Leave Her to Heaven (6 page)

Harland muttered an assent. His hand was tight on his gun and he felt it slipping with sweat and released his grip to wipe his palm dry on his trouser leg. The turkeys, moving straight toward where they lay, came within fifty or sixty yards; but then Harland thought the birds saw them. Certainly he and Ellen were by that time in plain sight, and certainly the actions of the turkeys were subtly modified. They changed course, and instead of coming on they drifted nearer the border of the woods and, keeping the same distance away, described a third of a circle around the two watchers. Harland wished to shoot, but he waited till Ellen whispered:

‘Careful! Now!'

He swung the gun's muzzle slowly toward the birds, and at that cautious movement they stood for an instant in motionless attention. In that instant Harland fired.

The turkey he had chosen fell; the others fled like speeding shadows. As he leaped erect, the stricken turkey also scrambled to its feet; and Harland, running toward it, fired again, knocked it down again. Before he reached it, it was up once more, and once more Harland shot it down. It was still struggling when he caught its neck, smothered the great beating wings, gave it a quick quietus.

And he thought then suddenly that his chest was about to explode! The violent exertion through these few seconds at this high altitude had called on his heart and lungs for an extraordinary effort. When Ellen, coming more slowly, reached him, he was lying flat on his back, breathless and helpless, his hand clasping the softly feathered neck of the dead bird.

She knelt beside him, quickly understanding. ‘Just rest !' she said. ‘I should have warned you. You're not acclimated to the thin air. We're up nine or ten thousand feet here, you know.' Then she cried, looking at the turkey: ‘Oh, what a pity! One of your bullets cut his beard. He'd have made a splendid specimen!'

Harland, grimly amused at his own distress, thought he himself was in a fair way to become a splendid specimen! He tried to sit up, but she bade him lie still. ‘Wait,' she insisted. ‘You'll be all right presently.'

He did not protest. He was content to stay passive till his laboring heart slowed to a normal beat again; content even then to sit with her while they admired the big gobbler on the ground between them. Its wingspread was wider than his gun's length would span, and she guessed the bird would weigh twenty-five pounds. ‘It's bigger than the best my father killed,' she said. ‘I'm sorry the beard's spoiled. I might have saved the skin and mounted it in the group he made last winter, out of turkeys he killed here.'

‘Do you still do that sort of thing?'

‘I haven't, but I could. I've kept his workrooms as they were, in Boston and at Bar Harbor, with everything ready, just as he left them.'

‘Do you mean to — go on with his work?'

Her eyes met his. ‘I don't know what I mean to do,' she said quietly. Then with a quick movement she rose. ‘Stay here. I'll bring the horses.'

‘I'll go.'

‘You shouldn't move around much for a while.' Her solicitude at once flattered and compelled him, and he felt a momentary rebellion at her assured domination; but she was already moving,
away. When she returned, herself mounted and with his horse on lead, under her direction he loosed the yellow slicker bound behind his saddle and wrapped the turkey in it and secured it on the horse's back. Then they turned homeward, jubilant together, talking much and laughing easily. There was a like intoxication in them both, and every thought was amusing, every word provoked a shout of mirth. On the crest of the last ridge they paused to watch the level sun dip below the heights northwestward, and when it was gone, like bathers venturing into the sea at night, they descended into the cool dusk which filled the canyon; and Ellen began to sing a doleful song:

He laughed in amused appreciation. ‘Where'd you get that?'

‘Charlie Yates taught it to me when father and I were here two years ago.'

‘It's a classic!' He began to sing it with her, and when he erred she corrected him.

‘Not “slippery elms”!' she protested. ‘“Slip-per-y el-lums ”! Soulful and woeful! Try it again.'

So they began afresh, and their singing voices went before them as they neared the lodge, and their shouts of triumph summoned the others out to see their prize.

Harland before he slept that night planned eagerly to spend next day with Ellen; but at breakfast Lin reminded him that they were to go looking for wild horses and he could think of no ready pretext to escape. Tess decided to join them, and shortly after breakfast, lunch in their saddlebags, the others on the veranda to watch their departure, they set out.

From the first it was clear that Lin felt himself to be — and was — in charge of the expedition. Harland found it hard to remember
that Lin was no older than Danny; the boy seemed so completely at home in these surroundings, so sure of himself, so mature in all his ways. Tess, in dungarees and checked shirt and big hat, wearing leather chaps to guard her knees against the buck brush through which sometimes they rode, seemed as much a boy as Lin; and they vied with each other like puppies, spurring their horses into sudden headlong races not only on the level but up or down the steep trails, shouting and laughing, the victor deriding the vanquished while after each sprint they waited for Harland to come up with them.

They were charming, but he wished it were Ellen with whom he rode through these sun-filled canyons and these park-like openings carpeted with flowers. He might have forgotten their quest, but Lin did not. Whenever they were about to emerge from some forest cover he paused to scan the scene ahead; and thrice he showed Harland tracks of the quarry upon which they sought to spy. At noon, as efficiently as any guide, he boiled the kettle beside a tumbling little stream, and Harland smiled at the youngster's gravity, and thought how Danny would have enjoyed this day, and they ate their lunch and then rode on.

It was mid-afternoon before fortune gave them at last the glimpse they sought. Emerging from an aspen thicket into one of the lovely parks which lay everywhere, Harland saw Lin pause to look ahead, and the boy called a low, quick word, and Harland and Tess brought their horses up beside his, and then they all spurred into the open.

Two hundred yards away, gleaming like bronze statues in the sun, nine horses stood with crests flung high, watching them. As Harland's eye found them. they turned in thundering flight. The stallion herded his mares away, and Lin shouted and gave chase, and Tess and Harland, at full gallop, followed; but in a dozen bounds the wild creatures reached the rimrock and plunged over it and were gone. Only the stallion paused for one last defiant backward glance before he followed his harem over the brink. When the riders came to the spot, it seemed impossible that anything larger than a fox could have descended the broken declivity;
but the horses were gone, already out of sight in the wooded deeps.

‘Did they go down there?' Harland cried, doubting his own eyes; and Lin laughed.

‘Sure. They're a mile away by now. They're like mountain goats, and just about as wild.' He was tremendously proud of this success, and Harland to please him asked many wondering questions, till presently they moved on, now homeward bound.

Half an hour after they saw the horses, they emerged upon a tree-clad rim from which they looked out across a high grassy basin perhaps a mile wide. Lin checked his horse in the fringe of trees; and Harland, pausing beside him, saw three mounted figures sitting quietly in the center of the basin. He recognized at once Robie's big, light-colored hat, and the two people with him were clearly feminine; but far away across the basin another rider went at a swinging gallop, describing a circle around these three; and even at a distance Harland was sure this was Ellen.

Tess said in quick dismay: ‘Oh, I didn't know they were coming up here today. Get back, Lin.' Lin reined his horse among the trees again. ‘They won't want us butting in,' Tess explained, and Harland too retreated; and for long minutes they stayed there watching, while Ellen rode at a headlong run the circuit of the basin.

When she passed below where they hid, Harland saw that she held something in the curve of her left arm, pressed against her breast as a mother holds a child; and her right arm swung in the motion of a sower, regularly as a pendulum; and he understood what it was she thus broadcast upon the rocky sward, and he thought of a priestess at her rites, and he thought of old pagan festivals, and he thought there was a pounding and barbaric rhythm in the thudding of her horse's hooves, and he thought of the ride of the Valkyries. For there was a singing in the way she rode, erect and sure, her head high and proud; and he heard that singing in his blood while he watched her bring her father's ashes to the spot the dead man she loved had chosen, to this high meadow pressed against the sky.

The three watchers stayed hidden, and they saw her turn at last, still at full gallop, and plunge into the forest at the border of the basin, diagonally across from them. So she disappeared; and Harland heard a choked sound beside him and turned and saw that Tess had tears in her eyes; but she smiled at him.

‘That was — sort of wonderful, wasn't it,' she said frankly. ‘Professor Berent was a fine old man.'

Harland nodded, and Lin said in a low voice: ‘That's the trail to camp, the way she went.' Even the boy had felt the solemn beauty of this scene. He turned his horse back among the trees. ‘Come on,' he called softly. ‘We'll go home another way so they won't know we were here.'

They went headlong, plunging down rocky draws, racing at full gallop through the forests; and the horses, instantly responsive to the neck pressure of the reins or even to the inclination of the rider's body, wove through the trees in a graceful measure like a dance. They reached camp before the others. Walking to the lodge from the corral where they left their horses, Tess said warningly: ‘We mustn't let them know we were watching, Lin.'

‘What do you think?' he demanded, scornfully indignant at the suggestion.

She touched his arm in affectionate reassurance. ‘I know you won't,' she assented. ‘But I'm glad we saw them, all the same.' Lin nodded soberly, and she said to Harland: ‘It was — sweet, wasn't it, Mr. Harland.'

‘I'm glad we were there, yes,' he agreed.

While Harland was in his shower, Robie and Mrs. Berent and Ruth returned, and Harland heard Mrs. Berent bitter in complaint at the torment the ride had imposed upon her; but he did not hear Ellen's voice, and when they all gathered at the dinner table she had not come home. Mrs. Robie was concerned.

‘Are you sure she's all right, Glen?' she asked doubtfully.

‘Don't worry,' he told her. ‘She probably wanted to be alone a while. I've known her to ride all night, on a moonlit night; and she knows these trails as well as I do.'

Mrs. Berent tossed her head. ‘She probably imagines her
father is up there with her right now,' she exclaimed. ‘I don't know where she gets her notions. Certainly not from me!'

‘I like to be out at night myself,' Robie admitted. ‘There's a lot of good company in the stars. Did she have a blanket, anything to keep warm?'

Ruth said quietly: ‘She packed a heavy sweater in her slicker roll. She'll be all right, I'm sure.'

Mrs. Berent snorted. ‘She's a fool — and so am I, to go gallivanting over mountains on a horse at my age. Ruth, I've one of my coryzas coming on!' Harland reflected that she treated Ruth more like a paid companion than a daughter.

‘I'll fix you up, Mother,' the girl promised, a twinkle in her eyes.

When dinner was done, Mrs. Berent had begun to sneeze; and she and Ruth said good night at once. Harland, his emotions deeply stirred by that scene he and the children had witnessed, was alert for Ellen's return, wishing he might be with her in this hour of her lonely grief, and he waited a while on the veranda, listening for the hoofbeats of her horse. Mrs. Robie presently joined him, and he confessed that he and the children had chanced upon the scene on the heights that afternoon. ‘It was a moving thing to watch,' he said.

‘Tess told me,' she assented. ‘And Glen saw you, but the others didn't know you were there.'

His own hunger to see her made him resent Ellen's long delay, and he said: ‘Ellen ought to come back. She must know it will worry you. You've enough of a job, keeping us comfortable here, without riding herd on us too.'

‘Oh, I enjoy this,' she assured him. ‘I mean, making things nice here for Glen and our friends. But Ellen really is difficult, sometimes. It's not so much selfishness as a sort of — is egoism the word? When she wants to do a thing, she doesn't take into account the wants of others at all. It isn't that she overrides them. She simply goes her own way — and they can only submit.' There was no resentment in her tones, merely a half-amused appraisal. ‘I've never seen anyone so wholly sure of herself,' she confessed.

Harland nodded, feeling himself aggrieved. ‘I know. When we went after turkeys, she told me exactly what to do. It never occurred to me to argue with her.'

‘Of course not.' She added after a moment: ‘Her father couldn't call his soul his own. I used to feel like — slapping her, sometimes. I loved that old man. I'm glad he wanted to come back here.'

Someone stirred in the shadows, coming quietly toward them, and Harland till she spoke hoped this might be Ellen; but it was Ruth.

‘I saw your cigarettes,' she said. ‘Don't feel you must wait for Ellen, Mrs. Robie. She's all right.'

‘We weren't sleepy,' the older woman assured her, and Harland asked:

‘Where do you think she is?'

‘I think she'll stay up there till dawn,' Ruth told them. Her voice was warm and heartening in the night. ‘She probably hid to let us pass, and then went back there after we were surely gone.' She added in faint amusement: ‘Ellen dramatizes things, you, know.'

Lightning flickered far away, sending a faint wave of radiance across the cloudless sky; but it was so distant they heard no thunder rumble. ‘There's rain north of us,' Mrs. Robie doubtfully remarked.

As she spoke, Robie joined them. ‘Ellen knows her way home, if she wants to come,' he reminded her.

Ruth added: ‘Yes. Don't worry, please.' She bade them good night and turned away, and Harland. noticed how pleasantly she moved. He was surprised to find that in the darkness she wore a beauty of which in the light of day he had never been conscious.

After a moment Mis. Robie likewise said good night, and the lightning flashed again, and Harland said: ‘That must be an old roncher of a thunderstorm.'

‘We get some terrors,' Robie agreed. ‘Real cloudbursts. I've seen the brook rise three feet in an hour, even here where it has room to spread all over the canyon.' He turned away. ‘Good night, old man.'

Harland at last abandoned his vigil, telling himself he was a fool to be concerned; but he wondered whether he would hear Ellen's horse if she returned during the night. He woke before sunrise and at once thought of her and dressed and went out. No one was stirring in the bunkhouse; but one of the men must already have gone to find and bring in the horses for the day's use, and Harland walked up to the corral — a lonely milch cow, secured to one of the posts, was its sole occupant — and stayed there till he heard the clatter of hooves up the canyon. The horses came at a gallop, with tossing heads and flanks wet from the night's fall of dew. Penned in the corral they circled excitedly, the cow shrinking and making herself small as they milled past her; and then Charlie Yates, who had brought them in, stopped to roll a cigarette and to exchange a word with Harland.

‘She hasn't come home yet,' he said looking up the canyon trail; and after a moment he added: ‘She's a hot one, always doing the damnedest things. You'd think she'd know Mrs. Robie would be upset.'

Harland surprisingly resented this echo of his own criticism. ‘Can I have a horse?' he asked stiffly. ‘I think I'll ride to meet her.'

‘Sure thing,' Charlie agreed. ‘I'll go along if you say so.'

‘No need,' Harland told him. ‘She's all. right.'

‘Sure,' Charlie drawled. ‘She knows all the answers.' Harland realized that even Charlie must be uneasy, to speak thus of a guest.

When his horse was ready, Harland set out, at first at a foot pace to conceal his own eagerness; but once out of the other's sight, he lifted his horse to a trot and then to a lope. The sun struck the ridges high above him; but here in the canyon the air lay damp and cool, and he rode in shadows while in the sky the level rays swept away some shredded skeins of golden cloud. When in due time he passed the bars and left the main trail and began to climb, he ascended into sunlight that came pouring over the heights behind him in a shining flood; and on the crest of the ridge he met Ellen face to face.

The sun was in her eyes and the sun was all upon her, so that she seemed for an instant to wear a sort of incandescence. Hear-land imagined the stains of tears upon her cheeks, and the ravages of solitary grief in her countenance. Phrases formed themselves in his writer's mind and he thought of a white-hot ingot coming from the fire, of molten gold in a bone-white crucible. Sorrow, the night long, had brayed her in a mortar, and her soul was swept and burnished.

‘All right?' he asked, hoarse and husky.

She nodded, smiling radiantly. ‘Come,' she said, and touched his hand, inviting him to share with her some pleasant prospect. ‘I'm ready now to return to the world again.'

They rode back to the lodge, and till they left their horses — Charlie was there to take the reins — she did not speak, nor did he; but then she said gravely: ‘Thank you, Mr. Harland.'

So they parted and Harland was alive with a mysterious excitement. He heard her mother's querulous greeting, heard the sound of a sneeze, as Ellen went into the cabin where they lodged.