Leave Her to Heaven (11 page)

When at last the rain slackened, Harland stirred like a prisoner
who sees open the way to an escape; and then, as suddenly as it had come, the shower moved on down the canyon. The clouds began at once to vanish, the sun fighting through; and steam from the quickly drying ledges curled thinly in the warming air.

‘We've got to move,' he told her, and with no other word they started, Harland picking their path while she obediently followed. At first their chilled limbs were awkward and uncertain, but their own exertions warmed them. For a while they made good time.

But to advance was difficult. The canyon walls were high, and rimrock barred their escape to the heights above. Sometimes they slipped on muddy footing, sometimes on wet rocks; and where the way was steep, they clung like cats. Sometimes, as Harland chose what promised to be the easiest path, they were high above the water, sometimes, at its very brink. Once Ellen called to him, and he stopped to hear what she said — the roar of the brook was like fists pounding them — and she cried:

‘We forgot the rods, left them back at the big pool!'

He nodded shortly. ‘I've had enough fishing for today,' he shouted, grinning; and she laughed with him, loving him immeasurably.

The brook was so much risen that they could never cross it, and they had to stay on the south side of the canyon. Once they were near disaster. This was at a spot where at the foot of an abrupt declivity a slope of rubble and mud slanted down into the stream. They worked precariously across, and Harland found more secure footing on the further side and turned to give Ellen his hand; but when she reached out to take it, the loose stuff beneath her let go, and she slid in a small avalanche of shale and mud fairly into the water. She had a moment of sharp terror as she saw the torrent about to engulf her; but by good luck there was a shallow bar, and although she was rolled over and over, and bruised against the stones, the water was no more than waist-deep. Harland plunged in to catch her and help her to her feet and back to solid footing again, and she clung to him for an instant breathlessly, wishing he would never let her go.

‘All right?' he challenged, harsh in his concern.

She nodded, wiping the water from her streaming face, pushing back wet strands of hair that lay plastered on her cheeks. ‘I've lost my hat,' she said, smiling up at him.

‘It's gone on downstream.'

‘That was pretty close, wasn't it?'

‘Yes. For God's sake, watch your step,' he warned her. ‘Now come along!'

She followed him, and her teeth chattered, for the cold plunge had chilled her through and through; and the weight of her soaked and muddy garments wearied her, and their progress slowed; and always the stream, swollen now into a hungry river, roared past just below them, like a shark which follows a steamer, rolling up a wicked eye at the passengers along the rail. The footing was so hazardous that any error could precipitate them to destruction, and Ellen thought that if she fell again, because she was so weary, they might not be able to win free from the hungry flood. At increasingly frequent intervals they paused to rest, their tortured lungs laboring, their bodies trembling with fatigue. But the air was warmer, and presently the sky blew clear and the sun blazed on the upper slopes so that rocks and mud alike seemed to steam and smoke.

Also, the sun renewed their courage — and at the same time it warned them that the afternoon was well-sped. Harland looked at his watch, and this time she asked a question, and he said it was almost five o'clock, and added urgently: ‘Can't you travel any faster?'

There was no reproach in her tones as she replied. 'I'm sorry. I'll try,' she said. But she lagged, and he drew a few paces ahead, till reaching easier footing, he paused to wait for her. ‘I'm coming,' she assured him; but then she stepped on a stone which turned under her foot. She threw herself sidewise and fell, with a low cry, and he came quickly back to her.

‘It's nothing,' she declared, but when she took a step she limped and winced, and he said:

‘I'd better bandage that.'

‘I'm afraid so,' she confessed, catching her breath with pain.
‘I don't want to play out on you. But — what can you use?'

‘My shirt?' he suggested. She nodded and sat down and loosed the laces of her shoe and stripped off her stocking, while he laid aside his fishing vest and removed his shirt and tore out the back of it as far up as the neck yoke, and ripped it into lengths. His body, bare to the waist, wet and shining when he took off his shirt, dried quickly in the sun, and the muscles in his arms slid smoothly under the smooth skin. When he knelt to apply the makeshift bandages, his water-logged hat hid his face from her, and because she wished to watch him she took it off his head, and he looked up at her, a question in his eyes.

‘It's so heavy,' she said. ‘Throw it away.' She tossed it aside.

‘How do I do this?' he asked. She told him how to place the bandages, and when they were affixed, he wrung her stocking as dry as possible, and with some difficulty, over the bulk of the bandages, she drew on her shoe and laced it tightly.

He put on again the fragment of his shirt. It was whole in front and still had sleeves, but they laughed together at his appearance.

‘It's like a hospital night shirt,' he suggested.

She stood up to try her foot, facing him steadily. ‘That feels fine!' she declared, and saw his quick approval of her sturdy courage.

Thereafter he let her lead the way, and their progress slowed accordingly. Presently, as they worked along a rocky slope, she heard over the tumult of the brook a rumbling sound, and looked ahead with startled and then amazed eyes. The flood had undercut one of the perpendicular canyon walls which towered two hundred feet or more above the stream bed. This wall was a mixture of hard clay and shale and soft stone strata; and when its foundations were gone, the face collapsed. Like the front of a glacier when it meets a river swollen with spring floods, it sheared off, leaned a little outward so that for an instant Ellen saw the sky through a widening crack high above them, and then crumbled like a falling chimney, collapsing on itself, thousands of tons of debris smashing down into the gorge so violently that the earth trembled under the impact; and the water geysered high as
though a charge of dynamite had been set off in the depths, and a mighty blast of air struck them, throwing them off balance so that they fell sprawling and clung to each other, still watching with staring eyes.

Ellen, after the first moment of awed terror provoked by that majestic spectacle, saw that the fall had completely dammed the stream. They were penned here like flies in a stoppered bottle. The waters began at once to rise, the canyon to fill as rapidly as a goblet fills when it is held under a faucet. Harland shouted:

‘We've got to climb out of here! Come on.'

He took her hand, and they clambered upward, the rising water close on their heels. Something like panic touched them both, and they made unnecessary haste, till, looking back and down, they saw that the water would soon top the great mound of earth which sealed the canyon, and their hands held fast as they paused to watch.

The first trickle found a way across the barrier, and that trickle widened; and as easily as a hot knife cuts through butter it cut down through the dam. They saw boulders as big as barrels swept away and submerged; and abruptly the flood, making its own channel, began to fall again.

It had broken through at a point on the opposite side from where they were; and the heap of mud and rubble left on this side would for a while serve as a bridge which they could cross. To do so meant passing close under the face of the cliff from which the fall had come, and from which even now small clots of mud and rocks occasionally descended; but if they waited till the loose stuff was all washed away, they might not be able to pass at all. They must cross while they could, and Harland told her so.

‘We can't, possibly,' she protested, holding fast to him, her teeth clicking with real terror now.

‘We've got to!'

‘We'll mire like flies on flypaper,' she cried. ‘Or another slide will bury us!'

He gripped her hands so hard she thought the bones must break. ‘We're going,' he told her strongly, and smiled and drew
her toward him. ‘We'll make it,' he said in calm certainty. ‘It's all right, Ellen. I'll get you out of this. Now come.'

So hand in hand they plunged down the slope and began that dangerous passage. There was a moment when they sank knee-deep in mud, and Ellen thought they were caught; and a clod of dirt falling from a hundred feet above them landed so near that spattering particles stung their faces. But they crawled free of the muck and passed the face of the cliff and from a safe vantage looked back to see the last of their precarious footing, devoured by the hungry stream, dissolve and swirl away.

He laughed aloud, in a high pride because he had beaten the enemy; and because he could laugh at such a moment her heart swelled. ‘I thought we were going to die together there,' she said huskily.

‘We're all right!' he assured her. ‘We're going to make it. Ankle pretty bad?'

‘It's better all the time.'

‘If we ever come to anything like level ground, I can carry you.'

‘Exercise will do it good,' she said, but that was so absurd that they laughed together, and they drew together, united by this which they endured. Behind them the sun dropped below the last ridge and was gone; yet its rays still touched the loftier slopes above them, and though dusk began to fill the canyon, the sky was clear and fine. Ellen saw too that the way was easier now, the footing more secure; and the heights that walled them were no longer so abrupt. It was as though the mountains were relenting, relaxing their grasp, permitting these two small living creatures to escape. Yet full dark was almost come before the gorge widened out, and the violence of the stream, loosed from the canyon's close constriction, began to ease. They followed its margin, and the farther shore was all an indistinguishable shadow, and they came into a little clump of aspens, and pushed through and found themselves among pines beyond.

Here at last Ellen sank wearily down. ‘I can't go any farther for a while,' she said helplessly. ‘Do you think they might find us if we just waited here?'

It was almost dark among the pines, but the roar of the racing water no longer deafened them. ‘Of course,' he said. ‘Be sure they will. Rest. I'll see if I can start a fire.'

She remembered that Robie's ranch lay to the northward, and they were on the south side of the brook, so rescue could not reach them till the flood ran off; but she did not tell him so. On his knees, groping in the darkness, he collected by the sense of touch a supply of dead wood for his fire. He found none that was dry, but the small twigs of the pines would burn, wet or dry. When his wood was ready, he broke off a handful of these twigs from the lower branches of standing trees, and at last tried his matches.

The first one started a little flame, but it died as soon as the match burned out. While she watched, he used half a dozen to dry the kindling before at last it burned of itself. In five minutes thereafter he had a roaring bonfire, the sparks flying twinkling upward through the boughs overhead; and he stood back and brushed his hands triumphantly.

‘There!' he cried.

Ellen, sitting near-by, facing the blaze, her shoulders resting against the trunk of a huge pine, smiled approvingly, looking all around. The flames pushed the darkness back — so far but no farther. At a little distance blackness ringed them still; but the circle of firelight seemed to her almost palpable, as though it built a wall around them and a roof over their heads, built a habitation in which they could rest secure. She was conscious of the weight of the vast wilderness in the heart of which by the fire-magic he had carved out a shelter for them both; and she was happy in this sanctuary he had made.

Her eyes turned back to him, and he asked: ‘All right now? How's the ankle?'

‘Fine,' she declared. ‘But I'm terribly cold.' Yet the heat from the fire filled this circle from which the darkness was excluded. She was cold because she was wet through, as he was.

‘You'd better take off some of your clothes,' he suggested. ‘We'll dry them; and you'll be warmer without them, even while they're drying.'

She obeyed him without question, rising to step out of her skirt and hand it to him, and she gave him that bright-hued shirt she wore, sadly draggled and muddy now. He hung the garments so that they felt the heat of the flames, and his manner was wholly impersonal and reassuring.

But what she did had for her a significance deeper than the simple, reasonable act itself. Under the circumstances, for her to remove her wet and sodden outer clothing was the sensible and the intelligent thing to do; but because he was to her what he was, it seemed to her a symbolic gesture, as though she laid aside all her defenses. This circle of firelight was their bridal bower, and by doing what she did she surrendered herself to him — and bound him to her by that triumphant surrender.

To Harland, clearly, the moment had no such connotation. ‘Stand here by the fire till you're warm,' he advised, his tone completely matter-of-fact.

She obeyed, turning back and front to the blaze; but after a moment she said: ‘It's scorching me!' She went to the tree and sat down again, a small white huddle, hugging her knees, watching him with her heart in her eyes. He brought more wood and the flames leaped higher; and he took off his fishing vest with the many pockets, feeling the weight of the trout which he had forgotten there, and he exclaimed with a quick satisfaction: ‘Here's our supper anyway!' He laid the trout on the ground, and took off his ruined shirt and hung it to dry, and stood stripped to the waist, the firelight gleaming on his chest and flanks; and to her swimming senses it seemed they were alone in a world of their own, intimate and close as lovers, the fire on their hearthstone burning bright between them.