Silvermane Page 6

  Suddenly she flung herself into Tappan’s arms. The act amazed him. It seemed to have both the passion of a woman and the shame of a girl. Before she hid her face on Tappan’s breast, he saw how the rich brown had paled, and then flamed.

  “Tappan…! Take me away…take me away from here…from that life down there,” she cried in smothered voice.

  “Madge, you mean take you away…and marry you?” he replied.

  “Oh, yes…yes…marry me, if you love me. I don’t see how you can…but you do, don’t you? Say you do.”

  “I reckon that’s what ails me, Madge,” he replied simply.

  “Say so, then!” she burst out.

  “All right, I do,” said Tappan with heavy breath. “Madge, words don’t come easy for me…but I think you’re wonderful, an’ I want you. I haven’t dared hope for that, till now. I’m only a wanderer. But it’d be heaven to have you…my wife…an’ make a home for you.”

  “Oh…oh!” she returned wildly, and lifted herself to cling around his neck and to kiss him. You give me joy…oh, Tappan, I love you. I never loved any man before. I know now…an’ I’m not wonderful…or good. But I love you.”

  The fire of her lips and the clasp of her arms worked havoc in Tappan. No woman had ever loved him, let alone embraced him. To awake suddenly to such rapture as this made him strong and rough in his response. Then all at once she seemed to collapse in his arms and began to weep. He feared he had offended or hurt her and was clumsy in his contrition.

  Presently she replied. “Pretty soon…I’ll make you beat me. It’s your love…your honesty…that’s shamed me. Tappan, I was party to a trick to…sell you a worthless ranch. I agreed to…try to make you love me…to fool you…cheat you. But I’ve fallen in love with you, an’, my God, I care more for your love…your respect…than for my life. I can’t go on with it. I’ve double-crossed Jake, an’ all of them. Dear, am I worth lovin’? Am I worth havin’?”

  “More than ever, dear,” he said.

  “You will take me away?”

  “Anywhere…anytime, the sooner the better.”

  She kissed him passionately, and then, dislodging herself from his arms, she kneeled and gazed earnestly at him. “I’ve not told all. I will someday. But I swear now on my very soul…I’ll be what you think me.”

  “Madge, you needn’t say all that. If you love me…it’s enough. More than I ever dreamed of.”

  “You’re a man. Oh, why didn’t I meet you when I was eighteen instead of now…twenty-eight, an’ all that between. But enough. A new life begins here for us. We must plan.”

  “You make the plans, an’ I’ll act on them.”

  For a moment she was tense and silent, head lowered, hands shut tightly. Then she spoke. “Tonight we’ll slip away. You make a light pack that’ll go on your saddle. I’ll do the same. We’ll run off…ride out of the country.”

  Tappan tried to think, but the swirl of his mind made any reasoning difficult. This dark-eyed, full-bosomed woman loved him, had surrendered herself, asked only his protection. The thing seemed marvelous. She kneeled there, those dark eyes on him, infinitely more appealing than ever, haunting with some mystery of sadness and fear he could not divine.

  Suddenly Tappan remembered Jenet. “I must take Jenet,” he said.

  That startled her. “Jenet…who’s she?”

  “My burro.”

  “Your burro. You can’t travel fast with that pack beast. We’ll be trailed, an’ we’ll have to go fast. You can’t take the burro.”

  Then Tappan was startled. “What! Can’t take Jenet? Why, I…I couldn’t get along without her.”

  “Nonsense. What’s a burro? We must ride fast…do you hear?”

  “Madge, I’m afraid I…I must take Jenet with me,” he said soberly.

  “It’s impossible. I can’t go if you take her. I tell you, I’ve got to get away. If you want me, you’ll have to leave your precious Jenet behind.”

  Tappan bowed his head to the inevitable. After all, Jenet was only a beast of burden. She would run wild on the ridges and soon forget him and have no need of him. Something strained in Tappan’s breast. He had to see clearly here. This woman was worth more than all else to him. “I’m stupid, dear,” he said. “You see I never before ran off with a beautiful woman. Of course, my burro must be left behind.”

  Elopement, if such it could be called, was easy for them. Tappan did not understand why Madge wanted to be so secret about it. Was she not free? But then he reflected that he did not know the circumstances she feared. Besides, he did not care. Possession of the woman was enough.

  Tappan made his small pack, the weight of which was considerable owing to his bags of gold. This he tied on his saddle. It bothered him to leave most of his new outfit scattered around his camp. What would Jenet think of that? He looked for her, but for once she did not come in at mealtime. Tappan thought this was singular. He could not remember when Jenet had been far from his camp at sunset. Somehow Tappan was glad.

  After he had his supper, he left his utensils and supplies as they happened to be and strode away under the trees to the trysting-place where he was to meet Madge. To his surprise she came before dark, and, unused as he was to the complexity and emotional nature of a woman, he saw that she was strangely agitated. Her face was pale. Almost a fury burned in her black eyes. When she came up to Tappan and embraced him almost fiercely, he felt that he was about to learn more of the nature of womankind. She thrilled him to his depths.

  “Lead out the horses an’ don’t make any noise,” she whispered.

  Tappan complied, and soon he was mounted, riding behind her on the trail. It surprised him that she headed downcountry and traveled fast. Moreover, she kept to a trail that continually grew rougher. They came to a road, which she crossed, and kept on through darkness and brush so thick that Tappan could not see the least sign of a trail. At length, anyone could have seen that Madge had lost her bearings. She appeared to know the direction she wanted, but traveling upon it was impossible owing to the increasingly cut-up and brushy ground. They had to turn back and seemed to be hours finding the road. Once Tappan fancied he heard the thud of hoofs other than those made by their own horses. Here Madge acted strangely, and, where she had been obsessed by a desire to hurry, she now seemed to have grown weary. She turned her horse south on the road. Tappan was thus able to ride beside her, but they talked very little. He was satisfied with the fact of being with her on the way out of the country. Woman-like perhaps, she had begun to feel the pangs of remorse. Sometime in the night they reached an old log shack by the side of the road. Here Tappan suggested they halt, and get some sleep before dawn. The morrow would mean a long hard day.

  “Yes, tomorrow will be hard,” replied Madge, as she faced Tappan in the gloom. He could see her big dark eyes on him. Her tone was not one of a hopeful woman. Tappan pondered over this, but he could not understand because he had no idea how a woman ought to act under such circumstances. Madge Beam was a creature of moods. Only the day before, on the ride down from the rim, she had told him with a laugh that she was likely to love him madly one moment and scratch his eyes out the next. How could he know what to make of her? Still, an uneasy feeling began to stir in Tappan.

  They dismounted and unsaddled the horses. Tappan took his pack and put it inside. Something frightened the horses. They bolted down the road.

  “Head them off,” cried the woman hoarsely.

  Even on the instant her voice sounded strained to Tappan, as if she were choked, but, realizing the absolute necessity of catching the horses, he set off down the road on a run. He soon succeeded in heading off the horse he had ridden. The other one, however, was contrary and cunning. When Tappan would endeavor to get ahead of it, it would trot briskly on. Yet it did not go so fast but what Tappan felt sure he would soon catch it. Thus, walking and running, he got quite a long distance from the cabin befo
re he realized that he could not head off this wary horse. Much perturbed in mind Tappan hurried back.

  Upon reaching the cabin, Tappan called to Madge. No answer! He could not see her in the gloom or the horse he had driven back. Only silence brooded there. Tappan called again. Still no answer! Perhaps Madge had succumbed to the weariness and was asleep. A search of the cabin and the vicinity failed to yield any sign of her, but it disclosed the fact that Tappan’s pack was gone.

  Suddenly he sat down, quite overcome. He had been duped. What a fierce pang tore his heart. But it was for loss of the woman—not the gold. He was stunned and sick with bitter misery. Only then did Tappan realize the meaning of love and what it had done to him. The night wore on, and he sat there in the dark and cold and stillness until the gray dawn told him of the coming of day.

  The light showed his saddle lying where he had left it. Nearby lay one of Madge’s gloves. Tappan’s keen eye sighted a bit of paper sticking out of the glove. He picked it up. It was a leaf out of a little book he had seen her carry, and upon it was written in lead pencil:

  I am Jake’s wife, not his sister. I double-crossed him and ran off with you and would have gone to hell for you. But Jake and his gang suspected me. They were close on our tail. I couldn’t shake them. So here I chased off the horses and sent you after them. It was the only way I could save your life.

  * * * * *

  Tappan tracked the thieves to Globe. There he learned they had gone to Phoenix—three men and one woman. Tappan had money on his person. He bought horse and saddle, and, setting out for Phoenix, he let his passion to kill grow with the miles and hours. At Phoenix he learned Beam had cashed the gold—$12,000. So much of a fortune! Tappan’s fury grew. The gang separated here. Beam and his wife took the stage for Tucson. Tappan had his trouble in trailing their movements. Gambling dives and inns and freighting posts and stage drivers told the story of the Beams and their ill-gotten gold. They went on down into Tappan’s country, to Yuma and El Cajon, and then San Diego in California. Here Tappan lost track of the woman. He could not find that she had left San Diego, nor any trace of her there. But Jake Beam had killed a Mexican in a brawl and had fled across the line.

  Tappan gave up the chase of Beam for the time being and lent his efforts to finding the woman. He had no resentment toward Madge. He only loved her. All that winter he searched San Diego. He made of himself a peddler as a ruse to visit houses, but he never found a trace of her. In the spring he wandered back to Yuma, raking over the old clues, and so on back to Tucson and Phoenix.

  This year of dream and love and passion and despair and hate made Tappan old. His great strength and endurance were not yet impaired, but something wonderful died out of him. One day he remembered Jenet. “My burro,” he soliloquized. “I had forgotten her…Jenet!”

  Then it seemed a thousand impulses merged into one and drove him to face the long road toward the rimrock country. To remember Jenet was to grow doubtful. Of course, she would be gone. Stolen or dead or wandered off. But then, who could tell what Jenet might do? Tappan was both called and driven. He was a poor wanderer again. His outfit was a pack he carried on his shoulder. But while he could walk, he would keep on until he reached that last camp where he had deserted Jenet.

  October was coloring the cañon slopes when he reached the shadow of the great wall of yellow rock. There was no cabin where the Beams had lived—or claimed they lived—or a fallen ruin, crushed by snow. Tappan saw the signs of a severe winter and heavy snowfall. No horse or cattle tracks showed on the trails.

  To his amazement, his camp was much as he had left it. The stove fireplace, the iron pots appeared to be where he had left them. The boxes that had held his supplies were lying here and there, and his canvas tarpaulin, little the worse for wear or the elements, lay on the ground under the pine where he had slept. If any man had visited this camp in a year, he had left no sign of it.

  Suddenly Tappan espied a hoof track in the dust. A small track—almost oval in shape—fresh! Tappan thrilled through all his being. “Jenet’s track, so help me God,” he murmured.

  He found more of them, made that morning, and, keen now as never before on her trail, he set out to find her. The tracks led up the cañon. Tappan came out into a little grassy clearing, and there stood Jenet as he had seen her thousands of times. She had both long ears up high. She seemed to stare out of that meek, gray face, and then one of the long ears flopped over and drooped. Such perhaps was the expression of her recognition.

  Tappan strode up to her. “Jenet…old girl…you hung ’round camp…waitin’ for me, didn’t you?” he said huskily, and his big hands fondled her long ears.

  Yes, she had waited. She, too, had grown old. She was gray. The winter had been hard. What had she lived on when the snow lay so deep? There were lion scratches on her back and scars on her legs. She had fought for her life.

  “Jenet, a man can never always tell about a burro,” said Tappan. “I trained you to hang ’round camp an’ wait till I came back. Tappan’s burro, the desert rats used to say. An’ they’d laugh when I bragged how you’d stick to me where most men would quit. But brag as I did, I never knew you, Jenet. An’ I left you…an’ forgot. Jenet, it takes a human bein’…a man…a woman…to be faithless. An’ it takes a dog or a horse or a burro to be great. Beasts? I wonder now…. Well, old pard, we’re goin’ down the trail together, an’ from this day on Tappan begins to pay his debt.”

  III

  Tappan never again had the old wanderlust for the stark and naked desert. Something had transformed him. The green and fragrant forests and brown-aisled, pine-matted woodlands, the craggy promontories and the great colored cañons, the cold-granite water springs of the Tonto seemed vastly preferable to the heat and dust and glare and the emptiness of the wastelands. But there was more. The ghost of his strange and only love kept pace with his wandering steps, a spirit that hovered with him as his shadow. Madge Beam, whatever she had been, had showed to him the power of love to refine and ennoble. Somehow he felt closer to her here in the cliff country where his passion had been born. Somehow she seemed nearer to him here than in all those places he had tracked her.

  So, from a prospector searching for gold, Tappan became a hunter seeking only the means to keep soul and body together. All he cared for was his faithful burro Jenet, and the loneliness and silence of the forestland. He learned that the Tonto was a hard country in many ways, and bitterly so in winter. Down in the breaks of the basin it was mild in winter, the snow did not lay long, and ice seldom formed. But up on the rim, where Tappan always lingered as long as possible, the storm king of the north held full sway. Fifteen feet of snow and zero weather was the rule in dead of winter.

  An old native once said to Tappan: “See hyar, friend, I reckon you’d better not get caught up in the rimrock country in one of our big storms. Fer if you do, you’ll never get out.”

  It was a way of Tappan’s to follow his inclinations, regardless of advice. He had weathered the terrible midnight storm of hot wind in Death Valley. What were snow and cold to him? Late autumn on the Mogollon Rim was the most perfect and beautiful of seasons. He had seen the forestland brown and darkly green one day, and the next burdened with white snow. What a transfiguration! Then, when the sun loosened the white mantling on the pines, and they had shed their burdens in drifting dust of white and rainbowed mists of melting snow, and the avalanches sliding off the branches, there would be left only the wonderful white floor of the woodland. The great rugged brown tree trunks appeared mightier and statelier in the contrast, and the green of foliage, the russet of oak leaves, the gold of the aspens turned the forest into a world enchanting to the desert-scarred eyes of this wanderer of the wasteland.

  With Tappan the years sped by. His mind grew old faster than his body. Every season saw him lonelier. He had a feeling, a vague illusive thing, that instead of his bones bleaching on the desert sands, they would mingle with the pine mats
and the soft fragrant moss of the forest. The idea was pleasant to Tappan.

  One afternoon he was camped in Pine Cañon, a timber-sloped gorge far back from the rim. November was well on. The fall had been singularly open and fair, with not a single storm. A few natives happening across Tappan had remarked casually that such falls sometimes were not to be trusted.

  This late afternoon was one of Indian summer beauty and warmth. The blue haze in the cañon was not just the blue smoke from Tappan’s campfire. In a narrow park of grass not far from camp, Jenet grazed peacefully with elk and deer. Tappan never heard the sound of a rifle shot. Wild turkeys lingered there, to seek their winter quarters down in the basin. Gray squirrels and red squirrels barked and frisked, and dropped the pine and spruce cones, with thud and thump, on all the slopes.

  Before dark a stranger strode into Tappan’s camp, a big man, of middle age, whose magnificent physique impressed even Tappan. He was a rugged, bearded giant, wide-eyed and of pleasant face. He had no outfit, no horse, not even a gun.

  “Lucky for me I smelled your smoke,” he said. “Two days for me without grub.”

  “Howdy, stranger,” was Tappan’s greeting. “Are you lost?”

  “Yes an’ no. I could find my way out down over the Mogollon Rim, but it’s not healthy down there for me. So I’m hittin’ north.”

  “Where’s your horse and pack?”

  “I reckon they’re with the gang that took more of a fancy to them than me.”