“charmian,” said andy passionately, “do you know that i love you more than anything else in all the world? i can’t live without you, darling! don’t want to live without you! you know i love you, don’t you, dear? tell me you know it! you must know it! you can’t help but know! i’ve loved you from the moment i first set eyes on you, when you stood in the door in your evening gown at el trono de tolerancia. god, how i love you, charmian!”
he stopped her, made her face him, and threw his other arm about her. he was trembling violently, and in the moonlight she saw the twitching of his parted lips.
“charmian! charmian!” he cried brokenly, as he realized that she was not struggling in his arms. “you love me, don’t you? i know you love me! god!”
he tightened his hold on her, drew her close to his breast, kissed her dark hair, then savagely threw her body sidewise and found her lips with his.
she was shaken—swept away. he was so young, so handsome, so strong, so intensely masculine. every primitive instinct of her being went out to him. she could no more escape the passionate appeal of the[137] male in him than can the innocent, nature-ruled females of the wilderness escape at mating time. she had no desire to escape. they were man and woman, alone under the stars and the moon, in a deep, grim cañon that scarred the heart of this wild region; and all the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of our false and hectic civilization were far away. a man and a woman, alone and aloof as adam and eve in the garden of eden, young, courageous, ripe for love. “male and female created he them.” she gave him her warm, firm lips. he kissed her lips and eyes and her dusky throat, while the blood hammered in his veins as if freshets of old port wine were rushing through them.
they spoke a thousand words that night, reclining in each other’s arms on the uncompromising floor of that severe old gorge, but they only said, “i love you.” they said it in a hundred ways, lips to lips, but no way was original. love knows no originality when it is sincere. “i love you” is all that can be said—three words, “i love you,” but they are the hinges that swing the door of life.
“and to-morrow you’re going with him to the valley of arcana, charmian! will you think of me all the time, dearest? you won’t listen if he makes love to you, will you, charmian? i know you won’t—you’re the dearest, truest, sweetest girl on earth! oh, why did i have to draw the long match! why couldn’t i go with you instead of him? but as soon as you find the valley, you’ll come right back, won’t you, honey?”
[138]“of course”—and she smothered the words against his lips.
“i wonder, if i were to tell him that we love each other, if he wouldn’t consent to let me go instead. if mary needs help, he, being a doctor, ought to stay with her. but then i couldn’t ask it. he wouldn’t expect me to. i know he’d give in to me—but he’d think i wasn’t a sport. we’ve always played square—the doctor and i. i hope he doesn’t love you too much, charmian. has he told you that he loves you? what were you saying in the cañon this afternoon?”
“he told me he loved me,” said charmian softly.
“he did!”—belligerently. “and what—what did you say?”
“i—i promised to consider it, andy. i couldn’t think of anything else to say. and that was before you—before to-night, you know.”
“why didn’t you tell him there was nothing doing?”
“i couldn’t. i didn’t want to— that is, i—i—he took me so by surprise. and you hadn’t once mentioned love to me then, andy. and who could hurt his feelings—he’s such a dear—such a manly man!”
“but you knew i was going to blurt it out sometime—when i found my nerve.”
“i know—i felt it, i guess. but—oh, don’t think of doctor shonto to-night. i love you—i love you! i don’t want to think of anything else in all the world!”
the hour was late when they returned to camp, floating in air. the doctor had long since sought his blankets. they lengthened the good-night kiss of[139] their new-found love, for in the morning there would be no opportunity to kiss before the parting.
charmian, andy, and shonto had talked at length over the directions given to andy by the defaulting henry for the continuation of the journey. before the girl and andy had gone down the gorge for their love-making all arrangements had been made for an early-morning start.
the four were rather silent as they ate breakfast in the frosty cañon. mary temple assumed the initiative in such conversation as was indulged in, fussing over the out-going pair, as needlessly agitated as a mother hen, a couple of whose brood are ducklings and persist in taking to the water. but at last the meal was over, the good-byes were spoken, the packs and water-bags shouldered, the final love message wirelessed between charmian and andy. and now mary stood needlessly shading her eyes with her hand as she watched the couple up the gorge, so dismal at that early-morning hour, while andy watched from a seat on a large boulder, spread-legged, with hands clasped between his knees, hopelessness in his eyes.
then shrilly shouted the mother hen after her erring ducklings:
“doctor! doc-tor! did you leave andy plenty of his little pills?”
poor mary temple! she was not gifted with the ability to look into the future for which she gave madame destrehan credit. had she been able to she could have envisioned dr. shonto trudging wearily back to her and andy six days later—alone.
[140]half a mile up the clammy cañon from the camp charmian and the doctor turned abruptly to the right and entered a steep branch cañon that tentacled from the larger one to the south. their course was still due south, according to the bewhiskered deserter, and, as they carried a dependable compass, it was without misgivings that they abandoned landmarks which they knew and clambered upward into an unknown country.
the branch cañon was rock-tenoned and perilously steep, though mercifully dry for a mile above its mouth. it was, said charmian, the most outspoken cañon in its querulous complaints over their trespassing that they had as yet encountered. it seemed that nature had designed it as the closest attempt to an impossible approach to what was beyond as lay within her power. into its v bottom she had in a fit of anger hurled immense boulders from the heights above. she had uptilted in her tantrum huge strata of leaflike stone whose edges were sharp as a butcher’s cleaver. then, out to make a night of it, she had poured rubble from the size of an egg to that of a muskmelon down the reaching slopes, wildly mirthful as a miser raining his shekels from bags to glittering heaps on the table-top. these rubble slides were sometimes half a mile in length—nothing but a slanted sea of round, smooth stones of reddish hue, with not a grain of soil or one single gasping blade of vegetation. across these slides the wanderers laboured heavily, for the stones, always eager to continue their interrupted rush into the cañon, gave under their feet like dough; often slid under them, carrying them[141] along on the crest of a new slide; and, thus releasing the pressure, caused slides above them which threatened to swoop down and engulf them or mangle their arms and legs; threw them headlong on occasion; twisted their ankles; endangered every bone; made progress a nightmare of apprehensions by clutching their feet at every step, as when the dream-tortured victim tries to flee from some murderous phantom and terror palsies his legs. once shonto pitched headlong as the rubble sank under his feet like breaking ice. the break started a slide above him, which extended upward and upward to the lip of the cañon until their ears were filled with the deafening roar of a far-reaching avalanche. large stones were pushed upward above the mass, and, released, came bounding down alone over the top of the sliding sea, gaining momentum at every leap, living devils of menace.
for a brief space the two were bewildered, the doctor the more so because his head had struck a rock in falling and left him dazed. then charmian screamed, and he struggled up and ploughed a way to her side. almost before they could plan escape the vanguard of the great slide was rushing past them and piling up about their ankles.
“the other side!” shouted the doctor.
he grasped her hand and together they plunged recklessly toward the v bottom of the cañon. it was no longer dry, and this feature had forced them to traverse the rubble, for the opposite wall was all but perpendicular, with overhanging crags. there was no footing. every frantic step landed them on top[142] of a rolling stone or in the midst of a nest of them. their ankles turned; they were pitched drunkenly from right to left, thrown to their knees, carried downward in a sitting posture, sometimes backward. the increasing roar was terrifying; a tidal wave of reddish stones was vomited at them—a charging army pursuing them, its skirmish line already heckling them, its cannon balls pounding down from the artillery in the rear.
charmian pitched forward; would have sprawled on her face upon the wriggling mass of stones had the doctor lost his crushing grip on her hand. her right arm was almost jerked from its socket as their arms straightened between them and the doctor held on. she thought of her girlhood game of “crack the whip,” when she had been the “snapper” at the tail end of the line and had absorbed the greatest part of the dizzying shock. next moment she felt herself swept up into his arms, pack and all; and then—though only heaven knows how he did it—the man pitched with his burden into the cañon, lunged through the water, and started to climb the wall on the opposite side.
here she struggled free. “i’m all right,” she panted. “i can climb. oh, hurry!”
upwards they struggled, grasping jutting stones and the roots of bushes. into the cañon below them poured the avalanche of stones with the clatter of a billion dice. they struggled on for fifty feet or more, then the girl dropped in helpless exhaustion; and shonto, faring little better, threw himself down beside her.
[143]“we’re safe,” he gulped. “just—just rest.”
gradually the roar subsided while they lay there gasping for the air that seemed to be denied them. only an occasional angry snarl came from some section of the slide that tried to renew the wild dervish dance of destruction. then all sounds ceased, and the beleaguered travellers sat up and gazed at the opposite side of the cañon. everything looked as it had looked before the doctor fell, except that the bottom of the cañon was covered with rubble to a depth of maybe twenty feet. the freshets of a hundred springs to come would carry these on down towards the floor of the mother cañon below, and all would seem to be as it had been for centuries past until some leaping deer or prowling cougar or skulking coyote passed that way and started another slide.
“gosh!” breathed charmian. “ain’t nature wonderful! thanks for the lift, dear old thing. well, who’s scared? where do we go from here?”
“that’s the difficulty,” said shonto seriously. “i don’t like to risk another slide by travelling over the rubble stones again, and if we keep to this side of the cañon we won’t make half a mile an hour. and to walk up the floor of the cañon means wet feet and a continual battle with big boulders and outcroppings.”
but time was of the essence of their contract. they risked the slides again.
they crossed two more as large as the one on which catastrophe had threatened, then several of lesser dimensions until they went out of the district of slides. now they worked their slow way along the same steep[144] slope, over roots and rocks and soft black soil, mellow with decayed chaparral leaves and foamy from the heaving frost. the travelling was heart-breaking until they stepped into a deer trail by sheerest accident. birds cheered them along their way—silent, solemn birds, but companionable in their flattering curiosity. they were very small birds with indistinguishable necks, impossible long bills, big heads, swollen breasts, dull colouring, and manners pontifical in seriousness. these were the questioning little aborigines that, on the other side of the divide, mary temple had called squirks, explaining that a squirk was an important little man who looked like a shabbily clothed preacher, but who made his living by taking orders for enlargements of portrait photographs.
the cañon dwindled—petered out entirely on the ample breast of a hill. it that had been so jagged and yawning and formidable down below now showed no cause for its being—vagrancy cañon, charmian named it because, she said, it could show no visible means of support. over the rounded breast of the eminence they trailed and found themselves on virtually level land, on the wooded plateau of shirttail henry’s promise. the day was almost spent; they retraced their way back to the cañon, to where they had seen a spring. fleecy clouds drifted across the sky, mobilizing in the west, where the reflection of the sinking sun on the far-off ocean was re-reflected on their snowy scallops—orange, cerise, and giddy yellow.
they camped by the little spring.
