The Twins of Table Mountain, and Other Stories. Bret Harte
Ruth! for God’s sake come and help me!”
The blood flew back hotly to Rand’s cheek. It was Mornie’s voice. By leaning over the ledge, he could distinguish something moving along the almost precipitous face of the cliff, where an abandoned trail, long since broken off and disrupted by the fall of a portion of the ledge, stopped abruptly a hundred feet below him. Rand knew the trail, a dangerous one always: in its present condition a single mis-step would be fatal. Would she make that mis-step? He shook off a horrible temptation that seemed to be sealing his lips, and paralyzing his limbs, and almost screamed to her, “Drop on your face, hang on to the chaparral, and don’t move!”
In another instant, with a coil of rope around his arm, he was dashing down the almost perpendicular “slide.” When he had nearly reached the level of the abandoned trail, he fastened one end of the rope to a jutting splinter of granite, and began to “lay out,” and work his way laterally along the face of the mountain. Presently he struck the regular trail at the point from which the woman must have diverged.
“It is Rand,” she said, without lifting her head.
“It is,” replied Rand coldly. “Pass the rope under your arms, and I’ll get you back to the trail.”
“Where is Ruth?” she demanded again, without moving. She was trembling, but with excitement rather than fear.
“I don’t know,” returned Rand impatiently. “Come! the ledge is already crumbling beneath our feet.”
“Let it crumble!” said the woman passionately.
Rand surveyed her with profound disgust, then passed the rope around her waist, and half lifted, half swung her from her feet. In a few moments she began to mechanically help herself, and permitted him to guide her to a place of safety. That reached, she sank down again.
The rising moon shone full upon her face and figure. Through his growing indignation Rand was still impressed and even startled with the change the few last months had wrought upon her. In place of the silly, fanciful, half-hysterical hoyden whom he had known, a matured woman, strong in passionate self-will, fascinating in a kind of wild, savage beauty, looked up at him as if to read his very soul.
“What are you staring at?” she said finally. “Why don’t you help me on?”
“Where do you want to go?” said Rand quietly.
“Where! Up there!”—she pointed savagely to the top of the mountain,—“to HIM! Where else should I go?” she said, with a bitter laugh.
“I’ve told you he wasn’t there,” said Rand roughly. “He hasn’t returned.”
“I’ll wait for him—do you hear?—wait for him; stay there till he comes. If you won’t help me, I’ll go alone.”
She made a step forward but faltered, staggered, and was obliged to lean against the mountain for support. Stains of travel were on her dress; lines of fatigue and pain, and traces of burning passionate tears, were on her face; her black hair flowed from beneath her gaudy bonnet; and, shamed out of his brutality, Rand placed his strong arm round her waist, and half carrying, half supporting her, began the ascent. Her head dropped wearily on his shoulder; her arm encircled his neck; her hair, as if caressingly, lay across his breast and hands; her grateful eyes were close to his; her breath was upon his cheek: and yet his only consciousness was of the possibly ludicrous figure he might present to his brother, should he meet him with Mornie Nixon in his arms. Not a word was spoken by either till they reached the summit. Relieved at finding his brother still absent, he turned not unkindly toward the helpless figure on his arm. “I don’t see what makes Ruth so late,” he said. “He’s always here by sundown. Perhaps—”
“Perhaps he knows I’m here,” said Mornie, with a bitter laugh.
“I didn’t say that,” said Rand, “and I don’t think it. What I meant was, he might have met a party that was picnicking here to-day,—Sol. Saunders and wife, and Miss Euphemia—”
Mornie flung his arm away from her with a passionate gesture. “THEY here!—picnicking HERE!—those people HERE!”
“Yes,” said Rand, unconsciously a little ashamed. “They came here accidentally.”
Mornie’s quick passion had subsided: she had sunk again wearily and helplessly on a rock beside him. “I suppose,” she said, with a weak laugh—“I suppose, they talked of ME. I suppose they told you how, with their lies and fair promises, they tricked me out, and set me before an audience of brutes and laughing hyenas to make merry over. Did they tell you of the insults that I received?—how the sins of my parents were flung at me instead of bouquets? Did they tell you they could have spared me this, but they wanted the few extra dollars taken in at the door? No!”
“They said nothing of the kind,” replied Rand surlily.
“Then you must have stopped them. You were horrified enough to know that I had dared to take the only honest way left me to make a living. I know you, Randolph Pinkney! You’d rather see Joaquin Muriatta, the Mexican bandit, standing before you to-night with a revolver, than the helpless, shamed, miserable Mornie Nixon. And you can’t help yourself, unless you throw me over the cliff. Perhaps you’d better,” she said, with a bitter laugh that faded from her lips as she leaned, pale and breathless, against the bowlder.
“Ruth will tell you—” began Rand.
“D—n Ruth!”
Rand turned away.
“Stop!” she said suddenly, staggering to her feet. “I’m sick—for all I know, dying. God grant that it may be so! But, if you are a man, you will help me to your cabin—to some place where I can lie down NOW, and be at rest. I’m very, very tired.”
She paused. She would have fallen again; but Rand, seeing more in her face than her voice interpreted to his sullen ears, took her sullenly in his arms, and carried her to the cabin. Her eyes glanced around the bright party-colored walls, and a faint smile came to her lips as she put aside her bonnet, adorned with a companion pinion of the bright wings that covered it.
“Which is Ruth’s bed?” she asked.
Rand pointed to it.
“Lay me there!”
Rand would have hesitated, but, with another look at her face, complied.
She lay quite still a moment. Presently she said, “Give me some brandy or whiskey!”
Rand was silent and confused.
“I forgot,” she added half bitterly. “I know you have not that commonest and cheapest of vices.”
She lay quite still again. Suddenly she raised herself partly on her elbow, and in a strong, firm voice, said, “Rand!”
“Yes, Mornie.”
“If you are wise and practical, as you assume to be, you will do what I ask you without a question. If you do it AT ONCE, you may save yourself and Ruth some trouble, some mortification, and perhaps some remorse and sorrow. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Go to the nearest doctor, and bring him here with you.”
“But YOU!”
Her voice was strong, confident, steady, and patient. “You can safely leave me until then.”
In another moment Rand was plunging down the “slide.” But it was past midnight when he struggled over the last bowlder up the ascent, dragging the half-exhausted medical wisdom of Brown’s Ferry on his arm.
“I’ve been gone long, doctor,” said Rand feverishly, “and she looked SO death-like when I left. If we should be too late!”
The doctor stopped suddenly, lifted his head, and pricked his ears like a hound on a peculiar scent. “We ARE too late,” he said, with a slight professional laugh.
Indignant and horrified, Rand turned upon him.
“Listen,” said the doctor, lifting his hand.
Rand