The Desert and the Sown Part 12

"How much grub have we got?"

Paul gave a flattering estimate of their resources. The patient was not deceived.

"Where's it all gone to? You ain't eat anything."

"I've eaten a good deal more than you have."

"I was livin' on fever."

"You can't live on fever any longer. The fever has left you, and you'll go with it if you don't obey your doctor."

"But where's all the stuff _gone_ to?"

"There were four of them, and they allowed for some delay in getting out," Paul explained, with a sickly smile.

"Well, they was hogs! I knew how they'd pan out! That was why"--He wearied of speech and left the point unfinished.

On the evening following, when the two could no longer see each other's faces in the dusk, Paul spoke, controlling his voice:--

"I need not ask you, John, what you think of our chances?"

"I guess they ain't much worth thinking about." The fire hissed and crackled; the soft subsidence of the snow could be heard outside.

"We are 'free among the dead,' how does it go? 'Like unto them that are wounded and lie in the grave.' What we say to each other here will stop here with our breath. Let us put our memories in order for the last reckoning. I think, John, you must, at some time in your life, have known my father, Adam Bogardus? He was lost on the Snake River plains, twenty-one years ago this autumn."

Receiving no answer, the pale young inquisitor went on, choosing his words with intense deliberation as one feeling his way in the dark.

"Most of us believe in some form of communication that we can't explain, between those who are separated in body, in this world, but closely united in thought. Do I make myself clear?"

There was a sound of deep breathing from the bunk; it produced a similar conscious excitement in the speaker. He halted, recovered himself, and continued:--

"After my father's disappearance, my mother had a distinct presentiment--it haunted her for years--that something had happened to him at a place called One Man Station. Did you ever know the place?"

"I might have." The words came huskily.

"Father had left her at this place, and to her knowledge he never came back. But she had this intimation--and suffered from it--that he did come back and was foully dealt with there--wronged in body or mind. The place had most evil a.s.sociations for her; it was not strange she should have connected it with the great disaster of her life. As you lay talking to yourself in your fever, you took me back on that lost trail that ended, as we thought, in the grave. But we might have been mistaken. Is there anything it would not be safe for you and me to speak of now? Do you know any tie between men that should be closer than the tie between us? Any safer place where a man could lay off the secret burdens of his life and be himself for a little while--before the end answers all? I know you have a secret. I believe that a share of it belongs to me."

"We are better off sometimes if we don't get all that belongs to us,"

said John gratingly.

"It doesn't seem to be a matter of choice, does it? If you were not meant to tell me--what you have partly told me already--where is there any meaning in our being here at all? Let us have some excuse for this senseless accident. Do you believe much in accidents? How foolish"--Paul sighed--"for you and me to be afraid of each other! Two men who have parted with everything but the privilege of speaking the truth!"

The packer raised himself in his bunk slowly, like one in pain. He looked long at the listless figure crouching by the fire; then he sank back again with a low groan. "What was it you heared me say? Come!"

"I can't give you the exact words. The words were nothing. Haven't you watched the sparks blow up, at night, when the wind goes searching over the ashes of an old camp-fire? It was the fever made you talk, and your words were the sparks that showed where there had been fire once.

Perhaps I had no right to track you by your own words when you lay helpless, but I couldn't always leave you. Now I'd like to have my share of that--whatever it was--that hurt you so, at One Man Station."

"You ought to been a lawyer," said the packer, releasing his breath.

There was less strain in his voice. It broke with feeling. "You put up a mighty strong case for your way of looking at it. I don't say it's best.

There, if you will have it! Sonny--my son! It--it's like startin' a snow-slide."

The sick man broke down and sobbed childishly.

"Take it quietly! Oh, take it quietly!" Paul s.h.i.+vered. "I have known it a long time."

Hours later they were still awake, the packer in his bunk, Paul in his blankets by the winking brands. The pines were moving, and in pauses of the wind they could hear the incessant soft crowding of the snow.

"When they find us here in the spring," said the packer humbly, "it won't matter much which on us was 'Mister' and which was 'John.'"

"Are you thinking of that!" Paul answered with nervous irritation. "I thought you had lived in the woods long enough to have got rid of all that nonsense!"

"I guess there was some of it where you've been living."

"We are done with all that now. Go to sleep,--Father." He p.r.o.nounced the word conscientiously to punish himself for dreading it. The darkness seemed to ring with it and give it back to him ironically. "Father!"

muttered the pines outside, and the snow, listening, let fall the word in elfin whispers. Paul turned over desperately in his blankets.

"Father!" he repeated out loud. "Do _you_ believe it? Does it do you any good?"

"I wouldn't distress myself, one way or t' other, if it don't come natural," the packer spoke, out of his corner in the darkness. "Wait till you can feel to say it. The word ain't nothing."

"But do you feel it? Is it any comfort to you at all?"

"I ain't in any hurry to feel it. We'll get there. Don't worry. And s'pose we don't! We're men. Man to man is good enough for me."

Paul spent some wakeful hours after that, trying not to think of Moya, of his mother and Christine. They were of another world,--a world that dies hard at twenty-four. Towards morning he slept, but not without dreams.

He was in the pent-road at Stone Ridge. It was sunset and long shadows striped the lane. A man stood, back towards him, leaning both arms on the stone fence that bounds the lane to the eastward,--a plain farmer figure, gazing down across the misty fields as he might have stood a hundred times in that place at that hour. Paul could not see his face, but something told him who it must be. His heart stood still, for he saw his mother coming up the lane. She carried something in her hand covered with a napkin, and she smiled, walking carefully as if carrying a treat to a sick child. She pa.s.sed the man at the fence, not appearing to have seen him.

"Won't you speak to him, mother? Won't you speak to"--He could not utter the name. She looked at him bewildered. "Speak? who shall I speak to?"

The man at the fence had turned and he watched her, or so Paul imagined.

He felt himself choking, faint, with the effort to speak that one word.

Too late! The moment pa.s.sed. The man whom he knew was his father, the solemn, quiet figure, moved away up the road unquestioned. He never looked back. Paul grew dizzy with the lines of shadow; they stretched on and on, they became the ties of a railroad--interminable. He awoke, very faint and tired, with a lost feeling and the sense upon him of some great catastrophe. The old man was sleeping deeply in his bunk, a ray of white sunlight falling on his yellow features. He looked like one who would never wake again. But as Paul gazed at him he smiled, and sighed heavily. His lips formed a name; and all the blood in Paul's body dyed his face crimson. The name was his mother's.

XII

THE BLOOD-WITE

A few hours seemed days, after the great disclosure. Both men had recoiled from it and were feeling the strain of the new relation. Three times since their first meeting the elder had adjusted himself quietly to a change in the younger's manner to him. First there had been respectful curiosity in the presence of a new type, combined with the deference due a leader and an expert in strange fields. Then indignant partisans.h.i.+p, pity, and the slight condescension of the nurse. This had hurt the packer, but he took it as he accepted his physical downfall.

The last change was hardest to bear; for now the time was short, and, as Paul himself had said, they were in the presence of the final unveiling.

So when Paul made artificial remarks to break the pauses, avoiding his father's eye and giving him neither name nor t.i.tle, the latter became silent and lay staring at the logs and picking at his hands.

"If I was hunting up a father," he said to himself aloud one day, "I'd try to find a better lookin' one. I wouldn't pa'm off on myself no such old warped stick as I be." The remark seemed a tentative one.

"I had the choice, to take or leave you," Paul responded. "You were an unconscious witness. Why should I have opened the subject at all?"