Louis Dodge

CHAPTER XXI

Harboro and Sylvia were taking leave of Wayne and Valdez. Their horses had been brought and they were in their saddles, their horses’ heads already in the direction of Eagle Pass. Valdez was adding final instructions touching the road.

“If you’re not quite sure of the way I’ll get some one to ride in with you,” said Wayne; but Harboro would not listen to this.

“I’ll not lose the way,” he declared; though there remained in his mind a slight dubiousness on this point. The moon would be down before the ride was finished, and there were not a few roads leading away from the main thoroughfare.

Then, much to Harboro’s surprise, Runyon appeared, riding away from the corral on his beautiful dun horse. He overheard the conference between Harboro and the others, and he made himself one of the group with pleasant familiarity.

“Ah, Harboro, must you be going, too?” he inquired genially; and then: “If you don’t mind, I’ll ride with you. It’s rather a lonely road at this hour, and I’ve an idea I know the way better than you.”

Harboro’s eyes certainly brightened with relief. “It’s good of you to offer,” he declared heartily. “By all means, ride with us.” He turned toward Sylvia, plainly expecting her to second the invitation.

“It will be much pleasanter,” she said; though it seemed to Harboro that her words lacked heartiness. She was busying herself with the little package at her pommel—old Antonia’s rebozo.

“And you must all remember that there’s one more latch-string out here at the Quemado,” said Wayne, “whenever you feel inclined to ride this way.”

They were off then. The sound of violins and the shuffle of feet became faint, and the last gay voice died in the distance. Only now and then, when the horses’ feet fell in unison, there drifted after them the note of a violin—like a wind at night in an old casement. And then the three riders were presently aware of being quite alone on a windless waste, with a sentinel yucca standing on a distant height here and there between them and the descending moon, and distant groups of mesquite wreathing themselves in the silver mist of early morning. It had been a little past midnight when they left the Quemado.

Sylvia, riding between the two men, was so obviously under some sort of constraint that Harboro sought to arouse her. “I’m afraid you overtaxed yourself, Sylvia,” he suggested. “It’s all been pleasant, but rather—heroic.” It was an effort for him to speak lightly and cheerfully. The long ride out to the Quemado was a thing to which he was not accustomed, and the merrymaking had seemed to him quite monotonous after an hour or two. Even the midnight supper had not seemed a particularly gay thing to him. He was not quite a youth any more, and he had never been young, it seemed to him, in the way in which these desert folk were young. Joy seemed to them a kind of intoxication—as if it were not to be indulged in save at long intervals.

“I didn’t overtax myself,” replied Sylvia. “The ending of things is never very cheerful. I suppose that’s what I feel just now—as if, at the end, things don’t seem quite worth while, after all.”

Harboro held to his point. “You are tired,” he insisted.

Runyon interposed cheerfully. “And there are always the beginnings,” he said. “We’re just beginning a new day and a fine ride.” He looked at Harboro as if inviting support and added, in a lower tone: “And I’d like to think we were beginning a pleasant acquaintance.”

Harboro nodded and his dark eyes beamed with pleasure. It had seemed to him that this final clause was the obvious thing for Runyon to say, and he had waited to see if he would say it. He did not suppose that he and Sylvia would see a great deal of Runyon in Eagle Pass, where they were not invited to entertainments of any kind, but there might be occasional excursions into the country, and Runyon seemed to be invited everywhere.

But Sylvia refused to respond to this. The pagan in her nature reasserted itself, and she felt resentful of Runyon’s affable attitude toward Harboro. The attraction which she and Runyon exerted toward each other was not a thing to be brought within the scope of a conventionally friendly relationship. Its essence was of the things furtive and forbidden. It should be fought savagely and kept within bounds, even if it could never be conquered, or it should be acknowledged and given way to in secret. Two were company and three a crowd in this case. She might have derived a great deal of tumultuous joy from Runyon’s friendship for her if it could have been manifested in secret, but she could feel only a sense of duplicity and shame if his friendship included Harboro, too. The wolf does not curry favor with the sheep-dog when it hungers for a lamb. Such was her creed. In brief, Sylvia had received her training in none of the social schools. She was a daughter of the desert—a bit of that jetsam which the Rio Grande leaves upon its arid banks as it journeys stealthily to the sea.

They were riding along in silence half an hour later, their horses at a walk, when the stillness of the night was rudely shattered by the sound of iron wheels grinding on stone, and in an instant a carriage could be seen ascending a branch road which arose out of a near-by arroyo.

The riders checked their horses and waited: not from curiosity, but in response to the prompting of a neighborly instinct. Travellers in the desert are never strangers to one another.

The approaching carriage proved to be an impressively elegant affair, the locality considered, drawn by two horses which were clearly not of the range variety. And then further things were revealed: a coachman sat on the front seat, and a man who wore an air of authority about him like a kingly robe sat alone on the back seat. Then to Harboro, sitting high with the last rays of the moon touching his face, came the hearty hail: “Harboro! How are you, Harboro?”

It was the voice of the General Manager.

Harboro turned his horse so that he stood alongside the open carriage. He leaned over the wheel and shook hands with the General Manager. The encounter seemed to him to add the one desirable touch of familiarity to the night ride. He explained his presence away out on the Quemado Road; and the General Manager also explained. He had been spending the evening with friends on a near-by ranch. His family were remaining for the night, but it had been necessary for him to return to Piedras Negras.

Harboro looked about for his companions, intending to introduce them. But they were a little too far away to be included comfortably in such a ceremony. For some reason Runyon had chosen to ride on a few steps.

“How many are you?” inquired the General Manager, with a note of purposefulness in his voice. “Three? That’s good. You get in with me. Tie your horse behind. Two can ride abreast more comfortably than three, and you and I can talk. I’ve never felt so lonesome in my life.” He moved over to one side of the seat, and looked back as if he expected to help in getting Harboro’s horse tied behind the carriage. His invitation did not seem at all like a command, but it did seem to imply that a refusal would be out of the question.

The arrangement seemed quite simple and desirable to Harboro. He was not a practised horseman, and he was beginning to feel the effect of saddle strain. Moreover, he had realized a dozen times during the past hour that two could ride easily side by side on the desert road, while a third rider was continually getting in the way.

He called to Runyon cheerfully: “You two go on ahead—I’m going to ride the rest of the way in.”

“Fine!” called back Runyon. To Runyon everything always seemed precisely ideal—or at least such was the impression he created.

It became a little cavalcade now, the riders leading the way. Riders and carriage kept close together for a time. Sylvia remained silent, but she felt the presence of her companion as a deliciously palpable thing. Harboro and the General Manager were talking, Harboro’s heavy tones alternating at unequal intervals with the crisp, penetrating voice of the General Manager—a voice dry with years, but vital nevertheless.

After a time the horses in the carriage broke into a rhythmic trot. In the darkness Runyon’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction. “We’ll have to have a little canter, or we’ll get run over,” he said gayly, and he and Sylvia gave rein to their horses.

In a very few minutes they had put a distance of more than a hundred yards between them and the occupants of the carriage.

“This is more like it!” exclaimed Runyon exultantly. Tone and words alike implied all too strongly his satisfaction at being rid of Harboro—and Sylvia perversely resented the disloyalty of it, the implication of intrigue carried on behind a mask.

And then she forgot her scruples. The boy who had chosen her horse for her had known what he was doing, after all. The animal galloped with a dashing yet easy movement which was delightful. She became exhilarated by a number of things. The freedom of movement, the occasional touch of her knee against Runyon’s, the mysterious vagueness of the road, now that the moon had gone down.

Perhaps they both forgot themselves for a time, and then Sylvia checked her horse with a laugh in which there was a sound of dismay. “We ought to wait for them to catch up,” she said.

Runyon was all solicitude immediately. “We seem to have outdistanced them completely,” he said. They turned their horses about so that they faced the north. “I can’t even hear them,” he added. Then, with the irrepressible optimism which was his outstanding quality, he added laughingly: “They’ll be along in a few minutes. But wasn’t it a fine ride?”

She had not framed an answer to this question when her mind was diverted swiftly into another channel. She held her head high and her body became slightly rigid. She glanced apprehensively at Runyon and realized that he, too, was listening intently.

A faint roar which seemed to come from nowhere fell on their ears. The darkness swiftly deepened, so that the man and the woman were almost invisible to each other. That sinister roaring sound came closer, as if mighty waters were rolling toward them far away. The northern sky became black, as if a sable curtain had been let down.

And then upon Sylvia’s startled senses the first breath of the norther broke. The little winds, running ahead as an advance-guard of the tempest, flung themselves upon her and caught at her hair and her riding-habit. They chilled her.

“A norther!” she exclaimed, and Runyon called back through the whistle of the winds: “It’s coming!”

His voice had the quality of a battle-cry, joined to the shouts of the descending storm.

Fortunately, Runyon knew what to do in that hour of earth’s desolation and his own and Sylvia’s peril.

He sprang from his horse and drew his bridle-rein over his arm; and then he laid a firm hand on the bridle of Sylvia’s horse. His own animal he could trust in such an emergency; but the other had seemed to lose in height and he knew that it was trembling. It might make a bolt for it at any moment.

“Keep your seat,” he shouted to Sylvia, and she realized that he was leading both horses away from the road. She caught glimpses of his wraith-like figure as the whirling dust-cloud that enveloped them thinned occasionally.

She knew that he had found a clump of mesquite after a faltering progress of perhaps fifty yards. Their progress was checked, then, and she knew he was at the hitching straps, and that he was tethering the animals to the trees. The powdered dust and sand were stinging her face, and the cold wind was chilling her; yet she felt a strange elation as she realized that she was here alone with Runyon, and that he was managing the situation with deftness and assurance.

She felt his hand groping for her then, and, leaning forward, she was borne to the ground. He guided her to a little depression and made her understand that she was to sit down. He had removed his saddle-blanket and spread it on the earth, forming a rug for her. “The rebozo?” he cried in her ear.

“It’s fastened to the pommel,” she called back.

She could neither see nor hear him; but soon he was touching her on the shoulders. The rebozo was flung out on the wind so that it unfolded, and he was spreading it about her.

She caught his hand and drew him close so that she could make herself heard. “There’s room under it for two,” she said. She did not release his hand until he had sat down by her. Together they drew the rebozo about them like a little tent.

Immediately they were transformed into two sheltered and undismayed Arabs. The rebozo was pinioned behind them and under their feet. The finest dust could not penetrate its warp and woof. The wind was as a mighty hand, intent upon bearing them to earth, but it could not harm them.

Sylvia heard Runyon’s musical laugh. He bent his head close to hers. “We’re all right now,” he said.

He had his arm across her shoulder and was drawing her close. “It’s going to be cold,” he said, as if in explanation. He seemed as joyous as a boy—as innocent as a boy. She inclined her head until it rested on his shoulder, so that both occupied little more than the space of one. The storm made this intimacy seem almost natural; it made it advantageous, too.

And so the infinite sands swarmed over them, and the norther shrieked in their ears, and the earth’s blackness swallowed them up until they seemed alone as a man and a woman never had been alone before.

The rebozo sagged about them at intervals, weighted down with the dust; but again it rippled like a sail when an eccentric gust swept away the accumulated sediment.

The desert was a thing of blank darkness. A protected torch would have been invisible to one staring toward it a dozen steps away. A temporary death had invaded the world. There was neither movement nor sound save the frenzied dance of dust and the whistle of winds which seemed shunted southward from the north star.

Runyon’s hand travelled soothingly from Sylvia’s shoulder to her cheek. He held her to him with a tender, eloquent pressure. He was the man, whose duty it was to protect; and she was the woman, in need of protection.

And Sylvia thought darkly of the ingenuities of Destiny which set at naught the petty steps which the proprieties have taken—as if the gods were never so diverted as when they were setting the stage for tragedy, or as if the struggles and defeats of all humankind were to them but a proper comedy.

But Runyon was thinking how rare a thing it is for a man and a woman to be quite alone in the world; how the walls of houses listen, and windows are as eyes which look in as well as out; how highways forever hold their malicious gossips to note the movements of every pair who do not walk sedately; how you may mount the stairway of a strange house—and encounter one who knows you at the top, and who laughs in his sleeve; how you may emerge from the house in which you have felt safe from espionage—only to encounter a familiar talebearer at the door.

But here indeed were he and Sylvia alone.

Before the next spring came two entirely irreconcilable discoveries were made in Eagle Pass.

The first of these was made by certain cronies of the town who found their beer flat if there was not a bit of gossip to go with it, and it was to the effect that the affair between Sylvia and Runyon was sure to end disastrously if it did not immediately end otherwise.

The other discovery was made by Harboro, and it was to the effect that Sylvia had at last blossomed out as a perfectly ideal wife.

A certain listlessness had fallen from her like a shadow. Late in the winter—it was about the time of the ride to the Quemado, Harboro thought it must have been—a change had come over her. There was a glad tranquillity about her now which was as a tonic to him. She was no longer given to dark utterances which he could not understand. She was devoted to him in a gentle, almost maternal fashion—studying his needs and moods alertly and affectionately. Something of the old tempestuous ardor was gone, but that, of course, was natural. Harboro did not know the phrases of old Antonia or he would have said: “It is the time of embers.” She was softly solicitous for him; still a little wistful at times, to be sure; but then that was the natural Sylvia. It was the quality which made her more wonderful than any other woman in the world.

And Sylvia? Sylvia had found a new avenue of escape from that tedium which the Sylvias of the world have never been able to endure.

Not long after that ride to the Quemado a horse had been brought to her front gate during a forenoon when Harboro was over the river at work. Unassisted she had mounted it and ridden away out the Quemado Road. A mile out she had turned toward the Rio Grande, and had kept to an indistinct trail until she came to a hidden adobe hut, presided over by an ancient Mexican.

To this isolated place had come, too, Runyon—Runyon, whose dappled horse had been left hidden in the mesquite down by the river, where the man’s duties lay.

And here, in undisturbed seclusion, they had continued that intimacy which had begun on the night of the norther. They were like two children, forbidden the companionship of each other, who find something particularly delicious in an unguessed rendezvous. All that is delightful in a temporary escape from the sense of responsibility was theirs. Their encounters were as gay and light as that of two poppies in the sun, flung together by a friendly breeze. They were not conscious of wronging any one—not more than a little, at least—though the ancient genius of the place, a Mexican who had lost an eye in a jealous fight in his youth, used to shake his head sombrely when he went away from his hut, leaving them alone; and there was anxiety in the glance of that one remaining eye as he kept a lookout over the trail, that his two guests might not be taken by surprise.

Sometimes they remained in the hut throughout the entire noon-hour, and on these occasions their finely discreet and taciturn old host placed food before them. Goat’s milk was brought from an earthenware vessel having its place on a wooden hook under the eaves of the house; and there was a delicious stew of dried goat’s flesh, served with a sauce which contained just a faint flavor of peppers and garlic and herbs. And there was pan, as delicate as wafers, and coffee.

Time and again, throughout the winter, the same horse made its appearance at Sylvia’s gate at the same hour, and Sylvia mounted and rode away out the Quemado Road and disappeared, returning early in the afternoon.

If you had asked old Antonia about these movements of her mistress she would have said: “Does not the seÑora need the air?” And she would have added: “She is young.” And finally she would have said: “I know nothing.”

It is a matter of knowledge that occasionally Sylvia would meet the boy from the stable when he arrived at the gate and instruct him gently to take the horse away, as she would not require it that day; and I am not sure she was not trying still to fight the battle which she had already lost; but this, of course, is mere surmise.

And then a little cog in the machine slipped.

A ranchman who lived out on the north road happened to be in Eagle Pass one evening as Harboro was passing through the town on his way home from work. The ranchman’s remark was entirely innocent, but rather unfortunate. “A very excellent horsewoman, Mrs. Harboro,” he remarked, among other things.

Harboro did not understand.

“I met her riding out the road this forenoon,” explained the ranchman.

“Oh, yes!” said Harboro. “Yes, she enjoys riding. I’m sorry, on her account, that I haven’t more liking for it myself.”

He went on up the hill, pondering. It was strange that Sylvia had not told him that she meant to go for a ride. She usually went into minute details touching her outings.

He expected her to mention the matter when he got home, but she did not do so. She seemed disposed not to confide in him throughout the entire evening, and finally he remarked with an air of suddenly remembering: “And so you went riding to-day?”

She frowned and lowered her eyes. She seemed to be trying to remember. “Why, yes,” she said, after a moment’s silence. “Yes, I felt rather dull this morning. You know I enjoy riding.”

“I know you do,” he responded cordially. “I’d like you to go often, if you’ll be careful not to take any chances.” He smiled at the recollection of the outcome of that ride of theirs to the Quemado, and of the excitement with which they compared experiences when they got back home. Sylvia and Runyon had made a run for it and had got home before the worst of it came, she had said. But Harboro and the General Manager had waited until the storm had spent itself, both sitting in the carriage with their handkerchiefs pressed to their nostrils, and their coats drawn up about their heads. He remembered, too, how the dust-fog had lingered in the air until well into the next day, like a ghost which could not be laid.

He brought himself back from the recollection of that night. “If you like, I’ll have the horse sent every day—or, better still, you shall have a horse of your own.”

“No,” replied Sylvia, “I might not care to go often.” She had let her hair down and was brushing it thoughtfully. “The things which are ordered for you in advance are always half spoiled,” she added. “It’s better to think of things all of a sudden, and do them.”

He looked at her in perplexity. That wasn’t his way, certainly; but then she was still occasionally something of an enigma to him. He tried to dismiss the matter from his mind. He was provoked that it came back again and again, as if there were something extraordinary about it, something mysterious. “She only went for a ride,” he said to himself late at night, as if he were defending her.

CHAPTER XXIV