CHAPTER VII

ON THE RED ROAD

The green, mid May Virginian afternoon was arched with a sky as blue as the tiles of the Temple of Heaven and steeped in a wash of sunlight as yellow as gold: smoke-hazy peaks piling up in the distance, billowy verdure like clumps of trembling jade between, shaded with ma.s.ses of blue-black shadow, and lazying up and down, by gashed ravine and rounded knoll a road like red lacquer, fringed with stone wall and st.u.r.dy shrub and splashed here and there with the purple stain of the Judas-tree and the snow of dogwood blooms. Nothing in all the springy landscape but looked warm and opalescent and inviting--except a tawny bull that from across a barred fence-corner switched a truculent tail in silence and glowered sullenly at the big motor halted motionless at the side of the twisting road.

Curled worm-like in the driver's seat, with his chin on his knees, John Valiant sat with his eyes upon the distance. For an hour he had whirred through that wondrous shimmer of color with a flippant loitering breeze in his face, sweet from the crimson clover that poured and rioted over the roadside: past nests of meditative farm-buildings, fields of baby-green corn, occasional ramshackle dirt-daubed cabins with doorways hung with yellow honeysuckle and flagrant trumpet-vines, and here and there a quiet old church, Gothic and ivied and gray whose leaded windows watched benignantly over myrtled graveyards. A great soothing suspiration of peace seemed to swell from it all to lap the traveler like the moist balminess of a semi-tropical sea.

"Chum old man," said Valiant, with his arm about the bulldog's neck, "if those color-photograph chaps had shown us this, we simply wouldn't have believed it, would we? Such scenery beats the roads we're used to, what?

If it were all like this--but of course it isn't. We'll get to our own bailiwick presently, and wake up. Never mind; we're country gentlemen, Chummy, en route to our estate! No silly snuffle, now! Out with it!

That's right,"--as a sharp bark rewarded him--"that's the proper enthusiasm." He wound his strong fingers in a choking grip in the scruff of the white neck, as a chipmunk chattered by on the low stone wall.

"No, you don't, you cannibal! He's a jolly little beggar, and he doesn't deserve being eaten!"

He filled his brier-wood pipe and drew in great breaths of the fragrant incense. "What a pity you don't smoke, Chum; you miss such a lot! I saw a poodle once in a circus that did. But he'd been to college. Think how you could think if you only smoked! We may have to do a lot of thinking, where we're bound to. Wonder what we'll find? Oh, that's right, leave it all to me, of course, and wash your paws of the whole blooming business!"

After a time he shook himself and knocked the red core from the pipe-bowl against his boot-heel. "I hate to start," he confessed, half to the dog and half to himself. "To leave anything so sheerly beautiful as this! However, on with the dance! By the road map the village can't be far now. So long, Mr. Bull!"

He clutched the self-starter. But there was only a protestant wheeze; the car declined to budge. Climbing down, he cranked vigorously. The motor turned over with a surly grunt of remonstrance and after a tentative _throb-throb_, coughed and stopped dead. Something was wrong.

With a sigh he flung off his tweed jacket, donned a smudgy "jumper,"

opened his tool-box, and, with a glance at his wrist-watch which told him it was three o'clock, threw up the monster's hood and went bitterly to work.

At half past three the investigation had got as far as the lubricator.

At four o'clock the bulldog had given it up and gone nosing afield. At half past four John Valiant lay flat on his back like some disreputable stevadore, alternately tinkering with refractory valves and cursing the obdurate mechanism. Over his right eye an ooze of orange-colored oil glowered and glistened and indefatigably drip-dripped into his shrinking collar. A sharp stone gnawed frenziedly into the small of his back and just as he made a final vicious lunge, something gave way and a p.r.i.c.kling red-hot stab of pain shot zigzagging from his smitten crazy-bone through every tortured crevice of his impatient frame. Like steel from flint it struck out a crisp oath that brought an answering bovine snort from the fence-corner.

Worming like a lizard to freedom, his eyes puckered shut with the wretched pang, John Valiant sat up and shook his grimy fist in the air.

"You silly loafing idiot!" he cried. "Thump your own crazy-bone and see how you like it! You--oh, lord!"

His arm dropped, and a flush spread over his face to the brow. For his eyes had opened. He was gesturing not at the bull but at a girl, who fronted him beside the road, haughtiness in the very hue of her gray-blue linen walking suit and, in the clear-cut cameo face under her felt cavalry hat, myrtle-blue eyes, that held a smolder of mingled astonishment and indignation. The long ragged stems of two crimson roses were thrust through her belt, a splash of blood-red against the pallid weave. An instant he gazed, all the muscles of his face tightened with chagrin.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"I--I beg your pardon," he stammered. "I didn't see you. I really didn't. I was--I was talking to the bull."

The girl had been glancing from the flushed face to the thistly fence-corner, while the startled dignity of her features warred with an unmistakable tendency to mirth. He could see the little rebellious twitch of the vivid lips, the tell-tale flutter of the eyelids, and the tremor of the gauntleted hand as it drew the hat firmly down over her curling ma.s.ses of red-bronze. "What hair!" he was saying to himself.

"It's red, but _what_ a red! It has the burnish of hot copper! I never _saw_ such hair!"

He had struggled to his feet, nursing his bruised elbow, irritably conscious of his resemblance to an emerging chimney-sweep. "I don't habitually swear," he said, "but I'd got to the point when something _had_ to explode."

"Oh," she said, "don't mind me!" Then mirth conquered and she broke forth suddenly into a laugh that seemed to set the whole place aquiver with a musical contagion. They both laughed in concert, while the bull pawed the ground and sent forth a rumbling bellow of affront and challenge.

She was the first to recover. "You _did_ look so funny!" she gasped.

"I can believe it," he agreed, making a vicious dab at his smudged brow.

"The possibilities of a motor for comedy are simply stupendous."

She came closer and looked curiously at the quiescent monster--at the steamer-trunk strapped on the carrier and the bulging portmanteau peeping over the side of the tonneau. "Is it broken?"

"Merely on strike, I imagine. I think it resents the quality of the gasoline I got at Charlottesville. I can't decide whether it needs a monkey-wrench or a mustard-plaster. To tell the truth, it has been out of commission and I'm not much of an expert, though I can study it out in time. Are we far from the village?"

"About a mile and a half."

"I'll have to have it towed after me. The immediate point is my traps. I wonder if there is likely to be a team pa.s.sing."

"I'm afraid it's not too certain," answered the girl, and now he noted the liquid modulation, with its slightly questioning accent, charmingly Southern. "There is no livery, but there is a negro who meets the train sometimes. I can send him if you like."

"You're very good," said Valiant, as she turned away, "and I'll be enormously obliged. Oh--and if you see a white dog, don't be frightened if he tries to follow you. He's perfectly kind."

She looked back momentarily.

"He--he always follows people he likes, you see--"

"Thank you," she said. The tone had now a hint--small, yet perceptible--of aloofness. "I'm not in the least afraid of dogs." And with a little nod, she swung briskly on up the Red Road.

John Valiant stood staring after her till she had pa.s.sed from view around a curve. "Oh, glory!" he muttered. "To begin by shaking your fist at her and end by making her wonder if you aren't trying to be fresh!

You poor, profane, floundering dolt!"

After a time he discarded his "jumper" and contrived a make-shift toilet. "What a type!" he said to himself. "Corn-flower eyes and a blowse of coppery hair." A fragment of verse ran through his mind:

"Tawny-flecked, russet-brown, in a tangle of gold, The billowy sweep of her flame-washed hair, Like amber lace, laid fold on fold, Or beaten metal beyond compare."

"Delicacy and strength!" he muttered, as he climbed again to the leather seat. "The steel blade in the silk scabbard. With that face in repose she might have been a maid of honor of the Stuarts' time! Yet when she laughed--"

The girl walked on up the highway with a lilting stride, now and then laughing to herself, or running a few steps, occasionally stopping by some hedge to pull a leaf which she rubbed against her cheek, smelling its keen new scent, or stopping to gaze out across the orange-green belts of sunny wind-dimpled fields, one hand pushing back her mutinous hair from her brow, the other shielding her eyes. When she had pa.s.sed beyond the ken of the stranded motor, she began to sing a s.n.a.t.c.h of a cabin song, her vivid red lips framing themselves about the absurd words with a humorous exaggeration of the soft darky p.r.o.nunciation. Beneath its fun her voice held a haunting dreamy quality, as she sang, sometimes in the blaze of sun, sometimes with leaf-shadows above her through which the light spurted down in green-gilt splashes. Once she stopped suddenly, and crouching down by a thorn-hedge, whistled--a low mellow tentative pipe--and in a moment a brown-flecked covey of baby partridges rushed out of the gra.s.s to dart instantly back again. She laughed, and springing up, threw back her head and began a bird song, her slender throat pulsing to the shake and reedy trill. It was marvelously done, from the clear, long opening note to the soaring rapture that seemed to bubble and break all at once into its final crescendo.

Farther on the highroad looped around a strip of young forest, and she struck into this for a short cut. Here the trees stirred faintly in the breeze, filling the place with leafy rustlings and whisperings; yet it was so still that when a saffron-barred hornet darted through with an intolerant high-keyed hum, it made the air for an instant angrily vocal, and a woodp.e.c.k.e.r's tattoo at some distance sounded with startling loudness, like a crackling series of pistol-shots.

In the depth of this wood she sat down to rest on the sun-splashed roots of a tree. Leaning back against the seamed trunk, her felt hat fallen to the ground, she looked like some sea-woman emerging from an earth-hued pool to comb her hair against a dappled rock. The ground was spa.r.s.ely covered with gray-blue bushes whose fronds at a little distance blended into a haze till they seemed like billows of smoke suddenly solidified, and here and there a darting red or yellow flower gave the illusion of an under-tongue of flame. Her eyes, pa.s.sionately eager, peered about her, drinking in each note of color as her quick ear caught each twig-fall, each sound of bird and insect.

She drew back against the tree and caught her breath as a bulldog frisked over a mossy boulder just in front of her.

A moment more and she had thrown herself on her knees with both arms outstretched. "Oh, you splendid creature!" she cried, "you big, lovely white darling!"

The dog seemed in no way averse to this sensational proceeding. He responded instantly not merely with tail-wagging; but with ecstatic grunts and growls. "Where did you come from?" she questioned, as his pink tongue struggled desperately to find a cheek through the whorl of coppery hair. "Why, you must be the one I was told not to be afraid of."

She petted and fondled the smooth intelligent muzzle. "As if any one could be afraid of _you_! We'll set your master right on that point."

Smiling to herself, she pulled one of the roses from her belt, and twisting a wisp of long gra.s.s, wound it round and round the dog's neck and thrust the ragged rose-stem firmly through it. "Now," she said, and pushed him gently from her, "go back, sir!"

He whined and licked her hand, but when she repeated the command, he turned obediently and left her. A little way from her he halted, with a sudden perception of mysterious punishment, shrugged, sat down, and tried to reach the irksome gra.s.s-wisp with his teeth. This failing, he rolled laboriously in the dirt.

Then he rose, cast a reproachful glance behind him, and trotted off.

CHAPTER VIII