Over the Pass. Frederick Palmer
when they passed through the living-room to the veranda, that not a light remained in any ranch-house.
"I have not started my talk yet," said Jasper. "But next time you come I will really make a beginning—and you shall see the Date Tree Wonderful."
"I go by the morning train," Jack returned.
"So! so!" mused Jasper. "So! so!" he objected, but not gloomily. "I get a good listener only to lose him!"
But Jack was hardly conscious of the philosopher's words. In that interval he had still another glimpse of Mary's eyes without the veil and saw deeper than he had before; saw vast solitudes, inviting yet offering no invitation, where bright streams seemed to flash and sing under the sunlight and then disappear in a desert. That was her farewell to the easy traveller who had stopped to do her a favor on the trail. And he seemed to ask nothing more in that spellbound second; nor did he after the veil had fallen, and he acquitted himself of some spoken form of thanks for an evening of happiness.
"A pleasant journey!" Mary said.
"Luck, Sir Chaps, luck!" called Jasper Ewold.
Jack's easy stride, as he passed out into the night, confirmed the last glimpse of his smiling, whimsical "I don't care" attitude, which never minded the danger sign on the precipice's edge.
"He does not really want to go back to New York," Mary remarked, and was surprised to find that she had spoken her thought aloud.
"I hardly agree with that opinion," said her father absently, his thoughts far afield from the fetter of his words. "But of one thing I am sure, John Wingfield! A smile and a square chin!"
VI
OBLIVION IS NOT EASY
"A smile and a square chin!" Mary repeated, as they went back into the living-room.
"Yes, hasn't he both, this Wingfield?" asked her father.
"This Wingfield"—on the finish of the sentence there was a halting, appreciable accent. He moved toward the table with the listlessness of some enormous automaton of a man to whom every step of existence was a step in a treadmill. There was a heavy sadness about his features which rarely came, and always startled her when it did come with a fear that they had so set in gloom that they would never change. He raised his hand to the wick screw of the lamp, waiting for her to pass through the room before turning off the flame which bathed him in its rays, giving him the effect of a Rodinesque incarnation of memory.
Any melancholy that beset him was her own enemy, to be fought and cajoled. Mary slipped to his side, dropping her head on his shoulder and patting his cheek. But this magic which had so frequently rallied him brought only a transient, hazy smile and in its company what seemed a random thought.
"And you and he came down the pass together? Yes, yes!" he said. His tone had the vagueness of one drawing in from the sea a net that seemed to have no end.
Had Jack Wingfield been more than a symbol? Had he brought something more than an expression of culture, manner, and ease of a past which nothing could dim? Had he suggested some personal relation to that past which her father preferred to keep unexplained? These questions crowded into her mind speculatively. They were seeking a form of conveyance when she realized that she had been adrift with imaginings. He was getting older. She must expect his preoccupation and his absent-mindedness to become more exacting.
"Yes, yes!" His voice had risen to its customary sonority; his eyes were twinkling; all the hard lines had become benignant wrinkles of Olympian charm. "Yes, yes! You and this funny tourist! What a desert it is! I wonder—now, I wonder if he will go aboard the Pullman in that stage costume. But come, come, Mary! It's bedtime for all pastoral workers and subjects of the Eternal Painter. Off you go, or we shall be playing blind-man's-buff in the dark!" He was chuckling as he turned down the wick. "His enormous spurs, and Jag Ear and Wrath of God!" he said.
Her fancy ran dancing rejoicingly with his mood.
"Don't forget the name of his pony!" she called merrily from the stairs.
"It's P.D."
"P.D.!" said her father, with the disappointment of one tempted by a good morsel which he finds tasteless. "There he seems to have descended to alphabetic commonplace. No imagery in that!"
"He is a slow, reliable pony," put in Mary, "without the Q."
"Pretty Damn, without the Quick! Oh, I know slang!"
Jasper Ewold burst into laughter. It was still echoing through the house when she entered her room. As it died away it seemed to sound hollow and veiled, when the texture of sunny, transparent solidity in his laugh was its most pronounced characteristic.
Probably this, too, was imagination, Mary thought. It had been an overwrought day, whose events had made inconsiderable things supreme over logic. She always slept well; she would sleep easily to-night, because it was so late. But she found herself staring blankly into the darkness and her thoughts ranging in a shuttle play of incoherency from the moment that Leddy had approached her on the pass till a stranger, whom she never expected to see again, walked away into the night. What folly! What folly to keep awake over an incident of desert life! But was it folly? What sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been anything but a great event! Naturally, quiet, desert nerves must still be quivering after the strain. Inevitably, they would not calm instantly, particularly as she had taken coffee for supper. She was wroth about the coffee, though she had taken less than usual that evening.
She heard the clock strike one; she heard it strike two, and three. And he, on his part—this Sir Chaps who had come so abruptly into her life and evidently set old passions afire in her father's mind—of course he was sleeping! That was the exasperating phlegm of him. He would sleep on horseback, riding toward the edge of a precipice!
"A smile and a square chin—and dreamy vagueness," she kept repeating.
The details of the scene in the store recurred with a vividness which counting a flock of sheep as they went over a stile or any other trick for outwitting insomnia could not drive from her mind. Then Pete Leddy's final look of defiance and Jack Wingfield's attitude in answer rose out of the pantomime in merciless clearness.
All the indecisiveness of the interchange of guesses and rehearsed impressions was gone. She got a message, abruptly and convincingly. This incident of the pass was not closed. An ultimatum had been exchanged. Death lay between these two men. Jack had accepted the issue.
The clock struck four and five. Before it struck again daylight would have come; and before night came again, what? To lie still in the torment of this new experience of wakefulness with its peculiar, half-recognized forebodings, had become unbearable. She rose and dressed and went down stairs softly, candle in hand, aware only that every agitated fibre of her being was whipping her to action which should give some muscular relief from the strain of her overwrought faculties. She would go into the garden and walk there, waiting for sunrise. But at the edge of the path she was arrested by a shadow coming from the servants' sleeping-quarters. It was Ignacio, the little Indian who cared for her horse, ran errands, and fought garden bugs for her—Ignacio, the note-bearer.
"Señorita! señorita!" he exclaimed, and his voice, vibrant with something stronger than surprise, had a certain knowing quality, as if he understood more than he dared to utter. "Señorita, you rise early!"
"Sometimes one likes to look at the morning stars," she remarked.
But there were no stars; only a pale moon, as Ignacio could see for himself.
"Señorita, that young man who was here and Pete Leddy—do you know, señorita?"
"The young man who came down from the pass with me, you mean?" she asked, inwardly shamed at her simulation of casual curiosity.
"Yes,