The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, Owen Wister [best e books to read txt] 📗

he fell into the elemental talk of sex, such talk as would be an elk's or tiger's; and spoken so by him, simply and naturally, as we speak of the seasons, or of death, or of any actuality, it was without offense. It would be offense should I repeat it. Then, abruptly ending these memories of himself and Steve, he went out of the tent, and I heard him dragging a log to the fire. When it had blazed up, there on the tent wall was his shadow and that of the log where he sat with his half-broken heart. And all the while I supposed he was master of himself, and self-justified against Steve's omission to bid him good-by.

I must have fallen asleep before he returned, for I remember nothing except waking and finding him in his blankets beside me. The fire shadow was gone, and gray, cold light was dimly on the tent. He slept restlessly, and his forehead was ploughed by lines of pain. While I looked at him he began to mutter, and suddenly started up with violence. “No!” he cried out; “no! Just the same!” and thus wakened himself, staring. “What's the matter?” he demanded. He was slow in getting back to where we were; and full consciousness found him sitting up with his eyes fixed on mine. They were more haunted than they had been at all, and his next speech came straight from his dream. “Maybe you'd better quit me. This ain't your trouble.”

I laughed. “Why, what is the trouble?”

His eyes still intently fixed on mine. “Do you think if we changed our trail we could lose them from us?”

I was framing a jocose reply about Ounces being a good walker, when the sound of hoofs rushing in the distance stopped me, and he ran out of the tent with his rifle. When I followed with mine he was up the bank, and all his powers alert. But nothing came out of the dimness save our three stampeded horses. They crashed over fallen timber and across the open to where their picketed comrade grazed at the end of his rope. By him they came to a stand, and told him, I suppose, what they had seen; for all four now faced in the same direction, looking away into the mysterious dawn. We likewise stood peering, and my rifle barrel felt cold in my hand. The dawn was all we saw, the inscrutable dawn, coming and coming through the black pines and the gray open of the basin. There above lifted the peaks, no sun yet on them, and behind us our stream made a little tinkling.

“A bear, I suppose,” said I, at length.

His strange look fixed me again, and then his eyes went to the horses. “They smell things we can't smell,” said he, very slowly. “Will you prove to me they don't see things we can't see?”

A chill shot through me, and I could not help a frightened glance where we had been watching. But one of the horses began to graze and I had a wholesome thought. “He's tired of whatever he sees, then,” said I, pointing.

A smile came for a moment in the Virginian's face. “Must be a poor show,” he observed. All the horses were grazing now, and he added, “It ain't hurt their appetites any.”

We made our own breakfast then. And what uncanny dread I may have been touched with up to this time henceforth left me in the face of a real alarm. The shock of Steve was working upon the Virginian. He was aware of it himself; he was fighting it with all his might; and he was being overcome. He was indeed like a gallant swimmer against whom both wind and tide have conspired. And in this now foreboding solitude there was only myself to throw him ropes. His strokes for safety were as bold as was the undertow that ceaselessly annulled them.

“I reckon I made a fuss in the tent?” said he, feeling his way with me.

I threw him a rope. “Yes. Nightmare—indigestion—too much newspaper before retiring.”

He caught the rope. “That's correct! I had a hell of a foolish dream for a growed-up man. You'd not think it of me.”

“Oh, yes, I should. I've had them after prolonged lobster and champagne.”

“Ah,” he murmured, “prolonged! Prolonged is what does it.” He glanced behind him. “Steve came back—”

“In your lobster dream,” I put in.

But he missed this rope. “Yes,” he answered, with his eyes searching me. “And he handed me the paper—”

“By the way, where is that?” I asked.

“I built the fire with it. But when I took it from him it was a six-shooter I had hold of, and pointing at my breast. And then Steve spoke. 'Do you think you're fit to live?' Steve said; and I got hot at him, and I reckon I must have told him what I thought of him. You heard me, I expect?”

“Glad I didn't. Your language sometimes is—”

He laughed out. “Oh, I account for all this that's happening just like you do. If we gave our explanations, they'd be pretty near twins.”

“The horses saw a bear, then?”

“Maybe a bear. Maybe “—but here the tide caught him again—“What's your idea about dreams?”

My ropes were all out. “Liver—nerves,” was the best I could do.

But now he swam strongly by himself.

“You may think I'm discreditable,” he said, “but I know I am. It ought to take more than—well, men have lost their friendships before. Feuds and wars have cloven a right smart of bonds in twain. And if my haid is going to get shook by a little old piece of newspaper—I'm ashamed I burned that. I'm ashamed to have been that weak.”

“Any man gets unstrung,” I told him. My ropes had become straws; and I strove to frame some policy for the next hours.

We now finished breakfast and set forth to catch the horses. As we drove them in I found that the Virginian was telling me a ghost story. “At half-past three in the morning she saw her runaway daughter standing with a babe in her arms; but when she moved it was all gone. Later they found it was the very same hour the young mother died in Nogales. And she sent for the child and raised it herself. I knowed them both back home. Do you believe that?”

I said nothing.

“No more do I believe it,” he asserted. “And see here! Nogales time is three hours different from Richmond. I didn't know about that point then.”

Once out of these mountains, I knew he could right himself; but even I, who had no Steve to dream about, felt this silence of the peaks was preying on me.

“Her daughter and her might have been thinkin' mighty hard about each other just then,” he pursued. “But Steve is dead. Finished. You cert'nly don't believe there's anything more?”

“I wish I could,” I told him.

“No, I'm satisfied. Heaven didn't never interest me much. But if