"Dexter, I secured a few sprigs of very superior mint, yesterday," he made of it a ceremonial. "Do you think you would--care to join me, sir?"
They had been friends for close to forty years, not because of common tastes, but in spite of innate dissimilarity. Dexter came to his feet; he reached out and crushed the other man"s hand within his soft, white fingers. Nor was his reply quite according to formula.
"I don"t mind if I do, Cal," he accepted fervidly, "Thank G.o.d . . . I don"t mind if I do!"
Arm in arm, they recrossed to the white-columned house. And they kept close, each to the other, throughout the hours of suspense that followed, finding a potent though unconfessed rea.s.surance in such companionship.
Delirium came again upon the sick man who lay in the room which Miss Sarah had always kept waiting for him. Fever strode upon him, while the girl who had brought him home slept in complete exhaustion. At times Steve lay quiescent, only muttering fitfully; the next moment he called crisply for Fat Joe--he feared for his bridge--and Joe had to exert every iron muscle to hold him down. And always he spoke Barbara"s name, with a poignant gentleness that left Miss Sarah on the verge of collapse. But he continued to live, through that day and the next night, even when the doctor shook his head and Fat Joe rose to go for the girl, as he had promised he would, in the last extremity. He continued to live, and with the coming of the second dawn suddenly he was no longer delirious. Stephen O"Mara opened his eyes and gazed feebly but very understandingly into the eyes of Fat Joe, who was watching at that moment.
Joe tried to hush him, but he would talk a little.
"I know," he p.r.o.nounced each word with calculated effort. "I have been very sick, and I must not waste my strength. But I have to be clear, first, on one point. Have I dreamed it, Joe, or--or did she bring me home?"
With his voice alone, when all else seemed failing, Joe had kept his friend alive. The doctor believed it; Miss Sarah knew it to be so.
And first of all Joe had to voice his thankfulness, for it was an explosive thing.
"Didn"t I tell her so?" he demanded in his whining tenor. "Didn"t I say so, all along? And I let that doctor worry _me_, just because he"s got a diploma in a frame, hanging on his wall!"
Then he answered Steve"s question.
"She found you," he said. "She brought you home."
A long time the sick man lay and pondered. And finally he found it possible to smile.
"I have not cared whether I lived or died," he said in little more than a whisper. "All along I have seemed to know how near I was--to going across; and I have been near to quitting--at times. For I was happier than I"d ever dared let myself be, before--and then, with the first shot that dropped Big Louie, I knew----" He shook his head, still smiling vaguely. "I have not wanted to live, but I am looking at things--more like a man now. . . . You need not worry any longer, Joe.
I"ll sleep a little while, I think; and then I"ll put my mind hard on getting well, when I awake."
That marked the end of delirium, and with sleep which came almost while he was talking, the fever began to abate. He "put his mind on getting well," when he awoke, twelve hours later. Strength was flowing in a steady tide back into his body long before Barbara"s knees would again bear her weight. For she had squandered her endurance without counting the cost, and she paid the full penalty. She lay three days and three nights railing at her weakness before she could get up at all; and even then Cecile, her little maid, clucked discreetly at the dark circles beneath her eyes.
Joe was several days absent on that errand which had all but emptied the seething town of men; he returned the same day Barbara was about again, forced to admit that Harrigan and Fallon and Shayne had won clear. And there was nothing left to the disgruntled groups which straggled in behind him, save tall and heated conjecture. Some said that they must have managed to cross the border; others maintained that they had found sanctuary in the lumber-camps of the lake country to the west, but no matter which guess was right the net result stood unchanged. For it is upon the one who runs away that the blame is always laid, and Archibald Wickersham knew fully as well as did Caleb and Allison and Fat Joe that, without Harrigan, they could not hope to touch him. Harrigan had disappeared from the ken of men, and Wickersham delayed only until his departure could no longer be construed as flight. Then one evening modestly he boarded a train.
After she had rested Barbara proved almost humbly amenable to reason; until it was best for her to go to him, she would wait as patiently as she was able. And in the meantime, in a luxury of loneliness, wisely the girl spent her days out of doors, climbing oftenest to that hill-top where they had stood together, in the snow, the night of Miss Sarah"s Christmas party. From that point she could see Morrison and the river basin, and even the steam that jetted ever and again from the whistles of the engines clattering over his railroad which lanced into the north.
But no discordant note of haste could reach her ears from so great a distance. That whole vast panorama, suggestive least of all of violence, lay blanketed in a sleepy silence that matched the subdued security of her mood.
Miss Sarah ordered a week of unbroken quiet and rest for her patient; and Steve, and not Barbara, proved the difficult one to manage during that period. For with returning strength there came to him recollection of many things which required his attention. He fretted over his work; he swore humorously at Fat Joe, who, coming to make daily reports as soon as Miss Sarah realized that the good in such visits far exceeded the benefits of sleep and solitude, a.s.sured his chief that they had accomplished much, unhampered as they were by carping authority.
But he lay and brooded, no humor in his eye, when he was left alone.
Fat Joe had a.s.sured him that she had brought him home; but Fat Joe, who was ever averse to anti-climax, had told him no more than that. His efforts at entertainment were only the more spontaneous those days because of the soberness of his friend"s face. And then, the same day that Joe raised him against the pillows so that he might watch a string of flat-cars, high piled with logs, roll into the yards, they let her go to him.
Steve was listening to the shrill salute of the whistle which he knew was McLean"s paen of victory; he was smiling a little wistfully over the memory which, with McLean, always recurred to him, when he turned and saw her standing on the threshold. She had come on diffident, mouse-like feet. She was watching him. And before he believed it really was she, Barbara faltered his name.
"Steve!"
It was only a wisp of a sound--an aching, throbbing bit of tenderness lighter even than the breath that bore it.
"Steve!" she breathed again.
But thereupon, with a headlong little rush that scattered spools of bandage and rolls of lint, and set the bottles upon his table jingling dangerously, she flew to him and came, somehow, into his arms.
They had not told him--at first he could not speak. Dumbly he sat, his face bowed upon that brown head pillowed in his arms. She had told herself that she was a woman now--yet her first words were all girl.
"Tell me just once that I"m pretty," she quavered. "Say that I am still--half boy--to you!"
His tongue unsteadied with joy, he told her again, as he had told her on that other day; and watching the old, old wonder of her grow in his eyes, she listened as though she were taking the words, one by one, from his lips. But there was nothing boyish in the crooked little arch of her mouth--nothing boyish in the depths of her dark and br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes. She remembered his wincing shoulder then; her arms crept higher about his neck. And now her face was uplifted and there was no more need for words.
Afterward, when they spoke of Big Louie, she loved him more for the sorrow which he did not try to hide. From Fat Joe he had already learned of Big Louie"s last dereliction. Out of a deeper silence, Steve spoke gravely--an epitaph for the man to whom he had been unfailingly kind.
"Most any kind of a failure can live," he said, "but it takes a man--to smile and die."
He let himself marvel aloud at her littleness.
Their first hour together was only the happier for that moment of sadness they shared.
CHAPTER XXV
IN REAL LIFE TOO
There was no longer any objection raised by Miss Sarah; and Barbara spent every hour of her days with him. It grew warmer with aging spring--and almost immediately he was able to sit with her and watch the stream of logs coming in over the line from Thirty-Mile and beyond.
Miriam and Garry were married in that week which followed directly Steve"s first days of convalescence. The former had returned with Garry to the northern valley, and already a note had come from her to the younger girl, in which she bewailed the servant question, as represented by the cook-boy whom her husband had inherited, along with the cabin at headquarters.
Over that particular paragraph Barbara allowed herself to show amus.e.m.e.nt. She tilted her nose, however, in vast disdain at the tenor of the rest of the letter.
"From the way Miriam raves on and on," she exclaimed, "one would think that Garry had saved the day."
They were at the window together on this occasion, Steve outwardly still a little pale and haggard, but for the rest his old serene self again. He managed not to smile at her small and serious face.
"It certainly has not strengthened my vanity a little bit, either,"
said he, "to learn how smoothly things can move along without me."
Day by day the girl was finding her way deeper into that innermost heart of him which he had never shared with other woman or man. Hour by hour she was learning to know him better, and yet his whimsical gravity still could deceive her--she was sometimes thoughts behind his thoughts. Hard upon his reply her eyes flashed with indignation.
"Pooh!" she scoffed, "Pooh! Most any old clock will run, after somebody"s wound it up!"
It was a trick of speech that she had learned from him, but his employment of parallel, lazily amiable for the most part, had never been so hotly partisan as was hers at that moment. And suddenly self-conscious--suddenly confused and warmly disconcerted at the quality of his gaze--she had to hide her head. But she hid it upon a shoulder most conveniently at hand.
Spring gave way to early summer--and now Steve was able to be on his feet again, so absurdly uncertain of balance at first, however, that she ridiculed him unmercifully one moment, only to rush to him in a panic of solicitude the next. There came long walks, and longer trips in the saddle; came hours of silence that were the more wonderful for want of words--hours in which, in a hushed voice, she gave him shyly of her plans. But always, too, the interruptions grew more and more frequent and insistent. Fat Joe and McLean, and even Hardwick Elliott, made more and more pressing demands upon his time, until finally he insisted that he could no longer play, shamelessly, the invalid. He must look in upon the works up-river, if only for the moral effect which it would have upon the men. She a.s.sented, grudgingly; it would be but a day or two. And then--then he would come back to her.
The next morning, at the moment when Barbara and Steve were mounting their horses, for she wanted to ride with him a little way, Dexter Allison chose to disclose something which had been but lately in the process of preparation. He joined them at the edge of the lawn, before the white-columned house on the hill.
"Easing back into harness, I understand," he began, not quite comfortably, however, for he was aware of a gleam of disapproval in his daughter"s eyes, at this interruption. "Well, there"s no great rush, but it"s wise, no doubt, to see that things don"t lag." He hesitated, and shifted heavily to the other foot. "We"ll want to start through to the border by fall, I suppose?"
"We"ll be ready," Steve had to laugh at his lack of ease.