The Sagebrusher, Emerson Hough [best love novels of all time txt] 📗

though she was unable to comprehend.

"No," said Allen Barnes. "But keep this picture of him—think that he died like a gentleman and a soldier. A good man, Sim Gage."

He turned away and walked down the grade apart from them, hardly seeing what lay before him, hardly hearing the rush of the waters down the canyon.

When men began to question as to the cause of the disaster, it became plain that some man, whose name no one will ever know, must have crept along the side of the river bank below the road grade, and have fired the fuse of a heavy charge of rack-rock, which, none might know how long, had been hid between the buttresses and back of the apron of the dam.

Doctor Barnes reasoned now that that man in all likelihood had come from below. If so, in all likelihood he was one of the Dorenwald party. His face lighted grimly. There were but few places where they could have found a place in the canyon for an encampment. If they had found one of these places—where were they now? Their fate could now be read in this flood forcing its way down through the crooked gorge of the mountain range. The flag staff had not been swept down—the flag still fluttered now, triumphant over the attempted ruin—the answer of America to Anarchy! And the flag had been avenged. Dorenwald and his "free brothers," leaders of the "world's revolt," would revolt no more. The sponge of the slate had wiped off their little marks. No one would ever trace them. They would find no confessional and no shriving, for their way back to that underworld of devil-fed minds, out of which they had emerged to do ruin in a country which had never harmed them, but which on the contrary had welcomed them and fed them in their want.

CHAPTER XXXIV AFTER THE DELUGE

In one elemental instant there was loosed in the soul of Mary Gage a pent flood of emotion. She let her heart go, let in the wilderness of primitive things again. She was alive! She could see! She could be as other women!

The flood of relief, of joy, of yearning, was a thing cosmic, so strong that regret and grief were for the time swept on and buried in the welter of emotions running free.

It was as though she had stepped absolutely from one world into another. Suddenly, the people of her old world were gone. There had been a shadow, a strange, magnified shadow of a soul, this man who had been called her husband. But now with astonishing swiftness and clarity of vision she knew that he never had been a husband to her. What another had told her was the truth. He never had allowed her to touch his hand, his face, he never had laid a hand on hers, never had called her by any name of love, never had kissed her or sought to do so. And he was gone now, so absolutely that not even the image of him could remain had she ever owned an image of him. She never had known him, and now never could.

Alas! Sim Gage, shall we say? By no means. Happy Sim Gage! For he passed at the climax of his life and took with him forever all he ever could have gained of delight and comfort. Happy Sim Gage! to have a woman like Mary, his wife, stand and weep for him now. He had lost her had she ever seen his face, and now, at least, he owned her tears. A vast and noble flood carried happy Sim Gage out to the ocean at the end of all, to the rest and the absorption and the peace.

Mary Gage pushed back the bandage from her eyes furtively, unable to obey longer any command which cut her off from this new world to which she had come. Before she dropped the bandage once more she had caught sight of a figure not looking toward her at the moment.

Allen Barnes was standing with his head up, his eyes looking out over the abysmal scene below. Behind his back he had gripped tight together his long and sinewy hands. He was a lean and broad man, so she thought. He stood in the uniform of his country, made for manly men, and beseeming only such. The neatness of good rearing even now was apparent in every line of him. Dust seemed not to have touched him. He was clean and trim and fine, a picture of an officer and a gentleman.

Light, and the new music of the spheres—to whom did she owe those things? It was to this man standing yonder.

"McQueston," she heard a sharp voice command, "take your men and go down to the lower dam—any way you can get across the mountains. Bring your report up by one of these cars when you get back here. I'll go up above to the upper station with these people. It's going to rain. That will end the fire."

He saluted sharply in return, and turned again to those under his personal charge.

"Get into the car," he said. Mary Gage felt his hand steadying her arm. He took his place at the steering wheel, Wid Gardner alongside, Annie and herself being left to the rear seat of the tonneau. It was reckless driving that Doctor Allen Barnes did once more. They out-ran the approaching valley storm, and so presently came into the gate of that place where once had lived Sim Gage. They dismounted from the car and stood, a forlorn group, looking at the scene before them as funeral mourners returning, not liking the thought of going into a deserted home from which a man is gone never to return.

CHAPTER XXXV ANNIE ANSWERS

All at once Annie Squires, usually stolid, now overstrained, gave way to a wild sobbing. "I can't go in there," said she. "I'm scared. I want to go home! I want my mother, that's what I want."

"Where is your mother?" asked Wid Gardner. He had come over near to her when Doctor Barnes was helping Mary into the house.

"Dead—dead long ago," wept Annie. "When I was a little girl. Like her, Mary, there—we didn't neither of us ever have a mother. We done just the best we could, both of us. We've tried and tried to find some sort of place where we belonged, and we couldn't. We haven't got any place to go to. I haven't got a place on earth to call my home.

"And it's something a woman wants sometimes," she added after a while, dabbing her wet handkerchief against her eyes. "That's the Gawd's truth."

Wid approached more closely the weeping girl, touching her arm with a brown hand now gentle as a child's.

"Now look-a-here," said he. "I can't stand to hear you go on that way. Do you reckon you was ever any lonesomer fer a home than what I am, living out here all my life?"

"And now I'm worse off than I ever was before," he went on frowningly. "I didn't know nothing before you come out here. But now I do. I can't think of your going back, Annie."

She did not answer him, but went on weeping.

"What's more, I ain't a-going to stand it," he added savagely. "I ain't a-going to let you go back a-tall. Talk about home!—there's a home right acrosst the fence. We can make it any way we like. It'll do to start with, anyhow. Here's where you belong—you don't belong back there in them dirty cities. You belong right out here—with me."

"I couldn't—I can't," said Annie. "I couldn't let her go back alone. I got to take care of that kid."

"She ain't blind no more," said Wid. "But she don't have to go back! This here place where we stand is hers, ain't it? What more does she want? And we'd be right here, too, all the time, to help her and watch her, wouldn't we, now?"

"You don't know her," said Annie Squires. "I do."

"But, Annie," he went on, "you'd ought to see this out here in the valley when the spring comes! It's green, all green! The sage has got five different colors of green in it—you wouldn't think that, would you? And some blue. And you ain't seen the mountains yet when they're white with snow on them—that's something you got to see fer to know what a mountain is. And look at that little creek—it's plumb gentle up here, ain't it? It's pretty, here. You ought to see the moonlight on the meadows when the moon is full,—I was telling you about that, Annie."

"I ain't never been married in my life," he went on, arguing now. "I ain't never seen a woman that I loved or looked at twicet but you. I was too damn lazy to care anyway about anything till I seen you. I just been drifting and fooling along. But now I ain't. I want to go to work. I want to be somebody. Why, Annie, I reckon all the time I was homesick, and didn't know it. But I tell you it wouldn't be no home unless you was in it with me. I ain't fit to ask you to run it fer me. But I do!"

It was the ancient story, even told direct in the open, unwhispered, even told now, at such an hour and place. She did not answer at all, but her sobbing had ceased. He stood still frowning, looking at her, his hat pushed back from his forehead.

"I can't say no more'n I have," he concluded. "Years and years, Annie. Wouldn't it settle a heap of things?"

"I got to have some sort of time to think things over, haven't I, then?" She spoke with apparent venom, as though this were an affront that had been offered her.

"All you want," said Wid Gardner gently. "I've done my own thinking. I know."

"I've got to go in and get them folks something to eat, haven't I?" said Annie, using her apron on her eyes. "It's going to be about the last time all of us'll ever eat together any more."

"Well, we can invite them over, sometimes, can't we, Annie?" said Wid Gardner calmly. And he kissed her brazenly and in the open.

CHAPTER XXXVI MRS. DAVIDSON'S CONSCIENCE

It was fall, and the flame of the frost had fallen on the aspen and the cottonwoods, and shorn the willows of most of their leaves. A hundred thousand wild fowl honked their way across the meadows toward the black flats where once had been a lake, and where now was immeasurable food for them. Up in the mountains the elk were braying. The voice of the coyotes at the pink of dawn seemed shriller now, as speaking of the coming days of want. But the sun still was kind, the midday hour still was one of warmth. A strange, keen value, immeasurably exalting, was in the air. All nature was afoot, questioning of what was to come.

Mary Gage came in from the stream side that afternoon, the strap of her trout creel cutting deep into the shoulder of her sweater. She placed the basket down under the shadow of the willow trees, and hung up a certain rod on certain nails under the eaves of the cabin. Her little dog, Tim, soberly marched in front of her, still guiding her, as he supposed; but she no longer had a cord upon his neck, a staff in her hand. A hundred chickens, well grown now, followed her about, vocal of their desire for attention. She turned to them, taking down the little sack which contained the leavings of the wheat that had been threshed not so long ago here.

"Chick, chick, chick!" she called gently—"chickee, chickee!" So she stood, Lady Bountiful for them as they swarmed about her feet in the dooryard.

She heard the clang of the new gate, and turned,