Over the Pa.s.s.
by Frederick Palmer.
PART I
AN EASY TRAVELLER
I
YOUTH IN SPURS
Here time was as nothing; here sunset and sunrise were as incidents of an uncalendared, everlasting day; here chaotic grandeur was that of the earth"s crust when it cooled after the last convulsive movement of genesis.
In all the region about the Galeria Pa.s.s the silence of the dry Arizona air seemed luminous and eternal. Whoever climbed to the crotch of that V, cut jagged against the sky for distances yet unreckoned by tourist folders, might have the reward of pitching the tents of his imagination at the gateway of the clouds.
Early on a certain afternoon he would have noted to the eastward a speck far out on a vast basin of sand which was enclosed by a rim of tumbling mountains. Continued observation at long range would have shown the speck to be moving almost imperceptibly, with what seemed the impertinence of infinitesimal life in that dead world; and, eventually, it would have taken the form of a man astride a pony.
The man was young, fantastically young if you were to judge by his garb, a flamboyant expression of the romantic cowboy style which might have served as a sensational exhibit in a shop-window. In place of the conventional blue wool shirt was one of dark blue silk. The _chaparejos_, or "chaps," were of the softest leather, with the fringe at the seams generously long; and the silver spurs at the boot-heels were chased in antique pattern and ridiculously large. Instead of the conventional handkerchief at the neck was a dark red string tie; while the straight-brimmed cowpuncher hat, out of keeping with the general effect of newness and laundered freshness, had that tint which only exposure to many dewfalls and many blazing mid-days will produce in light-colored felt.
There was vagrancy in the smile of his singularly sensitive mouth and vagrancy in the relaxed way that he rode. From the fondness with which his gaze swept the naked peaks they might have been cities _en fete_ calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let realization overtake antic.i.p.ation. His reins hung loose. He hummed s.n.a.t.c.hes of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt, which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer joy of living.
Lapsing into silence, his face went ruminative and then sad. With a sudden indrawing of breath he freed himself from his reverie, and bending over from his saddle patted a buckskin neck in affectionate tattoo. Tawny ears turned backward in appreciative fellowship, but without any break in a plodding dog-trot. Though the rider"s aspect might say with the desert that time was nothing, the pony"s expressed a logical purpose. Thus the speed of their machine-like progress was entirely regulated by the prospect of a measure of oats at the journey"s end.
When they came to the foot-hills and the rider dismounted and led the way, with a following muzzle at times poking the small of his back, up the tortuous path, rounding pinnacles and skimming the edge of abysses, his leg muscles answered with the readiness of familiarity with climbing.
At the top he saw why the pa.s.s had received its name of Galeria from the Spanish. A great isosceles of precipitous walls formed a long, natural gallery, which the heaving of the earth"s crust had rent and time had eroded. It lay near the present boundary line of two civilizations: in the neutral zone of desert expanses, where the Saxon pioneer, with his lips closed on English _s"s_, had paused in his progress southward; and the _conquistadore_, with tongue caressing Castilian vowels, had paused in his progress northward.
At the other side the traveller beheld a basin which was a thousand feet higher than the one behind him. It approached the pa.s.s at a gentler slope. It must be cooler than the other, its ozone a little rarer. A sea of quivering and singing light in the afternoon glow, it was lost in the horizon.
Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by the roofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the end of the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom in sterile expanses. There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visible symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, pa.s.sed beyond the outer edge of the oasis.
"This beats any valley I"ve seen yet," and the traveller spoke with the confidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys.
He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous vista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present it in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visual intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoism of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the sound of voices, a man"s and a woman"s, broke on his ear.
The man"s was strident, disagreeable, persistent. Its timbre was such as he had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons. The woman"s was quiet and resisting, its quality of youth peculiarly emphasized by its restrained emotion.
Now the easy traveller took stock of his immediate surroundings, which had interested him only as a foothold and vantage-point for the panorama that he had been breathing in. Here, of all conceivable places, he was in danger of becoming eavesdropper to a conversation which was evidently very personal. Rounding the escarpment at his elbow he saw, on a shelf of decaying granite, two waiting ponies. One had a Mexican saddle of the cowboy type. The other had an Eastern side-saddle, which struck him as exotic in a land where women mostly ride astride. And what woman, whatever style of riding she chose, should care to come to this pa.s.s?
Judging by the direction from which the voices came, the speakers were hidden by still another turn in the defile. A few more steps brought eye as well as ear back to the living world with the sight of a girl seated on a bowlder. He could see nothing of her face except the cheek, which was brown, and the tip of a chin, which he guessed was oval, and her hair, which was dark under her hatbrim and shimmering with gold where it was kissed by the rays of the sun. An impression as swift as a flash of light could not exclude inevitable curiosity as to the full face; a curiosity emphasized by the poised erectness of her slender figure.
The man was bending over her in a familiar way. He was thirty, perhaps, in the prime of physical vigor, square-jawed, c.o.c.ksure, a six-shooter slung at his hip. Though she was not giving way before him, her att.i.tude, in its steadiness, reflected distress in a bowstrung tremulousness.
Suddenly, at something he said which the easy traveller could not quite understand, she sprang up aflame, her hand flying back against the rock wall behind her for support. Then the man spoke so loud that he was distinctly audible.
"When you get mad like that you"re prettier"n ever," he said.
It was a peculiar situation. It seemed incredible, melodramatic, unreal, in sight of the crawling freight train far out on the levels.
"Aren"t you overplaying your part, sir?" the easy traveller asked.
The man"s hand flew to his six-shooter, while the girl looked around in swift and eager impulse to the interrupting voice. Its owner, the color scheme of his attire emphasized by the glare of the low sun, expressed in his pose and the inquiring flicker of a smile purely the element of the casual. Far from making any movement toward his own six-shooter, he seemed oblivious of any such necessity. With the first glimpse of her face, when he saw the violet flame of her anger go ruddy with surprise and relief, then fluid and sparkling as a culminating change of emotion, he felt cheap for having asked himself the question--which now seemed so superficial--whether she were good-looking or not. She was, undoubtedly, yes, undoubtedly good-looking in a way of her own.
"What business is it of yours?" demanded the man, evidently under the impression that he was due to say something, while his fingers still rested on his holster.
"None at all, unless she says so," the deliverer answered. "Is it?" he asked her.
After her first glance at him she had lowered her lashes. Now she raised them, sending a direct message beside which her first glance had been dumb indifference. He was seeing into the depths of her eyes in the consciousness of a privilege rarely bestowed. They gave wing to a thousand inquiries. He had the thrill of an explorer who is about to enter on a voyage of discovery. Then the veil was drawn before his ship had even put out from port. It was a veil woven with fine threads of appreciative and conventional grat.i.tude.
"It is!" she said decisively.
"I"ll be going," said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixed partly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed down to normal.
"As you please," answered that easy traveller. "I had no mind to exert any positive directions over your movements."
His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an open challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made his protagonist appear a negligible quant.i.ty.
"There"s some things I don"t do when women are around," the persecutor returned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silence prevailed. The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him.
He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuously as he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to draw rein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easy traveller in from head to foot.
"Huh! You near-silk dude!" he said chokingly, in his rancor which had grown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion.
"If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk," the easy traveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement.
"We"ll meet again!" came the more definite and articulate defiance.
"Perhaps. Who can tell? Arizona, though a large place, has so few people that it is humanly very small."
Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body on the palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle. He was rigid, his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to a fine point of determination.
"When we do meet, you better draw! I give you warning!" he called.
There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten a single muscle. But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile.
"Whew!" He drew the exclamation out into a whistle.
"Whistle--whistle while you can! You won"t have many more chances! Draw, you tenderfoot! But it won"t do any good--I"ll get you!"
With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceeded on his way.
"Whew!" The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything but apologetic. It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delight of the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places.
From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of embarra.s.sment that left her speechless.
"Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, but your anthropology as you find it!"
His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and his absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete.
"Quite like the Middle Ages, isn"t it?" he said.