Part 43 (1/2)
”Let the wagon get on ahead,” he whispered. ”We'll follow at a distance.”
The whisper, so low that the silence was unbroken by it, came to her, a clear sound carrying with it a thrill of understanding. She trembled and--his arm against hers as his hand held her rein--he felt the subdued vibration like the quivering of a frightened animal. The wagon lumbered away with the sifting dust gus.h.i.+ng from the wheels. A stirred cloud rose upon its wake and they could feel it thick and stifling in their nostrils. She watched the receding arch cut down the back by the crack in the closed canvas, while he watched her. The sound of crushed twigs and straining wheels lessened, the stillness gathered between these noises of laboring life and the two mounted figures. As it settled each could hear the other's breathing and feel a mutual throb, as though the same leaping artery fed them both. In the blue night encircled by the waste, they were as still as vessels balanced to a hair in which pa.s.sion brimmed to the edge.
”Come on,” she said huskily, and twitched her reins from his hold.
The horses started, walking slowly. A strip of mangled sage lay in front, back of them the heavens hung, a star-strewn curtain. It seemed to the man and woman that they were the only living things in the world, its people, its sounds, its interests, were in some undescried distance where life progressed with languid pulses. How long the silence lasted neither knew. He broke it with a whisper:
”Why did you get David the water last night?”
Her answer came so low he had to bend to hear it.
”He wanted it. I had to.”
”Why do you give him all he asks for? David is nothing to you.”
This time no answer came, and he stretched his hand and clasped the pommel of her saddle. The horses, feeling the pull of the powerful arm, drew together. His knee pressed on the shoulder of her pony, and feeling him almost against her she bent sideways, flinching from the contact.
”Why do you shrink from me, Missy?”
”I'm afraid,” she whispered.
They paced on for a moment in silence. When he tried to speak his lips were stiff, and he moistened them to murmur:
”Of what?”
She shrunk still further and raised a hand between them. He s.n.a.t.c.hed at it, pulling it down, saying hoa.r.s.ely:
”Of me?”
”Of something--I don't know what. Of something terrible and strange.”
She tried to strike at her horse with the reins, but the man's hand dropped like a hawk on the pommel and drew the tired animal back to the foot pace.
”If you love me there's no need of fear,” he said, then waited, the sound of her terrified breathing like the beating of waves in his ears, and murmured lower than before, ”And you love me. I know it.”
Her face showed in dark profile against the deep sky. He stared at it, then suddenly set his teeth and gave the pommel a violent jerk that made the horse stagger and grind against its companion. The creaking of the wagon came faint from a wake of shadowy trail.
”You've done it for weeks. Before you knew. Before you lied to your father when he tried to make you marry David.”
She dropped the reins and clinched her hands against her breast, a movement of repression and also of pleading to anything that would protect her, any force that would give her strength to fight, not the man alone, but herself. But the will was not within her. The desert grew dim, the faint sounds from the wagon faded. Like a charmed bird, staring straight before it, mute and enthralled, she rocked lightly to left and right, and then swayed toward him.
The horse, feeling the dropped rein, stopped, jerking its neck forward in the luxury of rest, its companion coming to a standstill beside it.
Courant raised himself in his saddle and gathered her in an embrace that crushed her against his bony frame, then pressed against her face with his, till he pushed it upward and could see it, white, with closed eyes, on his shoulder. He bent till his long hair mingled with hers and laid his lips on her mouth with the clutch of a bee on a flower.
They stood a compact silhouette, clear in the luminous starlight. The crack in the canvas that covered the wagon back widened and the eye that had been watching them, stared bright and wide, as if all the life of the feeble body had concentrated in that one organ of sense. The hands, damp and trembling, drew the canvas edges closer, but left s.p.a.ce enough for the eye to dwell on this vision of a shattered world. It continued to gaze as Susan slid from the encircling arms, dropped from her horse, and came running forward, stumbling on the fallen bushes, as she ran panting out the old servant's name. Then it went back to the mountain man, a black shape in the loneliness of the night.
CHAPTER V
A slowly lightening sky, beneath it the transparent sapphire of the desert wakening to the dawn, and cutting the blue expanse the line of the new trail. A long b.u.t.te, a bristling outline on the paling north, ran out from a crumpled cl.u.s.tering of hills, and the road bent to meet it. The air came from it touched with a cooling freshness, and as they pressed toward it they saw the small, swift s.h.i.+ne of water, a little pool, gra.s.s-ringed, with silver threads creeping to the sands.