When Beulah Pierce rode by on his way from Pagosa and left their mail one afternoon, she felt no eagerness about it. There could be nothing so soon, she was sure. Virginia brought her some letters and read aloud one from the aunt at Kensington. Then Mrs. Laithe looked through her own letters and found one from Ewing. She did not open it, but rose after a few moments, and walked swiftly over to the lake camp. Only there, alone, could she trust herself.
She read the thing staringly, haltingly, testing each phrase as if it were worded in some strange tongue.
"I can tell you now what I came for," the letter ran, "because the thing will be done before this letter can reach you. It"s a thing you want done, but if you had known I meant to do it you would have tried to prevent me, and that would only have distressed us both. But now, when it is all over, you will see that I was the one person in the world to do it for you. Think if you had killed him yourself that night, the pain you would have brought to yourself and to others. It wasn"t a woman"s work. I would have done it for you then, but I owed him money. I couldn"t kill him till I had paid that.
"I used to dream of doing things for you always, many things, big and little, but it has turned out that I can do only this. So won"t you try to believe that I am putting all my heart into it for you, all that thing I would have tried to show you if it had been scattered over the rest of our lives? I must put it all into this one act.
"Ben seemed to suspect that such affairs could be managed here with the informality that often marks them in the San Juan, but you and I know better. I cannot expect to return, nor to see you again. Yet I shall see you always; see no one else--while they let me see at all. We must take life as it falls, do the next thing without complaining, even if it is the hardest thing. And be sure of this--I shall do it so quickly that he will have no chance to tell me anything. He will not even speak your name. Afterwards you can have this to remember, that I did it gladly, knowing what the consequences would be. I hope that will be, in time, the happiness to you that it is to me. It is enough for me."
Over and over she read it, and at last she mastered it--all the horror of it. A long time she gazed dumbly at the sheets, then once more she laughed the old, low laugh, with a sinister note in it now. Ben Crider found her there an hour later, staring blankly out over the flawed surface of the lake. The breeze was swirling many finely torn bits of paper about her feet.
As they walked back to the cabin she reflected that the letter had lain four days in the postoffice at Pagosa. It had been written nine days before. Then Ewing had done the thing. She no more believed that Randall Teevan still lived than she believed that the mountains about her were phantoms. A sentence from the letter ran in her mind. "We must take life as it falls--do the next thing without complaining, even if it is the hardest thing."
"The hardest thing!"
She pleaded fatigue and lack of appet.i.te to Virginia and sought her bed to lie and think in the dark. She saw her own hardest thing, the thing she must do.
She had caused a man to be put to death; a vicious, mischievous fool, it was true, but still a man. That was sad and horrible. But of another man, one she had thought to guard and cherish and care for in all of woman"s ways--she had made a murderer, and she had murdered him. For she knew that Ewing must die. It was as if he were already dead. Perhaps out there in the agonized void of the world he had already killed himself, his work being done. Or, if not, they would kill him. She felt a blind, hollow sickness, as if her heart had broken and was bleeding away inside her. She had made her beloved a slayer and had slain him. She could not live with it. She hungered for her own death with intolerable desire.
She arose with a despair-cleared mind the next morning, her resolve made. Only the smaller details were to be worked out. She walked by the lake, resolving these. Once she wept, from the very abundance and color of life about her. Life was so full, and she had taken it from him in his splendid youth. But she would not shirk the penalty of her blood-guiltiness. She looked out to the hills beyond the valley that fell away from the lake, studying headland and wooded slope and canon opening, choked with green. Some spot far out there would be secret and gracious to her--welcome her with a finger on its lips--take her and keep. Death, to her, was no longer terrible. There had been a long intimacy with it. She rushed to the idea of it as to a home--a benignant succor from the unendurable thought.
Back in the cabin she lay counting the minutes as they rushed--thinking and counting. She must not let herself be prisoned by a mere body that exulted blindly, basely, in its vigor. She could make everything right.
She could conform to the law of a life for a life.
"The hardest thing," she murmured. "I must do the hardest thing." That would be her expiation, though not a sufficing one; she recognized that.
She longed for it too avidly, for the relief from thought, from torturing visions. Yet it was formally perfect as a punishment, according to the world"s standards. She would be her own executioner, and it would satisfy the world if the world knew. And despite her longing for release, it was still, she thought, the hardest thing, although it saved--saved her from that old man and that young man slain: that young beloved one, lying dead with blood upon his hands. Poor sacrificed, poor betrayed, poor ruined one! Again, the hollow sickness, as if her heart were bleeding away inside her. To expiate--to do the hardest thing. She came back to that always. It was the hardest thing, although it saved.
When her brother rode up in the afternoon, she instantly saw her plan completed. There came an hour in which she walked and talked and laughed in a waking dream, without sensation, except as she could imagine it felt by a creature she seemed to watch from afar, a creature who had looked strangely like herself. She saw this woman greet the others and sit at table with them to laugh and talk with acceptable ease. Their voices were soundless as voices in a dream, their shapes and flittings as illogical. So benumbed was her spirit that she suffered little even at the moment of hurried parting from Virginia. Her role was played with flawless detachment. She studied herself coolly and guarded against wrong speeches.
"I shall go home with Clarence; I haven"t seen that magnificent ranch yet," she remarked carelessly, and Virginia and her brother had applauded this.
"I"ll show you a ranch that is a ranch," Bartell had answered.
Ben led c.o.o.ney around, saddled. She kissed Virginia lightly and was on the little horse. She turned to wave gayly as she fell in ahead of Bartell on the trail to the lake.
The moon had sailed up over the eastern hills with the going down of the sun, and the shadows were sharply cut in its light. They reined in at the lake, lingering there a moment in its charm. Under the slanting moon rays it shone like another moon, radiantly silver in its setting of cloudlike leaf.a.ge. She drew a long breath as her brother started on, and called to him.
"Clarence!" He pulled up his horse, looking back at her.
"You"ll think me absurd, but I"ve decided not to go with you, after all.
I believe I"d rather stay with Virginia. She"ll be lonesome."
He came back to her, scolding whimsically.
"I know I"m foolish," she persisted, "but you"re so dreadfully busy and noisy over there."
"Nonsense! And Virgie will be all right. She doesn"t need you for a few days."
"I"m sure she"ll need me. No--go on alone, there"s a dear. I can ride over myself and bring you back for a few days, after your rush is over."
"Well, if you"re really set." He submitted, grumbling.
"And kiss me, dear!"
He did so, still grumbling. "And you skip back, if you"re going back.
You"re cold as ice. So long, weathervane! And come over when you feel like it."
"I"ll be warm, dear--and good-by."
She watched him down the slope and across the meadow until he vanished into the black of the forest wall. Then she rode on to the camp. Without dismounting she took from the end of a broken branch a revolver in its holster that she had hung there earlier in the day. She made sure again that it was loaded and buckled the holster about her waist.
Turning from the ranch trail, then, she found another that led off to the north and away from the Pagosa road--off into a wooded wilderness of hills where she would be safe from discovery. She halted again on the first ridge above the camp, sitting motionless in the shadow, her eyes on the little moon-flooded opening across the lake where the cabin trail came down to the sh.o.r.e. That was a walk for lovers, but they could not walk there now. After a little time she whirled c.o.o.ney about in a sudden gust of fierceness and sent him along the winding ridge, keeping close within the shadow.
When the trail fell away into the first of the unknown valleys she breathed a sigh of relief and release. Her burden was falling from her.
She could not again be cheated back from her refuge.
She began to rejoice in the wide, wild sweetness of the night, its piny fragrance, the soft-footed scurryings of its lesser people, the gloom of its sharply defined shadows, and the silvering haze that enveloped the peaks. She came on a deer feeding in the open, and was delighted when it did not run. It only lifted its head to look at her.
She began to rejoice, also, in the cleverness of her plan. As well as she might she had preserved the decencies. A week might ensue before they missed her. c.o.o.ney, stripped of his trappings, would appear at the lake cabin, to be laughed at and chided for his desertion of the Bar-B ranch, a week before she was missed; and then she would never be found.
There was, indeed, small chance of their having the pain of that. She would keep to the trail as long as the night hid her; then a climb up some unpathed slope, over rocks that would show no trace of her pa.s.sage; then a tangled thicket, remote, secret, improbable--and the tale of a lost woman, a woman who wandered confusingly far on a night of tempting splendor. She thought of Virginia"s pain with a feeble pity. It seemed as if humanity was dead in her.
The narrow trail wound beckoningly before her, the land stretched off to peaks of silver or barren gray slopes or shadowed promontories, glooming above ravines where little rivers turned restlessly in their beds; and over all hung the mystic shimmer of moon rays, softening all angles and picking the fronds of trees with dancing lights as she pa.s.sed.
An owl boomed from a dead pine, and a little off the trail she heard the scream of a cougar, like the scream of a woman in some strange terror.
But all sounds were indifferently alike to her, the shrilling of the beast, the sibilance of running water, the bellow of the owl, the whistle of a deer, or the throaty mutterings of an awakened bird. She heard them as receding echoes of a life already remote.
She kept c.o.o.ney moving as rapidly as the trail permitted, checking his little s.n.a.t.c.hes at the wayside herbage. He could fast with her for one night, she told him. To-morrow he could feast his way home hara.s.sed by no rider. He stopped at times to test some doubtful bit of trail with a cautious forefoot; or slowed to feel a sure way down a gullyside of loose stones; or lingered knee deep in a melody of swift water, to drink, with swelling sides. She was glad to have this last night with the little horse that had been Ewing"s. Ewing--only not to think of him--for one cannot ride with the heart all bled away.
The light faded from the lower ways after a while. The moon had completed its short arc and fell below the mountain ahead of her; defining sharp little notches in its rim.
The hills seemed to steal upon her in the darkness then, huddling close about her, m.u.f.fling her with their black plumage. But she was glad of this--surmounting the mere physical oppression of it--for she felt that it doubled the secrecy of her going; and c.o.o.ney"s eyes, with his skilled feet, sufficed for the trail.
At times she shrank as under the touch of a palpable hand reached out to her from the darkness, a thing that frantically protested, pleaded, expostulated--but she knew it for the hand of mere brute life, a cowardly, blind, soulless thing, that would subvert all fitness. She shook it off, knowing herself its superior by right of mind, with power to inflict justice upon it. And _he_ was dead, he, the young and strong--alas, poor slayer, poor slain! How her heart bled away. To expiate----
She clung to that: it was an obligation that lay on her, a secret obligation, but the more imperative for that. She could not hold a forfeited life. She must redeem herself. The hardest thing was demanded of her. And then, one could not go on with this bleeding heart.
"The hardest thing--the hardest thing!" she murmured, shutting her lips tightly on the words, with a sudden inexplicable fear of some flaw in her logic. Again and again she forced the words from her lips with stubborn, deaf insistence, to still some mental voice of inquiry, a pa.s.sionless, cold thing that lifted itself in her brain, but which she could beat down with this bludgeon of her phrase. She was even bold enough to cross-examine herself presently. The hardest thing was demanded of her, and she was doing the hardest thing. Her hand fell on the laden holster at her side with a panic impulse to rush the thing through. But the touch rea.s.sured her and she laughed in the consciousness of her security. She could not be thwarted now, and she need not hurry. She could afford to the very end that deliberate thoroughness with which she had begun. Her will for the thing had lost none of its iron.
An hour or so after the darkness had crowded the hills in upon her she rode into a dense mist, chilling to the bone after the dryness of the early night. The range of her vision was again shortened, and even the little horse halted more frequently to feel his way. Once he seemed to have wandered, and stood a moment in uncertainty. She let him rest, then flicked his shoulder with the bridle rein, and he struggled stanchly on over the ridge of loose gravel where he had halted, feeling for the trail with expert hoofs. He found it a moment later, and was moving forward again. She patted his neck and blessed him for being so "trail wise." He, too, was doing the hardest thing, and doing it faithfully.
She fell again into the rhythm of her battle cry--"The hardest thing--the hardest thing!"
And yet it was not hard. She was so near to it now that she could afford the luxury of this admission. It required only a sense of justice, of moral symmetry. She had taken a life--two, doubtless--and by the law she must pay. But no debtor could have had a willinger spirit. And she would not be paying too much. She recalled certain homely words of an old man whose life she had watched out, a man whose worn, seamed face showed his right to speak.
"Experience, lady, a dear thing sometimes--yes--but never too dear. It is worth always just what we pay for it. It is had at slightest cost, high or low. No other thing is like it thus. All else of the world may cheat us in their price, but not experience. Our fee shall vary as we are quick to learn, but the good G.o.d teaches us what we must know at flat cost, as says the merchant, with never the penny of profit. This it saves much to know--much sorrowing, much whining. It would make us wise--so!"
"So!" She echoed his rich guttural imitatively and laughed as she drew in a deep breath of the damp air. She was numb with the cold now, and laughed at foolish life for registering so petty a discomfort at such a moment. The humor of it came home to her--that she should sensually feel the cold.
Another span of hours the little horse strode on at his quick step, valiantly lifting her up steep ascents, or descending the sides of ravines with devoted sureness of foot, treading narrow ways where she could feel that he hugged the bush-lined bank, and knew that a fall lay the other side.