"Ah," said Moya in a long-drawn sigh, "then she did not"--

"Oh, she did, explicitly! For I went on to speak of it. It was my last chance. I asked her how she--we--could possibly go through with it; how with this knowledge between us we could look each other in the face--and go on living.

"'Put this hallucination out of your mind,' she said. 'That man and I are strangers.'"

"Was that--would you call that a lie?" asked Moya fearfully.

"You can see your answer in her face. I do not say that hers was the first lie. It must always be foolish, I think, to evade the facts of life as we make them for ourselves. He refused to meet his facts, from the n.o.blest motives;--but now I'm tangling you all up again! Rest your head here, darling. This is such a business! It is a pity I cannot tell you his whole story. Half the meaning of all this is lost. But--here is a solemn declaration in writing, signed John Hagar, in which this man we are speaking of says that Adam Bogardus was his partner, who died in the woods and was buried by his hand; that he knew his story, all the scenes and circ.u.mstances of his life in many a long talk they had together, as well as he knew his own. In his delirium he must have confused himself with his old partner, and half in dreams, he said, half in the crazy satisfaction of pretending to himself he had a son, he allowed the delusion to go on; saw it work upon me, and half feared it, half encouraged it. Afterwards he was frightened at the thought of meeting my mother, who would know him for an impostor. His seeming scruples were fear of exposure, not consideration for her. This was why he guarded their interview so carefully. 'No harm's been done,' he says, 'if you'll act now like a sensible man. I'll be disappointed in you if you make your mother any trouble about this. You've treated me as square as any man could treat another. Remember, I say so, and think as kindly as you can of a harmless, loony old impostor'--and he signs himself 'John Hagar,'--which shows again how one lie leads to another. We go to find 'John Hagar.'"

"Have you shown your mother this letter? You have not? Paul, you will not rob her of her just defense!"

"I will not heap coals of fire on her head! This letter simply completes his renunciation, and he meant it for her defense. But when a man signs himself 'John Hagar' in the handwriting of my father, it shows that somebody is not telling the truth. I used to pore over the old farm records in my father's hand at Stone Ridge in the old account books stowed away in places where a boy loves to poke and pry. I know it as well as I know yours. Do you suppose she would not know it? When a man writes as few letters as he does, the handwriting does not change." Paul laid the letter upon the coals. "It is the only witness against her, but it loses the case."

"She never could have loved him. I never believed she did!" said Moya.

"She thinks she can live out this deep-down, deliberate--But it will kill her, Moya. Her life is ended from this on. How could I have driven her to that excruciating choice! I ought to have listened to him altogether or not at all. There is a h.e.l.l for meddlers, and the ones who meddle for conscience' sake are the deepest d.a.m.ned, I think."

Moya came and wreathed her arm in his, and they paced the room in silence. At length she said, "If we go to find John Hagar, shall we not be meddling again? A man who respects a woman's freedom must love his own. It is the last thing left him. Don't hunt him down. I believe nothing could hurt him now like seeing you again."

"He shall not see me unless he wants to, but he shall know where I stand on this question of the Impostor. It shall be managed so that even he can see I am protecting her. No, call himself what he will, the tie between him and me is another of those facts."

"But do you love him, Paul?"

"Oh--I cannot forget him! He is--just as he used to be--'poor father out there in the cold.' We must find him and comfort him somehow."

"For our own peace of mind? Forgive me for arguing when everything is so difficult. But he is a man--a brave man who would rather be forever out in the cold than be a burden. Do not rob him of his right to _be_ John Hagar if he wants to, for the sake of those he loves. You do not tell me it was love, but I am sure it was, in some mistaken way, that drove him into exile. Only love as pure as his can be our excuse for dragging him back. He did not want shelter and comfort from her. Only one thing. Have we got that to give him?"

"Well then, I go for my own sake--it is a physical necessity; and I go for hers. She has put it out of her own power to help him. It will ease her a little to know I am trying to reach him in his forlorn disguise."

"But you were not going to tell her?"

"In words, no. But she will understand. There is a strange clairvoyance between us, as if we were accomplices in a crime!"

Moya reflected silently. This search which Paul had set his heart upon would equally work his own cure, she saw. Nor could she now imagine for themselves any lover's paradise inseparable from this moral tragedy, which she saw would be fibre of their fibre, life of their life. A family is an organism; one part may think to deny or defy another, but with strange pains the subtle union exerts itself; distance cannot break the thread.

They kissed each other solemnly like little children on the eve of a long journey full of awed expectancy.

Mrs. Bogardus stood holding her door ajar as Moya pa.s.sed on her way downstairs. "You are very late," she uttered hoa.r.s.ely. "Is nothing settled yet?"

"Everything!" Moya hesitated and forced a smile, "everything but where we shall go. We will start--and decide afterwards."

"You go together? That is right. Moya, you have a genius for happiness!"

"I wish I had a genius for making people sleep who lie awake hours in the night thinking about other people!"

"If you mean me, people of my age need very little sleep."

"May I kiss you good-night, Paul's mother?"

"You may kiss me because I am Paul's mother, not because I do not sleep."

Moya's lips touched a cheek as white and almost as cold as the frosted window-panes through which the moon was glimmering. She thought of the icy roses on her wedding dress.

Downstairs her father was smoking his bedtime cigar. Mrs. Creve, very sleepy and cosy and flushed, leaned over the smouldering bed of coals.

She held out her plump, soft hand to Moya.

"Come here and be scolded! We have been scolding you steadily for the last hour."

"If you want that young man to get his strength back, you'd better not keep him up talking half the night," the colonel growled softly. "Do you see what time it is?"

Moya knelt and leaned her head against her father. She reached one hand to Mrs. Creve. They did not speak again till her weak moment had pa.s.sed.

"It will be very soon," she said, pressing the warm hand that stroked her own. "You will help me pack, aunt Annie; and then you'll stay--with father? I know you are glad to have me out of the way at last!"

XVII

THE HIDDEN TRAIL

Because they had set forth on a grim and sorrowful quest, it need not be supposed that Paul and Moya were a pair of sorrowful pilgrims. It was their wedding journey. At the outset Moya had said: "We are doing the best we know. For what we don't know, let us leave it and not brood."

They did not enter at once upon the more eccentric stages of the search.

They went by way of the Great Northern to Portland, descending from snow to roses and drenching rains. At Pendleton, which is at the junction of three great roads, Paul sent tracers out through express agents and train officials along the remotest slender feeders of these lines.

Through the same agents it was made known that for any service rendered or expense incurred on behalf of the person described, his friends would hold themselves gratefully responsible.

At Portland, Paul searched the steamer lists and left confidential orders in the different transportation offices; and Moya wrote to his mother--a woman's letter, every page shining with happiness and as free from apparent forethought as a running brook.

They returned by the Great Northern and Lake Coeur d'Alene, stopping over at Fort Sherman to visit Mrs. Creve, who was giddy with joy over the wholesome change in Paul. She, too, wrote a woman's letter concerning that visit, to the colonel, which cleared a crowd of shadows from his lonely hearth.

Thence again to Pendleton came the seekers, and Paul gathered in his lines, but found nothing; so cast them forth again. But through all these distant elaborations of the search, in his own mind he saw the old man creeping away by some near, familiar trail and lying hid in some warm valley in the hills, his prison and his home.

It was now the last week in March. The travelers' bags were in the office, the carriage at the door, when a letter--pigeon-holed and forgotten since received some three weeks before--was put into Paul's hand.

I run up against your ad. in the Silver City Times [the communication began]. If you haven't found your man yet, maybe I can put you onto the right lead. I'm driving a jerky on the road from Mountain Home to Oriana, but me and the old man we don't jibe any too well. I've got a sort of disgust on me. Think I'll quit soon and go to mining. Jimmy Breen he runs the Ferry, he can tell you all I know. Fifty miles from Mountain Home good road can make it in one day. Yours Respecfully,

J. STRATTON.

It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of enterprise.

Business at the Ferry had shrunk since the railroad went through. The house-staff consisted of Jimmy Breen, a Chinese cook of the bony, tartar breed, sundry dogs, and a large bachelor cat that mooned about the empty piazzas. In a young farming country, hungry for capital, Jimmy could not do a cash business, but everything was grist that came to his mill; and he was quick to distinguish the perennial dead beat from a genuine case of hard luck.

"That's a good axe ye have there," pointing suggestively to a new one sticking out of the rear baggage of an emigrant outfit. "Ye better l'ave that with me for the dollar that's owing me. If ye have money to buy new axes ye can't be broke entirely." Or: "Slip the halter on that calf behind there. The mother hasn't enough to keep it alive. There's har'ly a dollar's wort' of hide on its bones, but I'll take it to save it droppin' on the road." Or, he would try sarcasm: "Well, we'll be shuttin' her down in the spring. Then ye can go round be Walter's Ferry and see if they'll trust ye there." Or: "Why wasn't ye workin' on the Ditch last winter? Settin' smokin' your poipe in the tules, the wife and young ones packin' sagebrush to kape ye warm!"

On the morning after their distinguished arrival, Jimmy's guests came down late to a devastated breakfast-table. Little heaps of crumbs here and there showed where earlier appet.i.tes had had their destined hour and gone their way. At an impartial distance from the top and the foot of the table stood the familiar group of sauce and pickle bottles, every brand dear to the cowboy, including the "surrup-jug" adhering to its saucer. There was a fresh-gathered bunch of wild phlox by Moya's plate in a tumbler printed round the edge with impressions of a large moist male thumb.

"Catchee plenty," the Chinaman grinned, pointing to the plain outside where the pale sage-brush quivered stiffly in the wind. "Bymbye plenty come. Pretty col' now."