"You won't get much satisfaction but growls."

"That will be all the more fun for me," rejoined Prather. "But don't let me keep you."

"No. I must be going on. I've got some things to look after before nightfall," said Bob, while Prather, in a humor proof against any hermit cantankerousness, rode into the yard.

When he returned after dark he said, laughingly, that he had enjoyed himself, though the conversation was all on one side. The next morning he decided to take up the plot of land adjoining Jack's.

"But I shall not be able to begin work for a few weeks," he said. "I must go to Goldfield to settle up my affairs before I begin my new career."

"If Jack ever comes back I wonder what he will say to his new neighbor!"

Little Rivers wondered.

XIX

LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES

To Mary Ewold the pa.s.s was a dividing line between two appeals. The Little Rivers side, with the green patch of oasis in the distance, had a message of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided for her. Under its spell she saw herself content to live within garden walls forever in the land that had given her life, grateful for the trickles of intelligence that came by mail from the outside world.

The other side aroused a mighty restlessness. Therefore, she rarely made that short journey which spread another panorama of s.p.a.ce before her. But this was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a tumult of any kind as a relief from her depression; and she went on through the V as soon as she reached the summit.

Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the pa.s.sage of time, of the dream cities of the Eternal Painter, she was staring far away where the narrowing gray line between the mountain rims met the sky. She was seeing beyond the horizon. She was seeing cities of memory and reality. A great yearning was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap of the heights which seemed without end was a symbol that separated her from her desire.

She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms and villages; in a shop selecting gowns; viewing from a high window the human stream of Fifth Avenue; taking pa.s.sage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongues long ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of great audiences before a curtain rose; glimpsing the Mediterranean from a car window; feeling herself a unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of many streets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world.

"It is hard to do it all in imagination!" she said to herself. "Even imagination needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way of encouragement."

An hour on the far side of the pa.s.s played the emotional part for her of a storm of tears for many another woman. She rejoiced in being utterly alone; rejoiced in the grandeur of the very wastes around her as mounting guard over the freedom of her thoughts. There was no living speck on the trail, which she knew lay across the expanse of parched earth to the edge of the blue dome; there was not even a bird in the air. Undisturbed, she might think anything, pray for anything; she might feed the flame of revolt till the fuel of many weeks' acc.u.mulation had burned itself out and left her calm in the wisdom and understanding that reconciled her to her portion and freshened to return through Galeria to the quiet routine of her daily existence.

Her mind paused in its travels from capital to capital and she was conscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened.

There was no sound. The s.p.a.cious stillness was soothing to her nerves; a specific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes, trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize the Infinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed at first a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in the fellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with a readjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched the point where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade.

Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, and after that a sage baggage burro with clipped ears, a solemn-faced pony, and an Indian. Jack was watching his steps in the uneven path, and not until the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the level with her did he look up.

She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her hand on the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep of the lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face in shadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiant readiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel--its ease, mystery, unattachedness--which had spanned the distances between her and the horizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitched exclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture she made, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting on her first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought a look of horror into her eyes.

"h.e.l.lo, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a spark electrifying him with all his old, happy manner.

He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sun which turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born as an inspiration from her greeting, with radiance.

"h.e.l.lo to you, Mary, guarding the pa.s.s to Little Rivers!" he said exultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been in a hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to me this morning."

She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have had time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomed any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of their meeting. She had refused to ride to the pa.s.s with him and here they were alone together on the pa.s.s. Three or four steps, so light that they seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.

"You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a conviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated you are not to be able to recall the time and place!"

"Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must have thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you remember him the last time you went through the pa.s.s."

"Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after all, that I had mistaken his ident.i.ty and he was a pleosaur. But"--he did not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and proceeded as if she had not spoken--"it has never been out of my mind that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the question that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen each other before?"

"Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to "this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the night before the duel, his reticence and animadversions.

"I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kind of contest between us as to which should be the first to say 'Tag!'"

She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of her eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.

"I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things do come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and I met! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!"

"Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed to rouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lips apart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.

"And _we_ met--_you_ and _I_!"

"We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was in earnest.

"Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been about a year younger. Do you remember it at all?"

"No!" She was silent, concentrated, groping. "No, no!" she repeated.

"Five is very immature compared to six!"

"Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited my emulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such bushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fast to his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path with him to see my mother--I can see just how you looked holding so fast to that thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't you remember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened."

"No!"

"Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet of the villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to his turn."

"Yes--yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mists of fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonder of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the fascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to come up on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You said it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet."

"And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't I frightened for fear you would tumble off!"

"But I remember that you helped me down very nicely--and--and that is all I do remember. What then?"

She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the current of this past a.s.sociation?

"Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his big thumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and I had gone to Switzerland--we were always on the move."

The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl they had met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under an Arizona sky.

Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic touch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past; they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canva.s.ses and enjoying Raphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the Eternal Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could not really have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him the power of divination; for if he had it he might not be so young of heart.

Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing an entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the hour. To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure.

"Do you see where that shelf breaks abruptly?" he asked. "It must be the side of a canyon. Have you ever looked down?"

"I started to once."

"I should not like to go over the pa.s.s again without seeing if this is really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authority on canyons."