But even before she entered the little dressing booth prepared for her, she hastened to peep through the curtains, scanning the audience with an eager eye. Her face fell as she saw that Hanson, true to his promise, was there, and on one of the front seats, not far from Seagreave and Bob Flick, who were sitting together. His eyes were dull, his face flushed, and he lurched flaccidly in his chair; he had been drinking heavily all day.

He was wondering dully as he sat there if she would enter in the same indifferent manner that she had adopted the first night he had seen her down in the desert. Probably she would; it had been very effective.

But the time for conjecture was over. The curtains were drawn aside, and Hugh sat down at the piano and began to play a seductive, sensuous accompaniment. Then through a crimson curtain at the rear Pearl flashed in as if blown by the mountain wind. The chrysalis had cast aside its sh.e.l.l and this tropical b.u.t.terfly had emerged. Her skirts were of yellow satin, and from a black bodice her beautiful bare shoulders rose half revealed and half concealed by her rose-wreathed, white _manton de Manila_. In her black, shining hair, just over one ear, was a bunch of scarlet, artificial blossoms.

She floated about the floor for a moment or two like a thistle-down blown hither and thither by the caprice of the wind, scarcely seeming to touch the ground, upborne by the music-tide. Throughout her career she was always at her best when she took those first few moments about the stage and waited for her inspiration.

Then she drifted nearer to Hughie and murmured, "The Tango." He changed his tempo immediately, and almost without a pause of transition she began that provocative measure--the dance of desire. Thrilling with the joy of expressing her love, her beautiful new love for Seagreave, through her art, she danced with a verve, an abandon, a more spontaneous impulse than she had ever shown before. The Tango! She made it a thing of alluring advances, of stinging repulses, of sudden, fascinating withdrawals and exquisite ardors.

When the applause had finally died down, the hall was still noisy with a babel of voices; those who could, moved about in the crowded s.p.a.ce, and little groups formed and broke up. Bob Flick, speaking to this or that acquaintance, felt some one touch him lightly on the arm, and turned suddenly to see Hanson standing beside him.

"h.e.l.lo, Flick," with a sort of swaggering bravado, "our old friend, the Black Pearl, is going some to-night, ain't she?"

"I don't know you," drawled Flick, the liquid Southern intonations of his voice softened until they were almost silky, "and," his hand shot back to his hip with an almost unbelievable rapidity, "I'll give you just three minutes to apologize for mentioning Miss Gallito's name, for speaking to me, and for being here at all."

Hanson's face had turned a sickly white, more with anger than fear.

"Considering the argument you stand ready to offer," he said, "there's nothing to do but to apologize my humblest on all three counts. I had hoped that you'd remember me and be willing to introduce me to your friend." He turned a cynical and evil glance upon Seagreave, who was talking to some one a few feet away. "But since you won't, I'll go, just adding that you and your friend, there, are likely to meet me soon again."

There was a touch of scorn in Flick's faint smile. "The three minutes are up," he said, and without a word Hanson turned and sought his seat.

The curtains parted now and Hugh again sat down to the piano, but his music had changed; it was no longer sensuous and provocative, but strange, and curiously disturbing, with a peculiar, recurring, monotonous beat.

It was the voice of the desert full of a savage exultation in its own loneliness and forsaken isolation, and through it rang a cry of deep, disdainful triumph, as if it said: "All puny races of men, come to me; embroider my vast surfaces with the green of your fields and gardens, build your houses upon my quiescent sand and dream that you have conquered and tamed me. And I abide, I abide. Silent, brooding, unwitting of your noisy incursions, I lie absorbed in my dream under my own illimitable skies. But soon or late, when the moment comes, I wake, I rouse, I see my inviolate desolations invaded. Then I gather my strength, I drown you with my torrential rivers, I torture you with my burning sun, I obliterate you with my flying sand. So shall my cactus bloom once more, my jeweled lizards crawl unmolested and the cry of the coyote echo again through the vast, soundless s.p.a.ces of my desolation.

Then to my looms, to my looms and out of emptiness and silence and s.p.a.ce and light to weave all mysteries of color and all illusions of beauty."

"Lord!" cried Bob Flick to Seagreave, "he's playing the desert. I've seen her look just like the music sounds. That's a sand storm; there's no other sound in the world like it." He turned his eyes full of a puzzled wonder on Seagreave. "How can he play all that so that you and I can see it, when he can't see it himself?"

"But he does see it," insisted Seagreave; "never think that he doesn't, and sees it through finer avenues of sight than mere material organs of vision. He sees the mountains, too. Why, he can play the very shadows on the snow for me."

During the Spanish dances Seagreave had not shared the excitement of the audience, and thus had maintained his usual serenity. He had been intensely interested and appreciative and admiring; but emotionally unmoved; but now, as this troubling music of Hughie's seemed to express the dominion of unsuspected but potent earth-forces, primitive, savage and forever irreclaimable, his calm became strangely disturbed. Dimly he realized that should every desert on the globe finally be subdued by the plow, the irrigating ditches and the pruning hook, they would still remain as realities in the mind of man, forever clouding his aspirations toward the mountain peaks and the stars. For the desert must ever remain an unsolved enigma, never to be reduced to a formula, never to be explained by any human standards; now whispering to man of the mysteries of the soul and revealing to him more of the infinite than his finite senses may grasp; and now mocking him with illusions, her beautiful mirages wrought of airbeams and sunlight, and transforming him into a beast of greed with her haunting intimations of hidden and inexhaustible treasure.

Thus Hughie's music; and presently Pearl floated out. She had changed her Spanish costume for the one of scarlet crepe in which Hanson had first seen her, a crown of scarlet flowers on her dark hair. Her very expression, too, had changed, her eyes were elongated, her features seemed delicately Egyptian; the brooding sphynx look was on her face.

"She's great, ain't she?" asked Bob Flick.

Seagreave nodded. He had never seen her superior in technique. It took character, he appreciated that, to have endured the years of tiresome, mechanical practice, and to have undertaken it so intelligently that she had achieved her marvelous results; and she had, beside, youth and beauty and magnetism. All this alone would have made her a great dancer, but as he recognized, she had more, much more to bring to her art; a complex nature which, in its unsounded depths ever held a vision of beauty, and a sense of this vision which amounted to unity with it, and therefore gave her the power of expressing it. Her mind, too, was plastic to all primitive impulses and to Nature; she blended with it.

She was but little influenced by persons, her will was too dominating, her intelligence too quick, and--but here his a.n.a.lysis ceased.

The Pearl was dancing to Hugh's strange music, she was dancing the desert for him--Seagreave. He knew it was for him, although she never glanced in his direction. And as she danced, he grew to realize that this feat was not an intellectual one. She was not portraying the spirit of the desert as gleaned from study and observation and melted in the crucible of her poetic imagination and molded by her fancy until it was a thing of form in her thought. The Black Pearl danced the desert because in her was the power to be one with it and live in its life through every cell of her being. It was a matter of feeling with her, one phase of her affinity with the forces of earth; but because she had the artist's constructive imagination, she could put it into form and dance it, and by projecting her own feeling into it, convey it to others.

The world with its round of outworn, hackneyed appeals, its wearisome repet.i.tions of crude and commonplace joys, its tawdry and limited temptations, had long ago fallen away from Seagreave--and left him nothing, but to-night a voice that he had long ignored, the voice of life, commanded him.

"If the desert seems forever to claim her own, what is that to you! Your work is to reclaim and in the face of a thousand defeats and desolations still to reclaim, with the eternal faith that for you the wastes shall blossom like the rose. Work, no matter how brokenly, how futilely. To build houses of sand is better than to sit in profitless dreams and live in an animal content."

When later he drove Pearl up the mountainside, almost in silence, as they had come, after his few words of admiration and appreciation of her dancing, there was a shadow for the first time in Harry's clear eyes, a shadow which did not pa.s.s.

CHAPTER XI

Had Gallito but known it, his theory of the unexpected was never more perfectly demonstrated than it was upon the night Pearl danced and in the days which followed. Hanson had left early the next morning with the firm determination of returning almost immediately accompanied by one or more detectives and of securing that much coveted prize, Jose. Also, he gloated over the prospect of seeing Gallito, Bob Flick and Seagreave arrested for conniving at Jose's escape and for harboring him during all these months.

But the unexpected did occur. As Seagreave had predicted, the snow began to fall, and began the very night that Pearl danced in the town hall; and fell so steadily and uninterruptedly that the progress of the train which bore Hanson down the mountains was considerably impeded. Thus, the very forces of the air conspired for Jose, and ably were they seconded by other invisible and unknown agencies. Even before Hanson had reached the coast he found himself powerless "in the fell clutch of circ.u.mstance." He had taken cold in the mountains and for several weeks was too seriously ill even to contemplate with much interest his plan of revenge. And by the time that he had recovered sufficiently to give consideration to the matter again, a very little investigation convinced him of the necessity for patience. So thoroughly had the season and the elements conspired, that Colina was effectually cut off from the outer world, a camp beleaguered by snow, and Jose, for several months at least, would be the prisoner of the mountains and not of man.

But Colina was used to this experience. It was one which she had regularly undergone every winter of her existence. Therefore, her inhabitants prepared for it and bore it with what equanimity they could summon. It was but a small camp so far up in the mountains that the mines were practically only worked during the late spring, the summer and the early autumn months, for the water which ran the concentrating and stamp mills was frozen early in the winter and the mines were practically closed down. One or two, like the Mont d'Or, were kept open, and worked a few hours a day, but no milling was done and the ore dumps increased to vast size.

The railroad, a steep and tortuous way, was not, _per se_ a pa.s.senger line, but existed to carry the ore down to the smelters, therefore, when there was no ore to carry, it was a matter of indifference to the mine owners who controlled the line whether trains ran or not; in fact, they preferred not from a strictly business standpoint, and truly they had an excellent excuse in the heavy drifts which completely obliterated the narrow, shining, steel path which led to the world beyond the mountains.

The police officials whom Hanson consulted as soon as his returning health permitted him to do so, realized that in spite of their anxiety to secure the famous and slippery Crop-eared Jose, he was quite as safely imprisoned by the mountains as if they themselves had secured him. There was no possible escape for him. All trails were blocked long before the railroad was, so there he was, caught as securely as a bird in a cage, and they, his potential captors, might sit down to a comfortable period of pleasant antic.i.p.ation and await that thaw which was bound to come sooner or later. So much for Gallito's unexpected.

As for those who would have been interested had they but known--the little group held in compulsory inaction by those white, encircling hills--they accepted it as a part of the year's toll, no more to be murmured at than the changing seasons, and as inevitable as were they.

But it was an experience which Pearl had never known, and Seagreave looked to see it wear upon her spirit, and daily experienced a new surprise that there was no evidence of its doing so. Instead, she seemed to glow hourly with a richer and fuller life, a softer beauty. But although an intimacy greater than he and she had yet known, would seem to be enforced by this winter of isolation and leisure, she did not, for a time, see as much of him as before. A constraint, almost like a blight upon their friendship, seemed to have fallen between them ever since the night that she had danced. Seagreave did not come down to Gallito's cabin quite so frequently in the evenings, and, according to Jose, spent much time by his own fireside absorbed in reading and meditation; and when he did come it was usually late and, instead of talking to Pearl, he would listen in silence to Hugh's playing or else engage him in conversation.

But this att.i.tude on his part failed to cloud Pearl's spirits. She had seen men taken with this not inexplicable shyness before, and she made no effort to rouse Harry from his abstraction or to lure him from his meditations; femininely, intuitively wise, she left that to time.

But even in her moods of gayety the Black Pearl was never voluble, and her habit of silence was a factor in maintaining the mystery with which Seagreave's imagination was now beginning to invest her, and during those winter evenings when she would often sit absolutely motionless for an hour at a time, her narrow eyes dreaming on the fire, the sphynx look on her face, more than once he felt impelled to murmur:

"'The Sphinx is drowsy, Her wings are furled: Her ear is heavy, She broods on the world.

Who'll tell me my secret, The ages have kept?-- I awaited the seer, While they slumbered and slept.'"

Thus, more and more, he saw her as the image of beauty and of mystery, and ever more frequently he pondered on the nature of the message of the desert. But had he come down to Gallito's cabin earlier in the evening he would not have found her brooding on the firelight. Usually, she danced, keeping well in practice. She and Hughie would discuss by the hour new movements and effects, and not only discuss, but try them, and she and Jose, who had a light foot, often gave Gallito the benefit of seeing them in many of the old Spanish dances.

But one evening when Seagreave came down, Pearl was not resting after her exertions, but ran forward to greet him with unwonted vivacity, and drew him toward a window in a dim corner of the room, out of earshot of her father and Jose.

"Oh!" she cried. "Look, look at what they have sent me from the camp for dancing for them. I had no idea it would be so much." She took a roll of bills from her bosom and showed it to him. Her cheek was flushed, her eyes were like stars. "Why, even here, even up here," she cried, "I can make money."

"You look as if you enjoyed making money," he smiled.

She looked up at him as if surprised, and then laughed. "Of course, of course I do. Who doesn't?" Her touch on the bills was a caress. She seemed to find a joy in the very texture of them. He never dreamed for a moment that she took a delight in those rather crumpled and dirty bills.

He merely took it for granted that she exulted in the visible expression of appreciation of her art.

"And what will you do with it?" he asked.

"I will send it to my bank when I can get any letters through, and then when this s...o...b..ll is big enough I will invest it."

"In mines?" still idly interested and smiling.

She shook her head. "I leave that to my father, he is a good judge and he is lucky at it, and my mother is always buying patches of land and trading them off, usually to good advantage. But my specialty is unset stones. I have some very good ones, really, I have. Oh," with a little glance over her shoulder toward her father and Jose, "I will show them to you some day when Jose is not around. If he knew I had them he would steal them just for the pleasure of keeping himself in practice."

"How you love beauty," he said.

"But they are valuable," she said. "Oh, yes, I love them, too. I love to let them fall through my fingers, to pour them from one hand to another.

Sometimes, when I am all alone here in the cabin, I sit and I open my little black leather bag and take them out and hold them in the palm of my hand, and I turn them this way and that way just to catch the light, and there is nothing so beautiful; in all the world there is nothing so beautiful as jewels, except," she caught herself quickly, "the desert, of course."

He sighed a little and stirred restlessly, the very mention of the desert made him vaguely uneasy. He had listened to the call of the mountains and obeyed it, and from that moment the desert, like the world, had no place in his thoughts; but since the night that Pearl had danced it had remained in his mind, and had become to him as a far horizon. The desert has ever been a factor in the consciousness of man, not to be excluded, and although Seagreave did not realize it, the moment had come in which he must reckon with it. He felt the fascination and repulsion of its impenetrable mystery, of its stark and desolate wastes, whose spell is yet so potent in the imagination of man, that many have found in its barren horror the very heart of beauty. He wondered if the uncontaminated winds which blew from out the ages across the vast, empty s.p.a.ces murmured a message of greater import than that whispered to him among the mountain tops, if the wings of light which beat unceasingly above its shifting sands lifted the soul to some undreamed of realm of eternal morning. Something that slept deep within him stirred faintly; the old pa.s.sion to adventure, to explore rose in his heart, his restless, reckless heart, which had, so he believed, found peace.

The shadow deepened in his eyes, but he suddenly roused from this momentary abstraction to find that Pearl was still speaking.