For the Soul of Rafael Part 16

His brother said nothing, only looked at him in wonder, as he rose with hands thrust in pockets and walked the length of the little terrace formed by the refuse of the mine. The two brothers had changed places.

It was now Keith, the cool, the indifferent, who had crossed some line of emotional experience where speech was a relief--Keith, of all men!

Teddy wondered who the woman could be; she would be worth seeing.

"So you see, Ted," observed the other, with a forced laugh, "you need not explain things to me. When the woman comes, none of us cares much what the other fellow thinks."

"If she is the right woman, I'm mighty sorry, old man, that it's going to be as you say--that you are not going to see her again."

"Don't waste good sorrow! I'm the only fool in the case--she doesn't care."

"That's not so easy to believe," declared Teddy, loyally. "You probably only asked her once, and then hit the trail before she could change her mind."

"Ask her. When people care, words are not so necessary."

"Perhaps not, but girls do expect words; though the right girl--"

"She doesn't know that she was the right girl; I may not have made it clear. I was a fool who dreamed dreams and believed them true. Talking about it doesn't help. I thought it might; that's all."

He continued to walk the terrace, as though with a certain impatience at having let go of himself. Teddy regarded him for a few moments of awkward silence. Keith had never been demonstrative, and this sudden confidence caught Teddy unprepared. He felt ill at ease, realizing that it was no light sentiment, causing him to let go of himself and speak.

"I reckon this particular mountain must be bewitched," he said at last.

"The only other time you talked of a girl--any special girl--was after we were led across yon range by that girl of the convent. Even then you talked of her only when the knock on your head sent you luny. What was the name they called her? Spirit--Dona Spirit--Dona Espiritu! That is it! I really thought for a few days of your ravings that we were going to have a nun in the family; and now it's a new girl!"

Keith regarded him for a moment, then in silence took out tobacco and made a cigarette. Of what use were words?

"I always wondered who that girl was and what became of her," continued Teddy. "The old padre was as dumb as an oyster on the subject. Did you learn more than her name?"

"Not much," said Keith, briefly.

"I always meant to. Funny how those crack-brained Indians let up on the attack that night, when she slipped that ring on your finger and held up your hand for them to see. It was the last thing I noted before I keeled over. Those Indians have not forgotten that. They knew when I came back here, and they seemed to watch either the mine or me,--I don't know which it is. Once they asked an old Mexican for you; he speaks their lingo. They described you as 'the man of the ring.'"

"That's queer."

"Did the girl tell you what the ring meant?"

"Meant?" repeated Keith, questioningly.

"Yes. To the tribe, it means more than a mere ring. The old Mexican gathered that much. It had something the significance of a sceptre, and was worn only by one of the rulers in the old days. When that girl put it on your finger, the tribe thought it meant that she had picked you out for marriage. She didn't tell you?"

"No, she didn't tell me."

"Well, it's all that saved our lives that night. You know the old padre is dead. It was he did the sleight-of-hand work in getting the girl out of sight before you got on your feet again. With some threat of eternal flames, he shut the lips of every Mexican I tried to bribe to find her."

Keith took the cigarette from his lips, and looked at him without speaking. Teddy smiled and nodded.

"Yes, I looked for her without your knowing it. You came nearer going 'over the range' in that fever than you ever realized. The English doctor down there asked me who the devil 'Espiritu' was, and said that she could probably do more to lower your temperature than his drugs. I tried to locate her, as soon as I could hobble on a crutch, but it was no use. The padre said she had taken the black veil: that shut us out."

"Yes, of course," a.s.sented Keith, absently.

"You never mentioned her name after you got on your feet, so I figured that it did not really mean anything. Girls never did mean much to you, individually, Keith,--until now."

"Until now."

"And now it's no use, since you can't see her again."

Keith puffed away in thoughtful silence before he spoke.

"Perhaps not. Yet--_quien sabe_? A sentiment may be like a sunrise, lifting clouds for you and making you see things--things within yourself you never suspected were there. Our trail in these hills followed the light of the morning star once, and we got out of the wilderness to safety: that star has meant something to me ever since. I can't possess it, but the meaning of it is mine. I can't give myself to the right woman,"--and he held out his hand and looked at it,--"but no conventions of the world, no man-made walls can prevent the thought of me from going to her--the thought which, after all, is the real me. When that is so, who can say that even an unknown love has not its own uses? It may prove the illumination of a whole lifetime."

Teddy, with wonder in his eyes, laid his hand on his brother's shoulder.

"Old man, that kind of feeling is beyond me. I want my girl with me, and I want her mighty bad. I've lived beside you all my life, and never dreamed it was in you to care like that for any woman. It only shows how little we know, after all."

"Yes; how little, after all, until the right woman crosses the trail."

"The chances are that we can never talk of it again. I know you _that_ much! I told you this old hill of the temple was uncanny--bewitched,--and it is. You never would have mentioned this to me in civilized places."

"Perhaps not," agreed Keith. "And you're right--I could never speak of it again."

They never did. That night they talked only of Teddy's enterprise, and covered much paper with many figures, and made fine plans for the future.

The next day it was that Keith, hunting in the hills, heard an unusual blast from the mine, felt the ground tremble from the shock, and turning back on the trail, met a Mexican with a bleeding hand and a cut face, who urged him to hasten. It was the word of the padre!

He reached Teddy's side only in time to accept "Angela--poor little Angela--" as a life-long legacy. There had been an explosion. Graves were made for the young engineer and three of his Mexican miners on the side of the mountain. When it was all over, Keith Bryton climbed to the heights above, where the broken walls of stone showed white and gray among forest growth on the temple terrace. Below, and beyond the ranges, lay the world. In his isolation of grief, he felt as alone as the solitary mountain rising from the plain below, through which a river ran. Far down the river, miles away, gleamed a cross on the chapel of a convent. It was the old Mexican pueblo of which he had told Alvara. He remembered saying to the old man that he would never come back; yet here he was. How useless to say what one will or will not do in this world!

One must make allowance for the moves fate insists upon in the game of life.

Back of him, on a slight elevation, stood some broken columns, and half an arch yet showed where an entrance had been, and under a dwarfed and twisted oak half covered with tropical vines a bench of marble gleamed. Two birds fluttered to the ground near him and turned inquisitive eyes on the intruder. He watched them carelessly, until one of them perched on a fallen block of stone ornamented with the sculptured sun of the Aztecs. It brought back like a flash that other day when he went from the presence of death to a ruined altar-place, where the Aztec sun and the cactus commemorated some unknown Mexican sculptor who cut the symbol of the faith of his people into the walls of a Christian church.

He closed his eyes, and the vision of that other day was only intensified. The wind in the oaks back of him sounded like the surf on San Juan's beach; and through it the slow, fateful words of a girl kneeling in her wedding-veil echoed in his ears as it had done a thousand times:

"So long--as--we--both--shall live!"

There were no weeping girls here, and no bells to toll out the death message; but otherwise the atmosphere of the place, and the illusion, were perfect. How--how had he chanced to enter into this half-pagan atmosphere of death? Unconsciously, automatically, he turned and re-turned on his finger the onyx ring at which Angela had laughed.

He was still seated there when the miners who had filled the graves came up the path, and with them the priest from the plains below. The Mexicans halted outside the broken walls. Only one Indian, who had followed at a distance, crossed the line of entrance, and stood apart, watching and listening in a furtive way--watching the American especially.

"Many times I have heard of this place," said the priest, "but never before have I been so far into the mountain. There are strange old traditions of it in the accounts some of the early padres left. Their king or chief became Christian and gave his sons to the Church, but the main body of the people kept to many of their pagan rites. And this was their temple. The men ask me if you continue with the mining, senor."

He noticed they all listened for the answer, and looked relieved when he said, "No."

"They are all very glad, senor. They ask me to tell you they have no ill will, but they say not any of their men will go into the mine of the temple."

"Some superst.i.tion?"

"It seems so. They say one man always dies when outsiders meddle with the mountain, but never before have three men died at once. They ask you to let the company know that none of them will come back."

"Very good," and Bryton arose and picked up the sombrero he had dropped beside him. "I will tell them to bring foreigners if they mean to keep on; but I doubt it. The cave-in down there means a fortune to dig out. I don't think they have the capital."

He was turning away, when he noticed the Indian.