Domino. Part 10

Jon Maddocks looked away from me out the window and said nothing. He knew, I thought. But I had to go on.

"There was a box on a rosewood table, and when I touched it I was so frightened that I had to run out of the room. Do you know what's in that box?"

I.

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"Why don't you open it and see?"

"Because I have a feeling that if I do something dieadful will happen."

"When you're ready you'll open it," he said, and I remembered his telling me that perhaps I had to earn the right to know. His a.s.surance made me angry. How could he possibly understand that I was trying to be my own woman, trying to fight for my life?

"I'll tell you something else," I went on. "Gail Cullen left that door unlocked for me deliberately. She knew I'd go in there. For some reason she wants to frighten and upset me. But I'm not going to open that box. Because if I do . . . Oh, what's the use! No one understands. I know what my husband would say if he were alive. He would tell me I can never be free until I open whatever needs to be opened. Hillary thinks that too. He thinks I should open all the boxes. But if I do, perhaps I really will go out of my mind!" I could hear my voice rising, and I hated its pitch.

"Whoa now," Jon said as though he gentled Sundance. "I think there's more of Persis Morgan in you than you know. You'll find that out when you stop fighting it."

I backed down feebly. "I didn't mean to explode like that. I'm sorry-"

"Don't be. Explode if you like. Maybe you hold in too many things. If you like, I'll go into that room with you. I'm pretty good at fighting ghosts, when I have to."

"Yes." Memory took me back. "You helped me fight them once before, didn't you? All those years since then I've had a dream of riding a pony up the valley toward Old Desolate. Everyone has always said it was only a dream, but I've known it was real. I could hear hooves pounding after me because someone was following, and a terrible fear comes through in the dream. Why did you follow me? Why was I running away, and 126.

why did I feel so desperately that I had to ride toward the mountain?"

He hesitated for a moment before he answered. "You were frightened. Terrified. You might have been hurt if you went on alone. There was no one else to ride after you just then, so I did. Though I didn't know myself what was happening at the time."

I put my hand on the post at the top of the stairs to steady myself and closed my eyes. Now I could remember being thrown. I could remember arms about me and a young boy, frightened himself but holding me, trying to comfort me-the sort of comfort that I had yearned for ever since and never found again. But that child was gone, lost in the past, and so was the boy who had held her. I opened my eyes and looked into Jon Maddocks' face-the face of a stranger. I wanted to thank that boy for what he had done, but I couldn't speak such words to this man who seemed to be waiting for something more that must come from me, and that I didn't know how to give, no matter what the need of my grandmother.

"I'm going home soon," I told him woodenly.

"That's a good way to escape what's real and present."

I marched down the stairs and out of the house, not waiting to hear anything more Jon Maddocks might say to me, not daring to listen.

Hillary and Gail were coming back along the street and Hillary was gesticulating dramatically, using Domino as his stage. I was struck by the contrast between him and Jon. The one always exuberant, excited, always onstage; the other quiet, indrawn, giving little away, yet always watchful, perhaps a little arrogant-thinking what? It disturbed me that I should find myself caring, wanting to know.

As Hillary danced about, light on his feet as he would be in a stage duel, Gail followed him, entranced, the way women always did. I knew all about Hillary's fascination as an actor, 127.

though sometimes I had the curious feeling that I didn't know what he was like as a man. A new objectivity was stirring in me that I couldn't altogether welcome.

He saw me on the porch and stopped waving his arms. "What a marvelous place, Laurie! Come down here-I want to show you something. Look-this was a saloon in here. There's what's left of a sign lying there that says, Open All Night.'"

I went to him quickly, putting new uncertainties behind me. When I bent to look through a broken doorframe, I could see sagging ceiling beams and a splintered bar with shelves behind it-all fallen in upon themselves. A small pine tree thrust upward where there had once been a roof.

"Can't you see the boys from Shoot-'em-up Corral coming in here, Laurie? I'll bet they really did. I'm beginning to get a feeling for all this. For the Opera House in Jasper, and for this little ghost of a town. It might be fun to put on Girl of the Golden West again. Put it on right there in Jasper-when people start coming in. Or perhaps I might even write a western play of my own."

"We're leaving very soon," I reminded him.

"But why should you?" Gail put in. "You're not through yet, Laurie. You must stay a few more days-a week, at least."

I knew what she meant. Enough time to open that box. Enough time to bring everything down like a pack of cards. Why should she want that? Why should she want Mark Ingram to be home free? And why should she say this if she had put the wreath on my door to frighten me away?

"I suppose we could stay a little while longer," Hillary said. "It's not going to make all that much difference, is it, Laurie?"

I recognized his excitement over this place. It wasn't fair to bring him out here and then turn off this new eagerness that kindled him.

"All right. But, please-not for long."

"Did you find anything interesting in the house?" lie asked.

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I pulled out the strip of wallpaper to show him. "Just this." His imagination caught fire as he held up the bit of paper. "Daisies-those mountain daisies! Years and years old!"

"From a room my grandmother lived in when she was a little girlHe gave the paper back to me. "Keep it, Laurie. It will help you to remember your coming here."

Companionably he linked his arm through mine, and as we walked along the street together I felt comforted. A little. Of course Hillary and Gail would like each other. He liked everyone-exactly the way Red did. But it didn't mean anything. I'd seen women turn calf's eyes at him before, and he still came back to me. Because I fired his imagination. He'd told me so once. Because J was a Pandora's box full of undisclosed secrets, he'd said. Sometimes I'd wondered uneasily whether I would still interest him once he knew everything there was to know. But at least he had understood how I felt about the wallpaper, where Jon Maddocks, the pragmatist, had not. I closed my mind against the thought of Jon. I mustn't let him in at all. In that direction lay danger. The connection with the past was too strong, and I must be careful.

We picked our way past stunted pine trees that grew here and there in a street made narrow because of mountain walls on either side. Gra.s.s waved in the wind wherever it had seeded in, and clumps of columbine, lavender and white, grew in rotting debris. In one corner flaming-red Indian paintbrush made an orangey slash of color.

I tried to let all confusion and inner conflict flow away so that I could accept this place, know all of it that remained. Already I loved these lonely remnants of what had once been a thriving mining camp. I wanted to carry them back with me in memory, just as I would carry away that tangible bit of wallpaper tucked into my pocket. All this was Domino, and somehow Domino was part of my flesh and blood and bones, as I had never expected that it would be.

If it hadn't been for Domino, I wouldn't be walking this street now. Perhaps I wouldn't even be alive. Persis had said I looked like Sissy Tremayne. There was kins.h.i.+p for me here with my own people, with my very roots. Hillary might use Domino as a springboard for his imagination, but for me it was reality-a past to which I still belonged, yearned to belong.

I walked on to the end of what had been a street, lost in a feeling for the past that had never touched me before. My eyes misted with grief for something I had never known, and I was closer here to Persis Morgan than I had felt standing beside her bed. If I were to stay a few days more to please Hillary, perhaps there was something I could do. Some way in which I could help her. A new resolve began to rise in me that I had never felt before.

The town had ended, running off into high gra.s.s that climbed the gulch, and we turned back toward our horses. Jon waited for us, astride Sundance. He looked right in a saddle, as a man should. He would never bother with fancy gaits in a horse, or proper posting with no saddle horn. A saddle horn was for roping, and Jon grew in his saddle, belonging to these western mountains as we did not. Even though Gail rode well, she looked a little like a dude, while Hillary and I were plainly easterners. Jon was real-a man who lived and worked in an environment he had loved and returned to. Perhaps he had never felt real in New York.

Something contrary was happening in me. Something that made me compare Hillary with Jon to Hillary's disadvantage. If this was disloyalty, it was also a clearer viewing than I'd ever had before. And if this must come, better that it should happen now, before our commitment to each other had gone too far. For Hillary as well as for me.

When we'd mounted, Jon came with us, leading the way.

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"Do you want to see what's left of the mine?" he asked, looking back at me. "From the outside, that is?"

"I'd like that," I told him. I might never come here again, and I was eager to see everything I could.

Gail and Hillary seemed uninterested, and rode on alone.

A switchback trail brought Jon and me to the top, where pieces of rusting machinery were strewn about, along with a few tumbledown sheds. The rusted wheels and frame of the ore car I'd noticed earlier lay on its side among twisted cables, while an equally rusted track ran into the mountain. Bare mounds of tailings fell away below us.

"Was there a smelter here?" I asked Jon.

"No. Smelters were mostly down on the plains. The ore was taken out by mule team to Jasper, where the railroad picked it up. Down there on your left is what they used to call the Glory Hole, where there was a big strike. There was a cave-in later, where a dozen men were buried under tons of earth. What's left of them is still down there."

I s.h.i.+vered as we rode on, and the narrowed way seemed even more precarious. That was what mining had always been-the threat of sudden, cruel death-yet there had always been men willing to be miners.

"Is the entrance to the mine still open?" I asked.

"I can show you where it is, but it's not open. It was boarded shut long ago and a door put in that could be locked."

Sundance picked his way delicately along the hillside, and Baby Doe followed docilely. Both were mountain horses, used to uncertain footing.

"There you are." Jon reined in, pointing. "The opening is right over there."

Timbering formed a door into the mountain, holding back its weight with strong overhead beams, framing the stout door that had been locked with a hasp and big padlock.

"Mostly old mines are nailed shut, or the openings filled in 131.

with concrete," Jon said. "But Mrs. Morgan never quite gave up on the Old Desolate. When there's silver in your blood, you don't get over it easily. She wants to hold onto it and keep access, but still bar the foolish from going in."

"She can't get many tourists back here."

"Mark Ingram means to change all that. Besides, there are old trails that lead into Domino, and sometimes backpackers find their way in even now. There's nothing more dangerous than an old mine. Tunnels are full of broken slabbing and piles of rock where there have been cave-ins. There can be shafts that go down a hundred feet or more. Most likely with deep water at the bottom. Plenty of people have been drowned in mine shafts, when they weren't killed by the fall. To say nothing of the gases that can collect inside, and the lack of oxygen. There are no snakes up this high, but there's plenty else that's not to be tampered with by the curious and ignorant."

"Are there many such mines left that people can get into?"

"Sure. Hundreds of them are scattered through these mountains, and not all of them marked. Some are just dangerous holes in the ground, overgrown and hidden, so it's impossible to locate them all. Kids and unwary backpackers fall into them and are sometimes killed."

There was nothing more to see here where my great-grandfather had found his fortune. The town itself meant more to me, and I turned Baby Doe's head. Behind me, Jon spoke.

"When you ran away on your pony that time and I found you, you kept wailing that you had to get to the mine. I've always wondered what drove you to all that urgency when you were so terrified."

Wind blew in my face, and now and then gusts howled down the gulch that held Domino far below us. I felt suddenly cold with an eerie remembrance. Terror had existed for me close to the mine, as well as back in my grandmother's house. If I went near those boards of a door set into the mountain, i 132.

would I feel another wind on my face surging through the cracks of the planking-a wind rising from the depths of the earth? A dark wind that would carry with it the odor of death?

"Hey!" Jon said, and rode up beside me. "Don't go getting dizzy while you're in the saddle. This is rough ground for a fall, and you could tumble down the mountain."

His words braced me. "I'm all right." I urged Baby Doe on along the hillside, forcing myself to sit steady in the saddle. Hillary and Gail were well ahead by now, and the moment of dizziness pa.s.sed as we rode on. I was in control again. But why had I thought of death in the mountain?

When the trail leveled, I reined in to look back-perhaps for the last time. Not at the mine, but down past it, past the tailing dumps, to the bare bones of Domino, impressing on my memory the appearance of the handful of straggling timbers that had once been a busy camp. In particular I looked for the house that had belonged to Sissy and Malcolm Tremayne, its gabled roof still raised in defiance of the years, resisting the laws of decay because it was still lovingly tended.

Jon waited for me. "You'll come back. That house down there should belong to you-not to anyone else. You can't go away and never see Domino and the Old Desolate again."

"I thought you said I should live in the present. All that is the past."

"It's the present for Persis Morgan-and for you, too." His look seemed to soften as he watched me. "You'll find a way to help her. Otherwise you can't live with yourself."

"I can live with myself," I said in quick irritation.

He turned Sundance along the trail after the others, and I followed in silence.

Ahead of us a horse blew and stamped, and Jon pulled in. As I rode up beside him, a rider on a big bay emerged from the stand of pines that had concealed him. In dismay I saw that he was Mark Ingram. Apparently the loss of a right leg did not '33.

Keep him from riding. His smile was amiable, and I didn't trust it at all.

"Good morning, Miss Morgan, Jon," he said. "You been down saying good-bye to the old place?"

That was exactly what I had been doing, but I couldn't accept the a.s.sumption from him. Ever since I'd come to Jasper, I'd felt about me an atmosphere of disapproval and rejection. Of more than rejection. That wreath had been a threat. And where else could threat originate except from this man?

With sudden resolve I rode over to where he sat as though he, too, had grown in a saddle. I looked straight into cold eyes that didn't match his easy smile, and knew I had to resist.

"Why should I say good-bye?" I asked.

His laughter was as easy as his smile. "Oh, come on now, little lady-you know Domino's going out of Morgan hands. All of it. And soon. I've some pretty fine plans I want to work out down there, and I expect to start building before long."

I could feel an anger rising in me that was stronger than any I'd ever experienced. It was hard to keep my voice steady.

"I don't think you'll build anything down there until you have access to the valley, Mr. Ingram."

"Getting that's only a matter of time, isn't it?"

"I hope a very long time. I didn't go down there just now to say good-bye," I told him, making the words up as I went along, driven only by an unfamiliar inner rage. "I went down to see what needs to be done to the property my grandmother still owns. She has some plans she wants to carry out."

Sundance stamped, and I was intensely aware of Jon sitting him a little way off, deliberately leaving all this to me.

Mark Ingram's eyes, almost a pewter color like his hair, blinked at my words. "We both know you're bluffing, young lady. But we can talk more about this at dinner tonight. I'll see you then."

He turned his bay onto the trail and rode down into '34.

Domino. I found I was shaking with reaction. I had done something I could never have conceived of ahead of time, and now that it was over I felt thoroughly shocked.

Jon came up beside me, grinning. "Good for you. I felt like cheering."

I shook my head. "Don't. He was right-I was bluffing. I just got mad and had to speak up."

Jon reached out to touch my hand on the reins. "Maybe Mrs. Morgan's found herself a fighter, after all."

"No!" I told him. "That's not true. That man frightens me. Did you see the way he looked at me?"

"Sure, I saw. From now on you aren't going to be his favorite girl. I can tell that well enough, and you're right to be afraid of him. That will make you cautious. But you can't back down now. You're in the fight."

I wanted to answer him heatedly, denying his words in order to save myself, but at that moment Hillary came galloping back along the trail, to rein in beside us dramatically, like a movie cowboy. Gail trotted more decorously along behind.

"What's kept you, Laurie?" Hillary demanded. "We thought you'd catch up. What was all that about with Ingram just now?"

I explained what had happened, and Hillary looked pleased. "Fine! Don't let that man walk all over you. Maybe we'll give him his money's worth at dinner tonight."

I had no answer for that, and when we started toward the ranch, I managed to drop behind them all again, weary of being praised for what I was not, and for what I wasn't at all sure I wanted to do. Becoming angry with Mark Ingram for a few moments was one thing. Keeping such anger going was another, and I didn't think I had that in me. I wasn't like Persis Morgan. Now I wanted only to let it all go and be aware of nothing but the mountains around me. More than anything else I wanted peace.

When we went over the shoulder of Old Desolate, I could see down through pines to the wide, beautiful valley that led to the ranch and Morgan House. An unaccountable mist touched my eyes at the sight of it. Perhaps I knew why. Not because of that old woman down there, who was really a stranger to me, but because something in me wept for the long-ago child who had ridden these trails and whom I had lost for all these years. It was not the terrible day when I'd fled to the mountain that stirred me now. It was not only a young boy's arms holding and soothing me that I remembered. It was something else.

A memory I had almost lost rode again beside me. The memory of a tall, fair man who was my father. I couldn't see him or recall his face, but I could remember him-just a little. I could remember kindness and humor-the way he had laughed. I could remember his love for me, my adoration for him. These were feelings I must hold to, recover. I would ask Persis to give me a picture of him, so that I could take it home with me when I left. I would do that now.

I touched my heels to Baby Doe's flanks, wanting only to hurry through the flowering meadow and reach the house. Wanting to leave that angry encounter behind me so that it couldn't force me into doing anything I didn't want to do.