Part 19 (2/2)
Moya's lips touched a cheek as white and almost as cold as the frosted window-panes through which the moon was glimmering. She thought of the icy roses on her wedding dress.
Downstairs her father was smoking his bedtime cigar. Mrs. Creve, very sleepy and cosy and flushed, leaned over the smouldering bed of coals.
She held out her plump, soft hand to Moya.
”Come here and be scolded! We have been scolding you steadily for the last hour.”
”If you want that young man to get his strength back, you'd better not keep him up talking half the night,” the colonel growled softly. ”Do you see what time it is?”
Moya knelt and leaned her head against her father. She reached one hand to Mrs. Creve. They did not speak again till her weak moment had pa.s.sed.
”It will be very soon,” she said, pressing the warm hand that stroked her own. ”You will help me pack, aunt Annie; and then you'll stay--with father? I know you are glad to have me out of the way at last!”
XVII
THE HIDDEN TRAIL
Because they had set forth on a grim and sorrowful quest, it need not be supposed that Paul and Moya were a pair of sorrowful pilgrims. It was their wedding journey. At the outset Moya had said: ”We are doing the best we know. For what we don't know, let us leave it and not brood.”
They did not enter at once upon the more eccentric stages of the search.
They went by way of the Great Northern to Portland, descending from snow to roses and drenching rains. At Pendleton, which is at the junction of three great roads, Paul sent tracers out through express agents and train officials along the remotest slender feeders of these lines.
Through the same agents it was made known that for any service rendered or expense incurred on behalf of the person described, his friends would hold themselves gratefully responsible.
At Portland, Paul searched the steamer lists and left confidential orders in the different transportation offices; and Moya wrote to his mother--a woman's letter, every page s.h.i.+ning with happiness and as free from apparent forethought as a running brook.
They returned by the Great Northern and Lake Coeur d'Alene, stopping over at Fort Sherman to visit Mrs. Creve, who was giddy with joy over the wholesome change in Paul. She, too, wrote a woman's letter concerning that visit, to the colonel, which cleared a crowd of shadows from his lonely hearth.
Thence again to Pendleton came the seekers, and Paul gathered in his lines, but found nothing; so cast them forth again. But through all these distant elaborations of the search, in his own mind he saw the old man creeping away by some near, familiar trail and lying hid in some warm valley in the hills, his prison and his home.
It was now the last week in March. The travelers' bags were in the office, the carriage at the door, when a letter--pigeon-holed and forgotten since received some three weeks before--was put into Paul's hand.
I run up against your ad. in the Silver City Times [the communication began]. If you haven't found your man yet, maybe I can put you onto the right lead. I'm driving a jerky on the road from Mountain Home to Oriana, but me and the old man we don't jibe any too well. I've got a sort of disgust on me. Think I'll quit soon and go to mining. Jimmy Breen he runs the Ferry, he can tell you all I know. Fifty miles from Mountain Home good road can make it in one day. Yours Respecfully,
J. STRATTON.
It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of enterprise.
Business at the Ferry had shrunk since the railroad went through. The house-staff consisted of Jimmy Breen, a Chinese cook of the bony, tartar breed, sundry dogs, and a large bachelor cat that mooned about the empty piazzas. In a young farming country, hungry for capital, Jimmy could not do a cash business, but everything was grist that came to his mill; and he was quick to distinguish the perennial dead beat from a genuine case of hard luck.
”That's a good axe ye have there,” pointing suggestively to a new one sticking out of the rear baggage of an emigrant outfit. ”Ye better l'ave that with me for the dollar that's owing me. If ye have money to buy new axes ye can't be broke entirely.” Or: ”Slip the halter on that calf behind there. The mother hasn't enough to keep it alive. There's har'ly a dollar's wort' of hide on its bones, but I'll take it to save it droppin' on the road.” Or, he would try sarcasm: ”Well, we'll be shuttin' her down in the spring. Then ye can go round be Walter's Ferry and see if they'll trust ye there.” Or: ”Why wasn't ye workin' on the Ditch last winter? Settin' smokin' your poipe in the tules, the wife and young ones packin' sagebrush to kape ye warm!”
On the morning after their distinguished arrival, Jimmy's guests came down late to a devastated breakfast-table. Little heaps of crumbs here and there showed where earlier appet.i.tes had had their destined hour and gone their way. At an impartial distance from the top and the foot of the table stood the familiar group of sauce and pickle bottles, every brand dear to the cowboy, including the ”surrup-jug” adhering to its saucer. There was a fresh-gathered bunch of wild phlox by Moya's plate in a tumbler printed round the edge with impressions of a large moist male thumb.
”Catchee plenty,” the Chinaman grinned, pointing to the plain outside where the pale sage-brush quivered stiffly in the wind. ”Bymbye plenty come. Pretty col' now.”
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