Whatever lay behind, he would live it down. This man at least had befriended him.
He turned into the room. "Perhaps I shall remember after a while." He took the saucepan from Prendergast"s hand. "I"ll cook the breakfast," he said.
Prendergast filled his pipe and watched him. "I guess there _are_ bats in your belfry, sure enough, Hugh," he said at length. "You never offered to do your stint before."
CHAPTER XX
MRS. HALLORAN TELLS A STORY
From the moment her kiss fell upon the forehead of the delirious man in the cabin, Jessica began to be a prey to new emotions, the significance of which she did not comprehend. She was no longer a child; she had attained to womanhood on that summer"s wedding-day that seemed so far away. But her woman"s heart was untried, and it felt itself opening to this new experience with a strange confusion.
That kiss, she told herself that night, had been given to her dead ideal, that had lain there in its purifying grave-clothes of forgetfulness. Yet it burned on her lips, as that other kiss in a darkened room had burned afterward, but with a sense of pleasure, not of hurt. It took her back into crimson meadows with her lost girlhood and its opaled outlook--and Hugh. Then the warring emotions racked her again; she felt a whirl of anger at herself, of hot impatience, of mortification, of self-pity, and of stifled longing for she knew not what.
But largest of all in her mind next day was anxiety. She must know how he fared. In the open daylight she could not approach the cabin, but she reflected that the doctor had been there, and no doubt had carried some report of him to the town. So, as the morning grew, she rode down the mountain, ostensibly to get the cherry cordial she had left behind her the day before--really to satisfy her hunger for news.
As it happened, Mrs. Halloran"s first greeting set her anxiety at rest.
Prendergast had bought some tobacco at the general store an hour before, while she had been making her daily order, and the store-keeper had questioned him. Prendergast had a fawning liking for the notice of his fellows--save for his saloon cronies, few enough in the town, where it was currently reported that he had a prison record in Arkansas, ever exchanged more than a nod with him--and he had responded eagerly to the civil inquiries. To an interested audience he had told of the finding of Hugh on the mountain road in a sort of crazy fever, and enlarged upon the part the girl on horseback had played. Hugh was all right now, he said, except that he didn"t remember him, or the cabin, or Smoky Mountain.
Here was new interest. Though her name was known to few, Jessica had come to be a familiar figure on the streets--she was the only lady rider the place knew--and the description was readily recognizable without the name which Mrs. Halloran supplied. In an hour the story had found a hundred listeners, and as Jessica rode by that day, many a pa.s.ser-by had turned to gaze after her.
What Prendergast had said Mrs. Halloran told her in a breath. Before she finished she found that Jessica had not heard of the incident in the saloon which had precipitated the fight with Devlin, and with sympathetic rhetoric Mrs. Halloran told this, too.
"He deserved it, ye see, dearie," she finished. "But no less was it a brave thing that--what ye did last night, alone on the mountain with them two, an" countin" yerself as safe as if ye were in G.o.d"s pocket! To hear that scalawag Prendergast talk, he"s been Hugh Stires" good angel--the oily hypocrite! An" do ye think it"s true that he"s lost his memory--Stires, I mean--an" don"t know nothin" that"s ever happened with him? Could that be, do ye think?"
"I"ve often heard of such a thing, Mrs. Halloran," responded Jessica.
Her heart was throbbing painfully. "But why does Smoky Mountain hate him so? What has he done?"
Mrs. Halloran shook her head. "I never knew anything myself," she said judiciously. "I reckon the town allus counted him just a general low-down. The rest is only suspicion an" give the dog a bad name."
There had been comfort for Jessica in this interview. The burden of that illness off her mind--she had not realized how great a load this had been till it was lifted--she turned eagerly toward this rift in the cloud of infamy that seemed to envelop the reputation of the man whose life her own had again so strangely touched. She was feeling a new kinship with the town; it was now not alone a spot upon which she had loved to gaze from the height; it was the place wherein the man she had once loved had lived and moved.
Mrs. Halloran"s story had materially increased the poignant force of her pity. What had seemed to her a vulgar brawl, had been in reality a courageous and unselfish championship of a defenseless outcast. Thinking of this, the self-blame and contrition which she had felt when she listened to the violin a.s.sailed her anew, till she seemed a very part of the guilt, an equal sinner by omission.
Yet she rode homeward that day with almost a light heart.
CHAPTER XXI
A VISIT AND A VIOLIN
Prendergast"s first view had been one of suspicion, but this had been shaken, and thereafter he had studied Harry with a sneering tolerance.
There had been little talk between them during the meal which the younger man had cooked, taking the saucepan from the other"s hands.
Shrinking acutely from the details of the dismal past which he must learn, Harry had asked no questions and Prendergast had maintained a morose silence. The latter had soon betaken himself down the mountain--to his audience in the general store.
As Harry stood in the cabin doorway, looking after him, toward the town glistening far below in the morning sunlight, he thought bitterly of his reception there.
"They all knew me," he thought; "every one knew me, on the street, in the hotel. They know me for what I have been to them. Yet to me it is all a blank! What shameful deeds have I done?" He shrank from memory now! "What was I doing so far away, where was I going, on the night when I was picked up beside the railroad track? I may be a drunkard," he said to himself. "No, in the past month I have drunk hard, but not for the taste of the liquor! I may be a gambler--the first thing I remember is that game of cards in the box-car! I may be a cheat, a thief. Yet how is it possible for bad deeds to be blotted out and leave no trace?
Actions breed habit, if they do not spring from it, and habit, automatically repeated, becomes character. I feel no inherent propensity to rob, or defraud. Shall I? Will these things come back to me if my memory does? Shall I become once more one with this vile old man, my "side-partner," to share the evil secrets that I see in his eyes--as I must once have shared them?" He shuddered.
There welled over him again, full force, the pa.s.sionate resentment, the agony of protest, that had been the gift of the resuscitated character.
He found himself fighting a wild desire to fling his resolution behind him and fly from his reputation and its penalties.
In the battle that he fought now he turned, even in his weakness, to manual labor, striving to dull his thought with mechanical movement. He cleaned and put to rights both rooms and sorted their litter of odds and ends. But at times the inclination to escape became well-nigh insupportable. When the conflict was fiercest he would think of a girl"s face, once seen, and the thought would restrain him. Who was she?
Why had her look pierced through him? In that hateful career that seemed so curiously alien, could she have had a part?
He did not know that she of whom he wondered, in the bitterest of those hours had been very near him--that on her way up the mountain she had stolen down to the k.n.o.b to look through the parted bushes to the cabin with the blue spiral rising from its chimney. He could not guess that she gazed with a strained, agitated interest, a curiosity even more intense than his own, the look of a heart that was strangely learning itself with mingled and tremulous emotions.
Though the homely task to which he turned failed to allay his struggle, by nightfall Harry had put the warring elements under. When Prendergast returned at supper-time the candle was lighted in its wall-box, the dinted tea-kettle was singing over a crackling fire, and Harry was perspiring over the scouring of the last utensil.
Prendergast looked the orderly interior over on the threshold with a contemptuous amus.e.m.e.nt. "Almost thought I was in church," he said. He took off his coat and lazily watched the other cook the frugal evening meal. "Excuse my not volunteering," he observed; "you do it so nicely I"m almost afraid you"ll have another attack of that forgettery of yours, and go back to the old line."
Presently he looked at the bunk, clean and springy with fresh cut spruce-shoots. He went to it, knelt down and thrust an arm into the empty s.p.a.ce beneath it. He got up hastily.
"What have you done with that?" he demanded with an angry snarl.
"With what?" Harry turned his head, as he set two tin plates on the bare table.
"With what was under here."
"There was nothing there but an old horse skin," said Harry. "It is hanging on the side of the cabin."
With an oath Prendergast flung open the door and went outside. He reentered quickly with the white hide in his arms, wrapped it in a blanket and thrust it back under the bunk.
"Has any one been here to-day--since you put it out there?" he asked quickly.
"No," said Harry, surprised. "Why?"
Prendergast chuckled. The chuckle grew to a guffaw and he sat down, slapping his thigh. Presently he went to the wall, took the chamois-skin bag from its hiding-place and poured some of its yellow contents into his palm. "That"s why. Do you remember that, eh?"
Harry looked at it. "Gold-dust," he said. "I seem to recall that. I am going to begin work in the trench to-morrow; there should be more where that came from."
Prendergast poured the gold back into the bag with a cunning look. The other had asked for no share of it. At that moment he decided to say nothing of the evening before, of the girl or the horseback journey--lest Hugh, cudgelling his brains, might remember he had been offered a half. If Hugh"s peculiar craziness wanted to dig in the dirt, very well. It might be profitable for them both. He put the pouch into his pocket with a grin.
"There"s plenty more where that came from, all right," he said, "and I"ll teach you again how to get it, one of these days."
Prendergast said little during the meal. When the table was cleared he lit his pipe and took from a shelf a board covered with penciled figures and scrutinized it.
"Hope you remember how to play old sledge," he said. "When we stopped last game you owed me a little over seventeen thousand dollars. If you forget it isn"t a cash game some day and pay up, why, I won"t kick," he added with rough jocularity. He threw a pack of cards on to the table and drew up the chairs.
Harry did not move. As they ate he had been wondering how long he could abide that sinister presence. The garish cards themselves now smote him with a shrinking distaste. As he was about to speak a knock came at the cabin door and Prendergast opened it.
The visitor Harry recognized instantly; it was the man who had called for fair play at the fight before the saloon, who had drawn him into the hotel.