape of rock like a great head. Helmet-like pieces clung on either side, and though there was nothing so grotesque as a projection upon its front to suggest any feature, nevertheless the smooth great face wore an expression implacable and mysterious as that of the sphinx. Wherein it lurked—a scarcely discernible beetling hinting at a forehead, a modeling that might have been a cheek, a floating shadow like a faint evanescent smile—was impossible to say. He discerned, but could not detect it.
Yet it was neither this head nor its neighbor which most struck his attention, but the thing which, together, they made. For one point of the helmet, thrusting out, overlapped the waterfall of stone. From there the side of the face cut under and away from it into the sharp hollow of the neck, and swelling again into the projecting collar, made thus a little window through which shone the strange blue jewel of the distance. He looked upon white lights and shadows, and lines of summits half seen and half imagined by the eye. In the setting of the solid wall it appeared a hundred times more bright and marvelous than with the graduated lines of distance between, nearer, yet more improbable.
"What is the name of that?" he said.
"What? where?" She looked in all directions but the right one. It seemed odd that she, who had pointed out so many objects less remarkable, should not be on familiar terms with this one, and instinctively look in the right direction. "There," he said.
Her head came around very slowly toward the thing his pointing indicated. "Oh!" her glance rested on it for a moment. "You mean that gap? It hasn't any name."
"It looks as if it had," Carron insisted. "I never saw one like it."
"Oh, there are lots of gaps," she said vaguely.
"But this one seems to me direct into the heart of the mountains."
"No, it is much farther than you think."
"Couldn't we get through?"
"I am afraid it is impossible."
"Have you ever tried?"
She turned around on him with a smile. She seemed to declare with that look of amusement how ridiculous such an attempt would be. "Do you want me to take your good mare and jump through?"
It was a very pretty little vision that brought up. "No, you've done all the equestrian feats you are going to do this morning," he declared, and let her lead him away.
He let her lead him from the subject as well as from the sight. It was not the time to press questions now, while they were borne along in the bright tide of action, their attention scattered, their minds lulled, their eyes satisfied with the sight of each other, as mere pictures—the sense of each other as persons, as magnets, cut off by the stream of the wind. It needed inaction, a sitting side by side looking over one constant piece of landscape, idle hands, broken talk, drifting into personal questions to set them venturing into the dangerous debatable land, the exchange of thoughts which sometimes brings such amazing confidences. He began to spy about for some temporary stopping-place. The watershed was already grown tall behind them, and they were winding endlessly in and out among a brown tumble of hills. These looked like the young children of the mountains, with unformed outcroppings of stone. Their growth of pine was scant and immature. The sun beat dazzlingly through it. He looked up wistfully at their little rocky crowns.
"Aren't you tired?" he asked the girl.
"I could keep on all day," she said.
"So could I, but I would so much rather sit on a cool rock under a tree and listen to your opinions of the universe."
She laughed. "I shall have to invent them then."
"That's easy enough. The problems of the universe are nothing to the problem of where two people are going to find some shade."
"I know where there is some," she said.
He gazed. Sky, hill, rocks, all bright and naked. "Where?"
"Just around the corner."
He thought she meant the next bend in the road, but she turned the mare's head promptly from the beaten track, and pricked the indignant beauty into as blind a bit of country as Carron ever cared to experience. They threaded, by Lilliputian passes, among tiny mountains. Which of the many doubles and twists was the "corner" she had so flippantly alluded to, was impossible to tell. She flickered around them easily and unhesitatingly. They were so many turns of the village street to her. He had all he could do to keep her in sight.
"How many times have you gone over this?" he inquired rather breathlessly, as they slipped through an acute angle between two knolls.
"All times!" she threw the equivocal answer over her shoulder, and bringing the chestnut's head about, made an impetuous set at a white-grassed hillside.
Up they went, over a surface ashy blond and slippery as glass—bad footing for horses, and not a tree in sight; but she lifted the mare with firm touch, without a stumble, and went like one who has knowledge and purpose in her direction.
"She's sure of herself! she's got a lot of confidence," he thought, and secretly applauded that virtue. It was one of his own, and he understood it.
They came out on a summit much larger than the little peaks around it and broken into two levels. The one that had faced their ascent was rocky and high, with odd individual little bushes dodging here and there; but, as the ground dropped away, the rock grew scanter and the bushes thickened, grew taller, drew closer together, developed mature form, until, upon the farther edge of the hill appeared a small company of cedars. They looked older than the hills around them, so low a man could scarcely stand upright under them, contorted, rigid as if cut of stone. It seemed as though no wind blowing could move such branches.
At the entrance of this prophet's retreat the girl slid, panting and smiling, into Carron's hands. "The only shade in this section of country," she remarked. "I found it all by myself." And, leaving him to fasten the horses, she turned into a little, lightly worn pathway, and walked forward through the trees. Following her presently, he found her sitting on the other side of the grove, leaning against an ancient cedar bole. Her head was dropped back until it rested upon the rough bark, and she was gazing up into the solid shade above her head. With a sigh he stretched himself full-length on the ground beside her. A feeling of peace was upon the place. Not a shadow moved on the bright blanched landscape before them. The mild gloom where they sat was unbroken by even a diamond point of light. Her body had passed from vivid activity into complete repose. Even the fingers that lay near his were relaxed. Her breast rose and fell gently with lengthening breath. When she looked at him she only moved her eyes. "Don't you think my treesare wonderful?" she said.
Carron looked critically upward. "They are a rather unusually hard-featured lot. I seem to see a good many fists shaken up there in those branches, and that old fellow you seem to have confidence in looks just ready to murder me."
"Oh, that's why they are beautiful. They are like a lot of brigands. I love them!" Her large white lids drooping showed but a narrow gleam between black lashes. "You should see them at sunrise. The light comes through them then, and they look as if they were on fire."
He raised himself a little on his elbow the better to consider this surprising girl. "You know the place rather well, don't you?"
"Yes. I've been here often. The third week in May the moon rises over there when the sun sets over there. It's cold, but very pretty, pink on one side and silver on the other, and the trees always black."
"You are not afraid?"
"Of what? The moon?"
"No, being alone."
"I'd rather be alone than with most people."
He was amused. "You seem to like odd hours."
She turned this over, another of the things she had never reflected upon. "I think I do—don't you?"
"I believe I've never had the chance to find out. My mother, a most excellent lady, brought me up on schedule time—so many hours walk before breakfast, so many spoonfuls of porridge, and so forth. She had my father well in hand before I appeared on the scene, and I seem to remember that we both went to bed when she told us to."
The girl looked scarcely ready to believe he wasn't joking. "How odd that seems! Father and I have always done exactly as we wanted."
"So I have noticed. Mrs. Rader is very gentle. I like women to be gentle. My mother was what is called capable. I used to wonder how she ran the church society, and the improvement society, and the other society, and the house, and still had so much energy left for me." His lip twitched with amusing memories. "She had the strongest convictions—she called them principles—and the strongest will of any human being I have ever known, and she had a way of imposing them. She kept me under that thumb of hers until after I was in college. It was in my junior year that I suddenly woke up to the fact that I didn't have to mind her. Funny the way it came, like a bolt clean out of the sky. I kicked over the traces then and there; I took what little was mine of the estate and came out here, out west."
"But then you were free. You could do what you wanted to then?"
"Oh, as to being free, I didn't know what it was. I thought it was like traveling through space above the earth; I thought it was going to be like one prolonged spree. Lord, how things narrowed down around me! I bought some ranching interests, and that showed me that I liked to run things. I've got more now, and a lot of men to work it, and all the incidental stuff to keep the two, the men and the land, going. And I get up at sunrise, and go to bed at ten o'clock in a way my mother would applaud; and everything on the ranch gets up and gets down when I tell it to, and I run that thing on schedule time!"
They both laughed. "It has taken me ten years," Carron said, "to find out that I am just like her."
Blanche Rader rested her chin on her hand, bringing her amused, inquiring gaze nearer to his. "But now you have run away for a vacation, haven't you?"
"Well, yes. What little there is of my father in me got stirring around this latter part of the summer. I couldn't stand it any longer. I think I was spoiling with work."
"Father told me that you had come here for the hunting."
Carron lifted one eyebrow. "Hunting will do. But what I have really come for is for a taste of the irresponsible life."
"Oh, me!" she sighed, "we never have anything else!"
"Then I shall expect you to do great things for me."
"Great things?" Her eyes grew larger.
"Yes—shake me up out of my stiffness. Wake me up. Show me—" he hesitated— "all of it!"
"Of what?"
"The odd hours—sunset, moonrise, whatever time out of the twenty-four you like the best."
Her eyes sparkled, and a smile curled the corners of her mouth.
"Well, which is it?" he asked, and felt an impulse to reach out and stroke her, she looked so sweet.
"The middle of the night!" she said it very softly, as though she feared the day might overhear her. Her eyes looked dreamy, but did not look away from him. They included him in the dream. Her hand plucked, one by one, the frail white grasses.
"I love to be out in it, it is like water, smooth and deep; like flood tide. It is so still you can think time has stopped for a moment." Her voice became a part of the silence. In the broad noon a sense of a shadow had fallen upon him. In the pause she seemed to have led him far, to the edge of his unasked question, to the edge of the wildest of possibilities.
"Will you take me out into the middle of the night, and drown me in it some time?" he asked. "Will you bring me out here?"
"Why here?"
"Well, hereabouts—over to the great stone face, perhaps."
A film of reserve dulled her wide-open bright eyes. They turned from his. "Why come so far? Three steps out of the house or seven miles, the feeling is just the same, isn't it?"
She left him expectant, baffled, and, to make the business harder, his mind kept straying from what he wanted to think of to her. The magnetic sense of her near him, the appearance of her, kept getting between him and his reason. In the cool shade the dusky ivory of her skin looked white and luminous, her eyes blue-black. She was herself a creature of night, of bright lights and velvety shadows, of qualities and textures rather than line and color. It was not the color of her mouth, at best but a pale red, nor even the form, but the expression of it when she smiled which so profoundly disturbed the senses. "I think the feeling would be very different out here," he said positively.
She glanced at him, no longer confidentially, sidelong and rather mockingly. "What would the people say to me, running out here in the middle of the night?"
"I thought you had been out here at that hour before?"
"Never!" She seemed to toss that idea lightly away with the cedar leaves she was tossing down the hill. "Sunset, moonrise, sunrise—those are different. I've come, though mother hated it, since I was quite a little girl. I come out here still once in a while at sunrise, you can't guess what for."
In spite of himself he was aware of suspense.
"To watch squirrels play." The mischievous bright face of a child peered provokingly through the woman's. "You think that is silly, don't you?" she asked, noting his relaxation of interest.
"Very! You can see squirrels play anywhere at any time of day."
"Ah, that shows how little you know about squirrels. They are too busy through the day—they have to work. Sunrise is their party. Over there on the hill opposite, and at the foot of this one there are lots of holes. I sit up here and see their heads pop out. I see their eyes first, and the next thing they are all up. They are as much fun to watch as rabbits, though they don't skip so high. If I keep perfectly quiet sometimes they come to the edge of the grove."
"And you tame them, I suppose?" For his life. he couldn't keep the irony out.
"No!" she scorned him. "I hate tame things. I love them to be wild!"
"Indeed?" His alert mind caught a significance here. "I thought women liked to coax things to eat from the hand."
She shrugged. "I don't know what most women like, but I know what I like. I tuck myself away behind these trees so they won't know I am here. That is why they come so close. They've never even seen me. I am very careful about that!"
The words struck a chord of memory. He had heard those very sentences before, though then they had been spoken by Rader's lips. "It has never even seen her. She has been very careful about that."
He looked around at the stunted trees, at the hills like tiny mountains with tiny cliffs of stone, his fancy placing the little playing animals. He felt like a man who is looking at the small working model of a great machine. It was all there, Lilliputian size. He waited, for he saw she was going to speak again without his prompting.
"Most people don't know what wild animals are like at all," she said. "They think of them always as hiding or running. When they think of the word 'wild' they think it means afraid. But really it is just the opposite of that. It is when the creatures are playing with one another, when they are just alone and don't suspect any human being, when they are themselves, that you can see what a wild creature really means."
"It means—?" Carron prompted, very cautious for fear of startling her.
"It means—oh, I don't see how I can put it into words. It means something quick and beautiful and heavenly fearless! There is a strange feeling you have about a creature that has never been touched by a man, and that has forgotten men."
"But there's a difference in degree. You have found that so?"
"Oh, yes. The squirrels, of course, as long as they don't see you, feel perfectly safe. Foxes are not so easy. But some are almost impossible to watch without their knowing—the larger animals, the ones that sniff you. Yet, if ever you can, when you can, though it's only for a moment, seeing them is the most wonderful thing in the world. It makes your heart beat. It's like seeing a spirit."
Carron lay for a moment without speaking, studying her face. "Did it never occur to you, when you are looking at such animals, that it would be even more wonderful to catch them?"
"No. I would rather see them killed than caught."
She blushed for the vehemence with which she had spoken.
Carron bit his lip. "My dear young friend, do you think that is quite sensible?"
"No," she said, "I don't. But I don't think it is sensible either to want always to catch things and break them." A word had slipped out that showed too plainly of what she was thinking, what vision was continually before her eyes.
He curbed his tongue. For the world he would not have startled her out of her unconsciousness.
"Men are always shooting things, or taming them, or controlling them," she went on, vivid with argument, "and they always say they do it because it's reasonable. But I don't believe it is reasonableness that makes them do it. It is just a very strong, blind sort of feeling. They want to and so they will!"
He kept on smiling for quite a long minute, because he was too irritated to venture speech.
"So, you think I am unreasonable?" he said at last. That had been the thorn which had pricked him so deep.
"Oh, not you!" Her eyes shone all their surprise that he could have made such a stupid blunder. "I only meant men in general. You are—" she hung on the pronouncement of his sentence, then let it fall with intense gravity—"you are different."
Every woman who had known him had probably passed the same sentence on him, but now for the first time he really heard it, and at the touching confidence with which it was spoken he felt his ears grow hot. His pulse too was perhaps a little warmer. "I broke in my mare myself," he told her warningly.
"You must think me a fanatic. I have never seen a horse broken, and I never will if I can help it; but, of course, horses bred on ranches have to be broken, I suppose. That is rather different."
Carron had a passing vision of the particular shoulder of white desert sand in the lee of which, three years ago, he had roped the frantic, kicking thing which was now the chestnut mare. There had been blood in the foam of her nostrils, and he recalled she had nearly succeeded in killing them both; but it had been a great moment and now she was a perfect saddle-horse.
"And the wild ones? What would you do with them?"
"Why, let them alone, of course."
His lips opened—remained open, silent, speechless.
"Why not?" she insisted. "Wild horses are the wildest things in the world; they are the only trampling, wild creatures left, and there are such a few of them! If you catch them, tame them, why, then they're gone: but if you leave them and let them go, then you have them for ever!" She flung her hands apart, the palms open with a gesture as free as if they had released liberty itself.
His eyes were on her; but out of the tail of one he had sighted a thing she was unaware of, since it was behind her. A shadow had slid forward from the shelter of the abutting end of a hill and paused, quivering with arrested motion. The horses in the grove fussed. He heard them tugging at their halters, then the shrill whinny of the chestnut mare startled both man and woman.
"Look there!" Carron said. He indicated the shadow. He had startled the girl, but, strangely enough, she did not look. Shrinking, drawing in her arms close to her body, she stared straight at him, for a moment; then made a rapid start as if she would have flung herself forward upon him. He had an instinct she meant to cover his eyes. He caught her by one wrist and, with his hand against her cheek, gently forced her head around in the direction of his pointing.
The body that had cast the shadow stood there, plain in view, a small, blackish horse, with head flung up, staring upon them. As her eyes took it in she gave a quick little sigh, catching in her throat, and he felt her tense muscles relax.
"Oh," she said, and again, "Oh! I thought—I thought it was—"
"Well, what did you think it was?" he demanded.
"Oh, a lion, a tiger, an elephant!" She began to shake with helpless laughter. Hysteria was the note in it. "You looked so frightened!" she gasped.
Carron's pulses indeed were going fifty to the minute. "You frightened me," he declared.
The black horse was surveying them, nostrils quivering with suspicion. All at once he wheeled and galloped across the open space, and with a graceful, sailing motion vanished through another overlapping fold of hills.
It was a spirited sight. The animal was more than usually well made; but Blanche Rader's glance followed it almost with indifference. "I have never seen him before," she observed. "I wonder who owns him."
"Sure he isn't one of those fellows we've been talking about?" Carron tested her.
"Never!" Her full glance scorned his ignorance. "Didn't you see—he stood and looked at us. And then, when he ran, he wasn't terrified as they are; and he is too small! Oh, he's nothing like, he isn't the same thing!" She looked at Carron doubtfully. "I begin to believe you have never seen a wild horse!"