Moon-Face and Other Stories Page 12

  Lute almost caught up amongst the trees, but was hopelessly outdistanced on the fallow field adjoining, across which the mare tore with a fine disregard for heavy ground and gopher-holes. When she turned at a sharp angle into the thicket-land beyond, Lute took the long diagonal, skirted the ticket, and reined in Ban at the other side. She had arrived first. From within the thicket she could hear a tremendous crashing of brush and branches. Then the mare burst through and into the open, falling to her knees, exhausted, on the soft earth. She arose and staggered forward, then came limply to a halt. She was in lather-sweat of fear, and stood trembling pitiably.

  Chris was still on her back. His shirt was in ribbons. The backs of his hands were bruised and lacerated, while his face was streaming blood from a gash near the temple. Lute had controlled herself well, but now she was aware of a quick nausea and a trembling of weakness.

  “Chris!” she said, so softly that it was almost a whisper. Then she sighed, “Thank God.”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” he cried to her, putting into his voice all the heartiness he could command, which was not much, for he had himself been under no mean nervous strain.

  He showed the reaction he was undergoing, when he swung down out of the saddle. He began with a brave muscular display as he lifted his leg over, but ended, on his feet, leaning against the limp Dolly for support. Lute flashed out of her saddle, and her arms were about him in an embrace of thankfulness.

  “I know where there is a spring,” she said, a moment later.

  They left the horses standing untethered, and she led her lover into the cool recesses of the thicket to where crystal water bubbled from out the base of the mountain.

  “What was that you said about Dolly’s never cutting up?” he asked, when the blood had been stanched and his nerves and pulse-beats were normal again.

  “I am stunned,” Lute answered. “I cannot understand it. She never did anything like it in all her life. And all animals like you so—it’s not because of that. Why, she is a child’s horse. I was only a little girl when I first rode her, and to this day—”

  “Well, this day she was everything but a child’s horse,” Chris broke in. “She was a devil. She tried to scrape me off against the trees, and to batter my brains out against the limbs. She tried all the lowest and narrowest places she could find. You should have seen her squeeze through. And did you see those bucks?”

  Lute nodded.

  “Regular bucking-bronco proposition.”

  “But what should she know about bucking?” Lute demanded. “She was never known to buck—never.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Some forgotten instinct, perhaps, long-lapsed and come to life again.”

  The girl rose to her feet determinedly. “I’m going to find out,” she said.

  They went back to the horses, where they subjected Dolly to a rigid examination that disclosed nothing. Hoofs, legs, bit, mouth, body—everything was as it should be. The saddle and saddle-cloth were innocent of bur or sticker; the back was smooth and unbroken. They searched for sign of snake-bite and sting of fly or insect, but found nothing.

  “Whatever it was, it was subjective, that much is certain,” Chris said.

  “Obsession,” Lute suggested.

  They laughed together at the idea, for both were twentieth-century products, healthy-minded and normal, with souls that delighted in the butterfly-chase of ideals but that halted before the brink where superstition begins.

  “An evil spirit,” Chris laughed; “but what evil have I done that I should be so punished?”

  “You think too much of yourself, sir,” she rejoined. “It is more likely some evil, I don’t know what, that Dolly has done. You were a mere accident. I might have been on her back at the time, or Aunt Mildred, or anybody.”

  As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten it.

  “What are you doing?” Chris demanded.

  “I’m going to ride Dolly in.”

  “No, you’re not,” he announced. “It would be bad discipline. After what has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”

  But it was a very weak and very sick mare he rode, stumbling and halting, afflicted with nervous jerks and recurring muscular spasms—the aftermath of the tremendous orgasm through which she had passed.

  “I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has happened,” Lute said, as they rode into camp.

  It was a summer camp of city-tired people, pitched in a grove of towering redwoods through whose lofty boughs the sunshine trickled down, broken and subdued to soft light and cool shadow. Apart from the main camp were the kitchen and the servants’ tents; and midway between was the great dining hall, walled by the living redwood columns, where fresh whispers of air were always to be found, and where no canopy was needed to keep the sun away.

  “Poor Dolly, she is really sick,” Lute said that evening, when they had returned from a last look at the mare. “But you weren’t hurt, Chris, and that’s enough for one small woman to be thankful for. I thought I knew, but I really did not know till to-day, how much you meant to me. I could hear only the plunging and struggle in the thicket. I could not see you, nor know how it went with you.”

  “My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.

  She turned her face up to his and met his lips.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Dear Lute, dear Lute,” he caressed her with his voice as she moved away among the shadows.

  *******

  “Who’s going for the mail?” called a woman’s voice through the trees.

  Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.

  “We weren’t going to ride to-day,” she said.

  “Let me go,” Chris proposed. “You stay here. I’ll be down and back in no time.”

  She shook her head.

  “Who’s going for the mail?” the voice insisted.

  “Where’s Martin?” Lute called, lifting; her voice in answer.

  “I don’t know,” came the voice. “I think Robert took him along somewhere—horse-buying, or fishing, or I don’t know what. There’s really nobody left but Chris and you. Besides, it will give you an appetite for dinner. You’ve been lounging in the hammock all day. And Uncle Robert must have his newspaper.”

  “All right, Aunty, we’re starting,” Lute called back, getting out of the hammock.

  A few minutes later, in riding-clothes, they were saddling the horses. They rode out on to the county road, where blazed the afternoon sun, and turned toward Glen Ellen. The little town slept in the sun, and the somnolent storekeeper and postmaster scarcely kept his eyes open long enough to make up the packet of letters and newspapers.

  An hour later Lute and Chris turned aside from the road and dipped along a cow-path down the high bank to water the horses, before going into camp.

  “Dolly looks as though she’d forgotten all about yesterday,” Chris said, as they sat their horses knee-deep in the rushing water. “Look at her.”

  The mare had raised her head and cocked her ears at the rustling of a quail in the thicket. Chris leaned over and rubbed around her ears. Dolly’s enjoyment was evident, and she drooped her head over against the shoulder of his own horse.

  “Like a kitten,” was Lute’s comment.

  “Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,” Chris said. “Not after yesterday’s mad freak.”

  “I have a feeling myself that you are safer on Ban,” Lute laughed. “It is strange. My trust in Dolly is as implicit as ever. I feel confident so far as I am concerned, but I should never care to see you on her back again. Now with Ban, my faith is still unshaken. Look at that neck! Isn’t he handsome! He’ll be as wise as Dolly when he is as old as she.”

  “I feel the same way,” Chris laughed back. “Ban could never possibly betray me.”

  They turned their horses out of the stream. Dolly stopped to
brush a fly from her knee with her nose, and Ban urged past into the narrow way of the path. The space was too restricted to make him return, save with much trouble, and Chris allowed him to go on. Lute, riding behind, dwelt with her eyes upon her lover’s back, pleasuring in the lines of the bare neck and the sweep out to the muscular shoulders.

  Suddenly she reined in her horse. She could do nothing but look, so brief was the duration of the happening. Beneath and above was the almost perpendicular bank. The path itself was barely wide enough for footing. Yet Washoe Ban, whirling and rearing at the same time, toppled for a moment in the air and fell backward off the path.

  So unexpected and so quick was it, that the man was involved in the fall. There had been no time for him to throw himself to the path. He was falling ere he knew it, and he did the only thing possible—slipped the stirrups and threw his body into the air, to the side, and at the same time down. It was twelve feet to the rocks below. He maintained an upright position, his head up and his eyes fixed on the horse above him and falling upon him.

  Chris struck like a cat, on his feet, on the instant making a leap to the side. The next instant Ban crashed down beside him. The animal struggled little, but sounded the terrible cry that horses sometimes sound when they have received mortal hurt. He had struck almost squarely on his back, and in that position he remained, his head twisted partly under, his hind legs relaxed and motionless, his fore legs futilely striking the air.

  Chris looked up reassuringly.

  “I am getting used to it,” Lute smiled down to him. “Of course I need not ask if you are hurt. Can I do anything?”

  He smiled back and went over to the fallen beast, letting go the girths of the saddle and getting the head straightened out.

  “I thought so,” he said, after a cursory examination. “I thought so at the time. Did you hear that sort of crunching snap?”

  She shuddered.

  “Well, that was the punctuation of life, the final period dropped at the end of Ban’s usefulness.” He started around to come up by the path. “I’ve been astride of Ban for the last time. Let us go home.”

  At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.

  “Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”

  The animal was struggling to lift its head. There were tears in Chris’s eyes as he turned abruptly away, and tears In Lute’s eyes as they met his. She was silent in her sympathy, though the pressure of her hand was firm in his as he walked beside her horse down the dusty road.

  “It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”

  “There was no warning,” Lute concurred. “I was looking. I saw him. He whirled and threw himself at the same time, just as if you had done it yourself, with a tremendous jerk and backward pull on the bit.”

  “It was not my hand, I swear it. I was not even thinking of him. He was going up with a fairly loose rein, as a matter of course.”

  “I should have seen it, had you done it,” Lute said. “But it was all done before you had a chance to do anything. It was not your hand, not even your unconscious hand.”

  “Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”

  He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.

  Martin stepped forward to receive Dolly, when they came into the stable end of the grove, but his face expressed no surprise at sight of Chris coming in on foot. Chris lingered behind Lute for moment.

  “Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.

  The groom nodded, then added, “Yes, sir,” with a second and deeper nod.

  “How do you do it?”

  “Draw a line from the eyes to the ears—I mean the opposite ears, sir. And where the lines cross—”

  “That will do,” Chris interrupted. “You know the watering place at: the second bend. You’ll find Ban there with a broken back.”

  ******

  “Oh, here you are, sir. I have been looking for you everywhere since dinner. You are wanted immediately.”

  Chris tossed his cigar away, then went over and pressed his foot on its glowing; fire.

  “You haven’t told anybody about it?—Ban?” he queried.

  Lute shook her head. “They’ll learn soon enough. Martin will mention it to Uncle Robert tomorrow.”

  “But don’t feel too bad about it,” she said, after a moment’s pause, slipping her hand into his.

  “He was my colt,” he said. “Nobody has ridden him but you. I broke him myself. I knew him from the time he was born. I knew every bit of him, every trick, every caper, and I would have staked my life that it was impossible for him to do a thing like this. There was no warning, no fighting for the bit, no previous unruliness. I have been thinking it over. He didn’t fight for the bit, for that matter. He wasn’t unruly, nor disobedient. There wasn’t time. It was an impulse, and he acted upon it like lightning. I am astounded now at the swiftness with which it took place. Inside the first second we were over the edge and falling.

  “It was deliberate—deliberate suicide. And attempted murder. It was a trap. I was the victim. He had me, and he threw himself over with me. Yet he did not hate me. He loved me … as much as it is possible for a horse to love. I am confounded. I cannot understand it any more than you can understand Dolly’s behavior yesterday.”

  “But horses go insane, Chris,” Lute said. “You know that. It’s merely coincidence that two horses in two days should have spells under you.”

  “That’s the only explanation,” he answered, starting off with her. “But why am I wanted urgently?”

  “Planchette.”

  “Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it when it was all the rage long ago.”

  “So did all of us,” Lute replied, “except Mrs. Grantly. It is her favorite phantom, it seems.”

  “A weird little thing,” he remarked. “Bundle of nerves and black eyes. I’ll wager she doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, and most of that’s magnetism.”

  “Positively uncanny … at times.” Lute shivered involuntarily. “She gives me the creeps.”

  “Contact of the healthy with the morbid,” he explained dryly. “You will notice it is the healthy that always has the creeps. The morbid never has the creeps. It gives the. That’s its function. Where did you people pick her up, anyway?”

  “I don’t know—yes, I do, too. Aunt Mildred met her in Boston, I think—oh, I don’t know. At any rate, Mrs. Grantly came to California, and of course had to visit Aunt Mildred. You know the open house we keep.

  They halted where a passageway between two great redwood trunks gave entrance to the dining room. Above, through lacing boughs, could be seen the stars. Candles lighted the tree-columned space. About the table, examining the Planchette contrivance, were four persons. Chris’s gaze roved over them, and he was aware of a guilty sorrow-pang as he paused for a moment on Lute’s Aunt Mildred and Uncle Robert, mellow with ripe middle age and genial with the gentle buffets life had dealt them. He passed amusedly over the black-eyed, frail-bodied Mrs. Grantly, and halted on the fourth person, a portly, massive-headed man, whose gray temples belied the youthful solidity of his face.

  “Who’s that?” Chris whispered.

  “A Mr. Barton. The train was late. That’s why you didn’t see him at dinner. He’s only a capitalist—water-power-long-distance-electricity-transmitter, or something like that.”

  “Doesn’t look as though he could give an ox points on imagination.”

  “He can’t. He inherited his money. But he knows enough to hold on to it and hire other men’s brains. He is very conservative.”

  “That is to be expected,” was Chris’s comment. His gaze went back to the man and woman who had been father and mother to the girl beside him. “Do you know,” he said, “it came to me with a shock yesterday when you told me that they had turned against me and that I was scarcely tolerated. I met them afterwar
ds, last evening, guiltily, in fear and trembling—and to-day, too. And yet I could see no difference from of old.”

  “Dear man,” Lute sighed. “Hospitality is as natural to them as the act of breathing. But it isn’t that, after all. It is all genuine in their dear hearts. No matter how severe the censure they put upon you when you are absent, the moment they are with you they soften and are all kindness and warmth. As soon as their eyes rest on you, affection and love come bubbling up. You are so made. Every animal likes you. All people like you. They can’t help it. You can’t help it. You are universally lovable, and the best of it is that you don’t know it. You don’t know it now. Even as I tell it to you, you don’t realize it, you won’t realize it—and that very incapacity to realize it is one of the reasons why you are so loved. You are incredulous now, and you shake your head; but I know, who am your slave, as all people know, for they likewise are your slaves.

  “Why, in a minute we shall go in and join them. Mark the affection, almost maternal, that will well up in Aunt Mildred’s eyes. Listen to the tones of Uncle Robert’s voice when he says, ‘Well, Chris, my boy?’ Watch Mrs. Grantly melt, literally melt, like a dewdrop in the sun.

  “Take Mr. Barton, there. You have never seen him before. Why, you will invite him out to smoke a cigar with you when the rest of us have gone to bed—you, a mere nobody, and he a man of many millions, a man of power, a man obtuse and stupid like the ox; and he will follow you about, smoking; the cigar, like a little dog, your little dog, trotting at your back. He will not know he is doing it, but he will be doing it just the same. Don’t I know, Chris? Oh, I have watched you, watched you, so often, and loved you for it, and loved you again for it, because you were so delightfully and blindly unaware of what you were doing.”