Cabin Gulch Page 5

  Presently they sat down, crossed-legged, one on each side of the tarpaulin, and began the meal. That was the strangest supper Joan ever sat down to; it was like a dream where there was danger that tortured her, but she knew she was dreaming and would soon wake up. Kells was almost imperceptibly changing. The amiability of his face seemed to have stiffened. The only time he addressed her was when he offered to help her to more meat or bread or coffee. After the meal was finished, he would not let her wash the pans and pots, and attended to that himself.

  Joan went to the seat by the tree, near the campfire. A purple twilight was shadowing the cañon. Far above on the bold peak the last warmth of the afterglow was fading. There was no wind, no sound, no movement. Joan wondered where Jim Cleve was then. They had often sat in the twilight. She felt an unreasonable resentment toward him, knowing she was to blame, but blaming him for her plight. Then suddenly she thought of her uncle—of home—of her kindly old aunt who always worried so about her. Indeed, there was cause to worry. She felt sorrier for them than for herself, and that broke her spirit momentarily. Forlorn, and with a wave of sudden sorrow and dread and hopelessness, she dropped her head upon her knees and covered her face. Tears were a relief. She forgot Kells and the part she must play. But she remembered swiftly—at the rude touch of his hand.

  “Here! Are you crying?” he asked roughly.

  “Do you think I’m laughing?” Joan retorted. Her wet eyes, as she raised them, were proof enough.

  “Stop it.”

  “I can’t help . . . but cry . . . a little. I was th-thinking of home . . . of those who’ve been father and mother to me . . . since I was a baby. I wasn’t crying . . . for myself. But they . . . they’ll be so miserable. They loved me so.”

  “It won’t help matters to cry.”

  Joan stood up then, no longer sincere and forgetful, but the girl with her deep and cunning game. She leaned close to him in the twilight.

  “Did you ever love anyone? Did you ever have a sister . . . a girl like me?”

  Kells stalked away into the gloom.

  Joan was left alone. She did not know whether to interpret his abstraction, his temper, and his action as favorable to her or not. Still she hoped and prayed they meant that he had some good in him. If she could only hide her terror—her abhorrence—her knowledge of him and his motive! She built up a bright campfire. There was an abundance of wood. She dreaded the darkness and the night. Besides, the air was growing chilly. So, arranging her saddle and blankets near the fire, she composed herself in a comfortable seat to await Kells’s return and developments. It struck her forcibly that she had lost some of her fear of Kells and she did not know why. She ought to fear him more every hour—every minute. Presently she heard his step brushing the grass, and then he emerged out of the gloom. He had a load of firewood on his shoulder.

  “Did you get over your grief?” he asked, glancing down upon her.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  Kells stooped for a red ember, with which he lighted his pipe, and then he seated himself a little back from the fire. The blaze threw a bright glare over him, and in it he looked neither formidable nor vicious or ruthless. He asked her where she was born, and, upon receiving an answer, he followed that up with another question. He kept this up until Joan divined that he was not so much interested in what he apparently wished to learn as he was in her presence, her voice, her personality. She sensed in him loneliness, hunger for the sound of a voice. She had heard her uncle speak of the loneliness of lonely campfires and how all men working or hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces in the embers and be haunted by soft voices. After all, Kells was human. And she talked as never before in her life—brightly, willingly, eloquently, telling the facts of her eventful youth and girlhood—the sorrow and the joy and some of the dreams up to the time she had come to Camp Hoadley.

  “Did you leave any sweethearts over there at Hoadley?” he asked after a silence.

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “A whole camp full,” she replied with a laugh, “but admirers is a better name for them.”

  “Then there’s no one fellow?”

  “Hardly . . . yet.”

  “How would you like being kept here in this lonesome place for . . . well, say forever?”

  “I wouldn’t like that,” replied Joan. “I’d like this . . . camping out like this now . . . if my folks only knew I am alive and well and safe. I love lonely dreary places. I’ve dreamed of being in just such a one as this. It seems so far away here . . . so shut in by the walls and the blackness. So silent and sweet. I love the stars. They speak to me. And the wind in the spruces. Hear it? Very low, mournful. That whispers to me. And I dare say, in the daytime . . . tomorrow I’d like it here, if I had no worry. I’ve never grown up yet. I explore and climb trees and hunt for little birds and rabbits . . . young things just born, all fuzzy and sweet . . . frightened . . . piping or squealing for their mothers. But I won’t touch one for worlds. I simply can’t hurt anything. I can’t spur my horse or beat him. Oh, I hate pain!”

  “You’re a strange girl to live out here on this border,” he said.

  “I’m no different from other girls. You don’t know girls.”

  “I know one pretty well. She put a rope around my neck,” he replied grimly.

  “A rope?”

  “Yes, I mean a halter, a hangman’s noose. But I balked her.”

  “Oh. A good girl?”

  “Bad! Bad to the core of her damned black heart . . . bad as I am!” he exclaimed with fierce, low passion.

  Joan trembled. The man, in an instant, seemed transformed, somber as death. She could not look at him, but she must keep on talking.

  “Bad? You don’t seem bad to me . . . only violent, perhaps, or wild. Tell me about yourself.”

  She had stirred him. His neglected pipe fell from his hand. In the gloom of the campfire he must have seen faces as ghosts of his past.

  “Why not?” he queried strangely. “Why not do what’s been impossible for years . . . open my life. It’ll not matter . . . to a girl who can never tell. Have I forgotten? God, I have not! Listen so that you’ll know that I’m bad. My name’s not Kells. I was born in the East, and went to school there, till I ran away. I was young, ambitious, wild. I stole. I ran away . . . came West in ’fifty-one . . . to the gold fields in California. There I became prospector, miner, gambler, robber . . . and road agent. I had evil in me, as all men have, and those wild years brought it out. I had no chance. Evil and gold and blood, they were all one and the same thing. I committed every crime till no place, bad as it might be, was safe for me. Driven and hunted and shot and starved . . . almost hanged! And now I’m twenty-nine. Kells of that outcast crew you named the Border Legion . . . every black crime but one . . . the blackest . . . and that, by God, haunting me, itching my hands tonight.”

  “Oh, you speak so . . . so dreadfully!” cried Joan. “What can I say? I’m sorry for you. I don’t believe it all. What . . . what black crime haunts you? Oh, what could be possible tonight . . . here in this lonely cañon . . . with only me?”

  Dark and terrible, the man arose. “Girl,” he said hoarsely, “tonight . . . tonight . . . I’ll . . . what have you done to me? One more day . . . and I’ll be mad to do right by you . . . instead of wrong! Do you understand that?”

  Joan leaned forward in the campfire light, with outstretched hands and quivering lips, as overcome by his halting confession of one lost remnant of honor as she was by the dark hint of his passion.

  “No . . . no . . . I don’t understand . . . nor believe!” she cried. “But you frighten me . . . so! I am all . . . all alone with you here. You said I’d be safe. Don’t . . . don’t . . .”

  Her voice broke then, and she sank back exhausted in her seat. Probably Kells had heard only the first words of her appeal, for he took to striding back and forth in the circle of campfire light. The scabbard with the big gun swung against his leg. It grew to be
a dark and monstrous thing in Joan’s sight. A marvelous intuition born of that hour warned her of Kells’s subjection of the beast in him, even while with all the manhood left to him he still battled against it. Her girlish sweetness and innocence had availed nothing, except to mock him with the ghost of dead memories. He could not be won or foiled. She must get her hands on that gun—kill him—or? The alternative was death for herself. She leaned there, slowly gathering all the unconquerable and unquenchable forces of a woman’s nature, waiting to make one desperate, supreme, and final effort.

  FIVE

  Kells strode there, a black silent shadow, plodding with bent head, as if all about and above him were demons and furies.

  Joan’s perceptions of him, of the night, of the inanimate and impondering black walls, and of herself were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. Their life did not breed cowardice or baseness. Joan knew the burning in her breast—that thing which influenced, and swept through her like a wind of fire, was hate. Yet her heart held a grain of pity for him. She measured his forbearance, his struggle, against the monstrous cruelty and passion engendered by a wild life among wild men at a wild time. And, considering his opportunities of the long hours and lonely miles, she was grateful, and did not in the least underestimate what it cost him; how different from Bill or Halloway he had been. But all this was nothing, and her thinking of it useless, unless he conquered himself. She only waited, holding on to that steel-like control of her nerves, motionless and silent.

  She leaned back against her saddle, a blanket covering her, with wide-open eyes, and, despite the presence of that stalking figure and the fact of her mind being locked around one terrible and inevitable thought, she saw the changing beautiful glow of the fire logs and the cold pitiless stars and the mustering shadows under the walls. She heard, too, the low rising sigh of the wind in the balsam and the silvery tinkle of the brook, and sounds only imagined, or nameless. Yet a stern and insupportable silence weighed her down. This dark cañon seemed at the end of the earth. She felt encompassed by illimitable and stupendous upflung mountains, insulated in a vast dark silent tomb.

  Kells suddenly came to her, treading noiselessly, and he leaned over her. His visage was a dark blur, but the posture of him was that of a wolf about to spring. Lower he leaned—slowly—and yet lower. Joan saw the heavy gun swing away from his leg; she saw it black and clear against the blaze; a cold blue light glinted from its handle. Then Kells was near enough for her to see his face and his eyes that were but shadows of flames. She gazed up at him steadily—open-eyed, with no fear or shrinking. His breathing was quick and loud. He looked down at her for an endless moment, then, straightening his bent form, he resumed his walk to and fro.

  After that for Joan time might have consisted of moments or hours, each of which was marked by Kells, looming over her. He appeared to approach her from all sides; he found her wide-eyed, sleepless; his shadowy glance gloated over her lithe slender shape, and then he strode away into the gloom. Sometimes she could no longer hear his steps, and then she was quiveringly alert, listening, fearful that he might creep upon her like a panther. At times, he kept the campfire blazing brightly; at others, he let it die down. And these dark intervals were frightful for her. The night seemed treacherous, in league with her foe. It was endless. She prayed for dawn—yet with a blank hopelessness for what the day might bring. Could she hold out through more interminable hours? Would she not break from sheer strain? There were moments when she wavered, and shook like a leaf in a wind, when the beating of her heart was audible, when a child could have seen her distress. There were other moments when all was ugly, unreal, impossible, like things in a nightmare. But when Kells was near or approached to look at her, like a cat returned to watch a captive mouse, she was again strong, waiting, with ever a strange and cold sense of the nearness of that swinging gun. Late in the night she missed him; for how long she had no idea. She had less trust in his absence than his presence. The nearer he came to her, the stronger she grew and the clearer of purpose. At last the black void of cañon lost its blackness and turned to gray. Dawn was at hand. The horrible endless night, in which she had aged from girl to woman, had passed. Joan had never closed her eyes a single instant.

  When day broke, she got up. The long hours in which she had rested motionlessly had left her muscles cramped and dead. She began to walk off the feeling. Kells had just stirred from his blanket under the balsam tree. His face was dark, haggard, lined. She saw him go down to the brook and plunge his hands into the water and bathe his face with a kind of fury. Then he went up to the smoldering fire. There was a glow, a somberness, a hardness about him that had not been noticeable the day before.

  Joan found the water cold as ice, soothing to the burn beneath her skin. She walked away then, aware that Kells did not appear to care, and went up to where the brook brawled from under the cliff. This was 100 paces from camp, although in plain sight. Joan looked around for her horse, but he was not to be seen. She decided to slip away the first opportunity that offered, and on foot or horseback, any way to get out of Kells’s clutches, if she had to wander lost in the mountains till she starved. Possibly the day might be endurable, but another night would drive her crazy. She sat on a ledge, planning and brooding, till she was startled by a call from Kells. Then slowly she retraced her steps.

  “Don’t you want to eat?” he asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” she replied.

  “Well, eat anyhow . . . if it chokes you,” he ordered.

  Joan seated herself while he placed food and drink before her. She did not look at him and did not feel his gaze upon her. Far asunder as they had been yesterday, the distance between them today was incalculably greater. She ate as much as she could swallow and pushed the rest away. Leaving the campfire, she began walking again, here and there aimlessly, scarcely seeing what she looked at. There was a shadow over her, an impending portent of catastrophe, a moment standing, dark and sharp, out of the age-long hour. She leaned against the balsam, and there she rested in the stone seat, and then she had to walk again. It might have been long, that time, she never knew how long or short. There came a strange flagging, sinking of her spirit, accompanied by vibrating, restless, uncontrollable muscular activity. Her nerves were on the verge of collapse.

  It was then that a call from Kells, clear and ringing, thrilled all the weakness from her in a flash, and left her strung and cold. She saw him coming. His face looked amiable again, bright against what seemed a vague and veiled background. Like a mountaineer he strode. And she looked into his strange gray glance to see unmasked the ruthless power, the leaping devil, the ungovernable passion she had sensed in him.

  He grasped her arm and with a single pull swung her to him.

  “You’ve got to pay that ransom!”

  He handled her as if he thought she resisted, but she was unresisting. She hung her head to hide her eyes. Then he placed an arm around her shoulders and half led, half dragged her toward the cabin.

  Joan saw with startling distinctness the bits of balsam pine at her feet and pale pink daisies in the grass, and then the dry withered boughs. She was in the cabin.

  “Girl, I’m hungry . . . for you,” he breathed hoarsely. Turning her toward him, he embraced her, as if his nature was savage and he had to use a savage force. If Joan struggled at all, it was only slightly, when she writhed and slipped, like a snake, to get her arm under his as it clasped her neck. Then she let herself go. He crushed her to him. He bent her backward—tilted her face with hard and eager hand. Like a madman, with hot working lips, he kissed her. She felt blinded—scorched. But her purpose was as swift and sure and wonderful as his passion was wild. The first reach of her groping hand found his gun belt. Swift as light her hand slipped down. Her fingers touched the cold gun—grasped with thrill on thrill—slipped farther down, strong and sure
to raise the hammer. Then with a leaping strung intensity that matched his own, she drew the gun. She raised it while her eyes were shut. She lay passively under his kisses—the devouring kisses of one whose manhood had been denied the sweetness, the glory, the fire, the life of a woman’s lips. It was a moment in which she met his primitive fury of possession with a woman’s primitive fury of profanation. She pressed the gun against his side and pulled the trigger.

  A thundering muffled hollow boom! The odor of burned powder stung her nostrils. Kells’s hold on her tightened convulsively, loosened with strange lessening power. She swayed back free of him, still with tight-shut eyes. A horrible cry escaped him—a cry of mortal agony. It wrenched her. She looked to see him staggering, amazed—stricken—at bay, like a wolf caught in cruel steel jaws. His hands came away from both sides, dripping with blood. They shook till the crimson drops spattered on the wall, on the boughs. Then he seemed to realize, and he clutched at her with those bloody hands.

  “God Almighty!” he panted. “You shot me! You . . . you, girl! You fooled me! You knew . . . all the time! You damned she-cat! Give me that gun! Man or beast . . . I believe . . . I loved you!”

  “Kells, get back! I’ll kill you!” she cried. The big gun, outstretched between them, began to waver.

  Kells did not see the gun. In his madness he tried to move, to reach her, but he could not; he was sinking. His legs sagged under him, let him down to his knees, and but for the wall he would have fallen. Then a change transformed him. The black turgid convulsed face grew white and ghastly, with beads of clammy sweat and lines of torture. His strange eyes showed swiftly passing thought—wonder—fear—scorn—even admiration.