Vandemark's Folly Part 19

I folded it around her and took my seat by her side. With scarcely a whisper between us we sat there and watched the stars wheel over to the west and down to their settings. At last I felt her leaning over against my shoulder, and found that she was asleep; and softly putting my arms about her outside the warm buffalo-robe, I held her sleeping like a baby until the shrill roundelays of the meadow-larks told me it was morning.

Then after taking away my arms I awakened her.

CHAPTER X

THE GROVE OF DESTINY DOES ITS WORK

Virginia opened her eyes and smiled at me. I think this was the first time that she had given me more than just a trace of a smile; but now she smiled, a very sweet winning smile; and getting spryly out of the wagon she said that she had been a lazy and useless pa.s.senger all the time she had been with me, and that from then on she was going to do the cooking. I told her that I wasn't going to let her do it, that I was strong and liked to cook; and I stammered and blundered when I tried to hint that I liked cooking for her. She looked very dense at this and insisted that I should build the fire, and show her where the things were; and when I had done so she pinned back her skirts and went about the work in a way that threw me into a high fever.

"You may bring the new milk," said she, "and by that time I'll have a fine breakfast for you."

When the milk was brought, breakfast was still a little behindhand, but she would not let me help. Anyhow, I felt in spite of my talk that I wanted to do some other sort of service for her: I wanted to show off, to prove myself a protector, to fight for her, to knock down or drive off her foes and mine; and as I saw the light smoke curling up through the tree-tops I asked myself where those men were who had made their way past us in such a dark and secret sort of way and with so much bad talk back there in the middle of the night. I wondered if they had camped where they could see the smoke of our fire, or hear our voices or the other sounds we made.

I almost wished that they might. I had now in a dim, determined, stubborn way claimed this girl in my heart for my own; and I felt without really thinking of it, that I could best foreclose my lien by defeating all comers before I dragged her yielding to my cave. It is the way of all male animals--except spiders, perhaps, and bees--and a male animal was all that I was that morning. I picked up my gun and told her that I must find out where those men were before breakfast.

"No, no!" said she anxiously, "don't leave me! They might shoot you--and--then--"

I smiled disdainfully.

"If there's any shooting to be done, I'll shoot first. I won't let them see me, though; but I must find out what they are up to. Wait and keep quiet. I'll soon be back."

I knew that I should find their horses' hoof-marks at whatever place they had left the stream; and I followed the brook silently, craftily and slowly, like a hunter trailing a wild beast, examining the bank of soft black rooty earth for their tracks. Once or twice I pa.s.sed across open s.p.a.ces in the grove. Here I crept on my belly through the brush and weeds shoving my gun along ahead of my body.

My heart beat high. I never for a moment doubted the desperate character of the men, and in this I think I showed good judgment; for what honest hors.e.m.e.n would have left the Ridge Road, or if any honest purpose had drawn them away, what honest men would have forced their horses to wade in the channel of a swollen stream in the middle of the night? They must have been trying to travel without leaving tracks, just as I had done.

Their talk showed them to be bad characters, and their fox-like actions proved the case against them. So I crawled forward believing fully that I should be in danger if they once found out that I had uncovered their lurking-place. I carefully kept from making any thras.h.i.+ng or swis.h.i.+ng of boughs, any crackling of twigs, or from walking with a heavy footfall; and I wondered more and more as I neared what I knew must be the other end of the grove, why they had not left the water and made camp. For what other purpose had they come to this patch of woods?

At last I heard the stamping of horses, and I lay still for a while and peered all about me for signs of the animals or their possessors. I moved slowly, then, so as to bring first this open s.p.a.ce in line with my eyes, and then that, until, crawling like a lizard, I found my men. They were lying on the ground, wrapped in blankets, all asleep, very near the other end of the grove. In the last open spot of the timber, screened from view from the prairie by clumps of willows and other bushes, were six horses, picketed for grazing. There were two grays, a black, two bays and a chestnut sorrel--the latter clearly a race-horse. They were all good horses. There were rifles leaning against the trees within reach of the sleeping men; and from under the coat which one of them was using for a pillow there stuck out the b.u.t.t of a navy revolver.

Something--perhaps it was that consciousness which horses have of the approach of other beings, scent, hearing, or a sense of their own which we can not understand--made the chestnut race-horse lift his head and nicker. One of the men rose silently to a sitting posture, and reached for his rifle. For a moment he seemed to be looking right at me; but his eyes pa.s.sed on, and he carefully examined every bit of foliage and every ant-hill and gra.s.s-mound, and all the time he strained his ears for sounds. I held my breath. At last he lay down again; but in a few minutes he got up, and woke the others.

This was my first sight of Bowie Bushyager. Everybody in Monterey County, and lots of other people will remember what the name of Bowie Bushyager once meant; but it meant very little more than that of his brother, Pitt Bushyager, who got up, grumbling and cursing when Bowie shook him awake. Bowie was say twenty-eight then, and a fine specimen of a man in build and size. He was six feet high, had a black beard which curled about his face, and except for his complexion, which was almost that of an Indian, his dead-black eye into which you could see no farther than into a bullet, and for the pitting of his face by smallpox, he would have been handsome.

"Shut up!" said he to his brother Pitt. "It's time we're gittin' our grub and pullin' out."

Pitt was even taller than Bowie, and under twenty-five in years. His face was smooth-shaven except for a short, curly black mustache and a little goatee under his mouth His eyes were larger than Bowie's and deep brown, his hair curled down over his rolling collar, and he moved with an air of ease and grace that were in contrast with the slow power of Bowie. There was no doubt of it--Pitt Bushyager was handsome in a rough, daredevil sort of way.

I am describing them, not from the memory of that morning, but because I knew them well afterward. I knew all the Bushyager boys, and their father and mother and sisters; and in spite of everything, I rather liked both Pitt and Claib. Bowie was a forbidding fellow, and Asher, who was between Bowie and Pitt in age, while he was as big and strong as any of them, was the gentlest man I ever saw in his manners. He did more of the planning than Bowie did. Claiborne Bushyager was about my own age; while Forrest was older than Bowie. He was always able to convince people that he was not a member of the gang, and now, an old white-haired, soft-spoken man, still owns the original Bushyager farm, with two hundred acres added, where I must confess he has always made enough money by good farming to account for all the property he has.

These men were an important factor in the history of Monterey County for many years, and I knew all of them well; but had they known that I saw them that morning in the grove I guess I should not have lived to write this history; though it was years before the people came to believing such things of them. The third man in the grove I never saw again.

Judging from what we learned afterward, I think it is safe to say that this Unknown was one of the celebrated Bunker gang of bandits, whose headquarters were on the Iowa River somewhere between Eldora and Steamboat Rock, in Hardin County. He was a small man with light hair and eyes, and kept both the Bushyagers on one side of him all the time I had them in view. When he spoke it was almost in a whisper, and he kept darting sharp glances from side to side all the time, and especially at the Bushyagers. When they left he rode the black horse and led one of the grays. I know, because I crept back to my own camp, took my breakfast with Virginia, and then spied on the Bushyagers until dinner-time. After dinner I still found them there arguing about the policy of starting on or waiting until night. Bowie wanted to start; but finally the little light-haired man had his way; and they melted away across the knolls to the west just after sunset. I returned with all the air of having driven them off, and ate my third meal cooked by Virginia Royall.

2

I do not know how long we camped in this lonely little forest; for I lost reckoning as to time. Once in a while Virginia would ask me when I thought it would be safe to go on our way; and I always told her that it would be better to wait.

I had forgotten my farm. When I was with her, I could not overcome my bashfulness, my lack of experience, my ignorance of every manner of approach except that of the ca.n.a.llers to the waterside women, with which I suddenly found myself as familiar through memory as with the route from my plate to my mouth; that way I had fully made up my mind to adopt; but something held me back.

I now began leaving the camp and from some lurking-place in the distance watching her as a cat watches a bird. I lived over in my mind a thousand times the attack I would make upon her defense, and her yielding after a show of resistance. I became convinced at last that she would not make even a show of resistance; that she was probably wondering what I was waiting for, and making up her mind that, after all, I was not much of a man.

I saw her one evening, after looking about to see if she was observed, take off her stockings and go wading in the deep cool water of the creek--and I lay awake at night wondering whether, after all, she had not known that I was watching her, and had so acted for my benefit--and then I left my tossed couch and creeping to the side of the wagon listened, trembling in every limb, with my ear to the canvas until I was able to make out her regular breathing only a few inches from my ear.

And when in going away--as I always did, finally--I made a little noise which awakened her, she called and asked me if I had heard anything, I said no, and pacified her by saying that I had been awake and watching all the time. Then I despised myself for saying nothing more.

I constantly found myself despising my own decency. I felt the girl in my arms a thousand times as I had felt her for those delicious hours the night she had invited me to share the wagon with her, and we had sat in the spring seat wrapped in the buffalo-robe, as she slept with her head on my shoulder. I tormented myself by asking if she had really slept, or only pretended to sleep. Once away from her, once freed from the innocent look in her eyes, I saw in her behavior that night every advance which any real man might have looked for, as a signal to action.

Why had I not used my opportunity to make her love me--to force from her the confession of her love? Had I not failed, not only in doing what I would have given everything I possessed or ever hoped to possess to have been able to do; but also had I not failed in that immemorial duty which man owes to woman, and which she had expected of me? Would she not laugh at me with some more forceful man when she had found him? Was she not scorning me even now?

I had heard women talk of greenhorns and backwoods boys in those days when I had lived a life in which women played an important, a disturbing, and a baleful part for every one but the boy who lived his strange life on the tow-path or in the rude cabin; and now these outcast women came back to me and through the very memories of them poisoned and corrupted my nature. They peopled my dreams, with their loud voices, their drunkenness, their oaths, their obscenities, their lures, their tricks, their awful counterfeit of love; and, a figure apart from them in these dreams, partaking of their nature only so far as I desired to have it so, walked Virginia Royall, who had come to me across the prairie to escape a life with Buckner Gowdy. But to the meaning of this fact I shut the eye of my mind. I was I, and Gowdy was Gowdy. It was no time for thought. Every moment I pressed closer and closer to that action which I was sure would have been taken by Eben Sproule, or Bill the Sailor--the only real friends I had ever possessed.

We used to go fis.h.i.+ng along the creek; and ate many a savory mess of bullheads, sunfish and s.h.i.+ners, which I prepared and cooked. We had b.u.t.ter, and the cows, eased of the labors of travel, grew sleek and round, and gave us plenty of milk. I saved for Virginia all the eggs laid by my hens, except those used by her in the cooking. She gave me the daintiest of meals; and I taught her to make bread. To see her molding it with her strong small hands, was enough to have made me insane if I had had any sense left. She showed me how to make vinegar pies; and I failed in my pies made of the purple-flowered prairie oxalis; but she triumphed over me by using the deliriously acid leaves as a flavoring for sandwiches--we were getting our first experience as prairie-dwellers in being deprived of the common vegetable foods of the garden and forest. One day I cooked a delicious mess of cowslip greens with a ham-bone. She seemed to be happy; and I should have been if I had not made myself so miserable. I remember almost every moment of this time--so long ago.

One day as we were fis.h.i.+ng we were obliged to clamber along the bank where a tree crowded us so far over the water that Virginia, in stooping to pa.s.s under the body of the tree, was about to fall; and I jumped down into the stream and caught her in my arms as she was losing her hold. I found her arms about my neck as she clung to me; and, standing in the water, I turned her about in my arms, rather roughly of necessity, caught one arm about her waist and the other under the hollows of her knees and held her so.

"Don't let me fall," she begged.

"I won't," I said--and I could say no more.

"You've got your feet all wet," said she.

"I don't care," I said--and stopped.

"How clumsy of me!" she exclaimed.

"It was a hard place to get around," said I.

"I hope you didn't lose the fish," said she.

"No," said I, "I dropped the string of them in the gra.s.s."

Now this conversation lasted a second, from one way of looking at it, and a very long time from another; and all the time I was standing there, knee-deep in the water, with Virginia's arms about my neck, her cheek almost against mine, one of my arms about her waist and the other under the hollows of her knees--and I had made no movement for putting her ash.o.r.e.

"You're very strong," said she, "or you would have dropped me in the water."

"Oh," said I, "that's nothing"--and I pressed her closer.

"How will you get me back on land?" she asked; and really it was a subject which one might have expected to come up sooner or later.

I turned about with her and looked down-stream; then I turned back and looked up-stream; then I looked across to the opposite bank, at least six feet away; then I carried her up-stream for a few yards; then I started back down-stream.

"There's no good place there," said I--and I looked a long, long look into her eyes which happened to be scanning my face just then. She blushed rosily.

"Any place will do," she said. "Let me down right here where I can get the fis.h.!.+"

And slowly, reluctantly, with great pains that she should not be scratched by briars, bitten by snakes, brushed by poison-ivy, muddied by the wet bank, or threatened with another fall, I put her down. She looked diligently in the gra.s.s for the fish, picked them up, and ran off to camp. After she had disappeared, I heard the bushes rustle, and looked up as I sat on the bank wringing the water from my socks and pouring it from my boots.

"Thank you for keeping me dry," said she. "You did it very nicely. And now you must stay in the wagon while I dry your socks and boots for you--you poor wet boy!"