Crossroads (4 page)

D
id y’ever hear about souls that get tangled up after death and come back to earth in the wrong shapes?” he said suddenly.

“I dunno,” answered the girl. “Seems to me like I heard something about it. Why?”

“Well, I been thinking, wouldn’t it be funny if the soul of some old sourdough come back and hopped into the body of a beautiful girl.”

“Well?”

“It’d be kind of funny, that’s all,” he murmured contentedly.

“Hmm,” said the girl. “Maybe you don’t no ways mean me by that?”

He was much surprised. “You? Did I say you?”

“Which I’m sort of silent,” she explained suspiciously.

“Well, it’d be a funny thing, eh?”

“That idea don’t interest me none,” she said coldly.

The silence fell heavily over them. Each knew each was thinking of the other. As for the girl, she did not understand very clearly the imputations behind the unusual question of Dix Van Dyck, but what she did feel most acutely was the challenge of his personality. It was, in a way, like a hand that had reached out and touched her on the shoulder, compelling her attention. She resented it keenly and strove to fasten her attention once more on the cold twinkle of the stars.

“D’you know,” she said, thinking out loud, “that, when the stars are as bright as they are to night, sometimes I feel just as if the old earth was pushing up closer to them…feel as if I was sailing right up through the air!”

“Hmm,” grunted Dix Van Dyck. “That idea don’t interest me none.”

She admitted the counter thrust by nodding her head sharply and scowling across to him. His vast, boyish grin of delight met her eye, and she jerked her head back to stare once more at the stars. However, she was grateful that the night would obscure the burning heat of her face.

The stars, alas, had grown into a confused swirl of faint light. She found that she was making no effort to see them clearly. She was concentrating on the effort to find an answer to this insolent fellow. All the time there was that old sensation of surrounding strength—surrounding personality. The man was reaching out to her. For what?

“I feel,” she said, “as if I was inside a house, and you was knockin’ at the door. What d’ye want?”

“If you was inside a house and I was knocking at the door,” responded the irrepressible Dix Van Dyck indirectly, “I got an idea that the door would stay locked.”

“I got an idea,” said the girl coldly, “that you’re right.”

This reply somewhat damped his spirits, but he rallied himself sternly to the trail. After all, she was only a girl. Yet, he began to guess more and more clearly at the soul of the sourdough.

“There ain’t no use bein’ strange,” he assured her. “You might as well get to know me today as tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she said calmly, “I ain’t going to be with you.”

“If you leave,” he announced, “I’ll follow.”

“I’ll go straight back to Double Bend,” she said maliciously.

“I’ll ride after you to Double Bend.”

“To Marshal Glasgow?” she asked in real alarm.

“Why not? I’d take a chance with him.”

“Some men was born fools, some educated fools, and some fools by choice, and I’m thinkin’ you’re all three rolled into one.”

Nevertheless, she was much moved. Her voice told the tale.

“Now that this here partnership is begun…,” he started.

She cut in: “Who said partnership?”

“Why,” he cried with a voice of much pain, “I thought all the time that was understood. Which was why I tried out the bad luck back there in the dance hall.”

“Now,” she answered scornfully, “you’re lyin’. You done that for pure deviltry. I seen it in your eye.”

“Anyway,” he went on contentedly, “that was the way I understood it, so we’ll leave it there.”

“Will we?” she said with rising anger. “Am I going to have you trailin’ me around the desert whether I want you or not? Say, Dix Van Dyck, ain’t this a free country?”

“Are you pretty mad?” he asked cautiously.

“I am!”

“Well, that’s good.”

Her anger apparently choked back further words.

“Yes,” he explained, “it shows we’re on the way to being friends. That’s what I’ve learned from women. Get ’em mad and they’re two-thirds yours.”

“I s’pose,” she answered with dangerous calm, “that you know a pile about women. Kind of a heart-breaker, eh?”

“I know quite a bit about ’em,” admitted the man easily. “You see, I ain’t been doing much all my life outside of fighting men and making love to women. Takin’ it all in all, I don’t know which is the most exciting, but I’d kind of put a woman above a gun fight.”

She thought at first that it might be pure banter, but he spoke so steadily and evenly that she was deceived. Then, remembering his manliness and courage earlier in the evening, she took pity on him.

“If you’re playing me for the common run of girls,” she said, “you’re on another cold trail, Van Dyck. Men ain’t a thing to me. Less’n nothing, in fact.”

“That just goes to show,” said Dix Van Dyck, “that you’re built along my own lines inside. You see, girls have been less’n nothing to me, too.”

“What you been doing then, lying to ’em?”

“Sort of. Mostly sort of angling around and waiting for the right one to come along.”

“I s’pose,” she said scornfully, “that I’m the right one.”

“Nope. Not yet. You look all right, but I got to glance you over a bit more before I take you.”

An inarticulate murmur of rage answered him.

“You
are
mad, ain’t you?” he said with an open delight. “Let’s see?”

Reaching over to the fire he raised a glowing brand, twirled it dexterously till it broke into a small flame, and raised it so that he could look fully into her face. She winced away a little and obviously wished with all her might that she could cover her face from his sight. She was scarlet with shame and pride and rage. That pride kept her from turning away. That rage made her drop a trembling hand on her gun.

“Van Dyck,” she said furiously, and her voice shook like the voice of a fighting mad man, “I’ve pulled my gun for less things than this.”

“But you can’t make your draw on me?” he queried. “That sounds pretty good for me, doesn’t it?”

She was silent.

“I s’pose,” he went on, “that in the whole world there ain’t nothing you hate half so much as you hate me.”

“Stranger,” she said, “you must be reading my mind.”

“Sure,” he said, “I have been for some time.” His voice changed and grew deeply serious. “Tell me why it ain’t possible for us to make a team, Jack? I been talkin’ foolish, but I just wanted to get you worked up enough to begin really thinking about me. Look at the two of us. Here you are with every man, woman, and child in Double Bend afraid to sit down by you. Why can’t we hit the trail together and run north? No, I don’t mean double harness or anything like that. I mean travel like man with man. We’ll hit new country where we’re new. You’ll get a chance to forget that fool cross, and I’ll get a chance to live without fighting for a week or two. Shake on it?”

He stretched a broad palm beside the fire toward her, and he saw the instinctive jerk of her arm to meet his gesture. He held his hand patiently. At last he withdrew it with a sigh.

“Think it over,” he said quietly, “I don’t want you to make up your mind too quick.”

Still no answer.

Then, suddenly, so that he stared where he sat and narrowed his eyes to peer at her, she said: “Van Dyck, are you talking as man to man or as man to woman?”

The solemnity of it took his breath. The light answer tumbled to his lips and fell heavily back again. She was sitting very straight, and he could make out the glow of her eyes as they reflected the firelight.

“If it’s man to man, you’ll go with me, Jack?”

“Right! Tell me straight, Van Dyck,” she said.

The truth came up to his lips. It came and formed itself in words, surprising the speaker more than she who listened.

I
t’s man to woman, Jack.”

A pause came. Now that he had spoken, his mind swirled as he examined the appalling truth.

“I kind of thought so,” said the girl. “I’m sorry.”

He answered: “So’m I. Damned sorry, Jack.”

“I was hoping,” she said wearily, “that we
could
be pals.”

“So was I,” he said faintly.

She stood up. “I’m going to turn in.”

“I’ll sit here by the fire a while.”

“Better not. You’ll have a pile of riding to do tomorrow.”

“But I got a pile of thinking to do right now.”

“All right. Good night, Van Dyck.”

Her hand went out to him. He shook it gravely with a reverent touch, and afterward with a vacant eye watched her preparations for the night. They were quickly made, and almost at once she lay wrapped in her blanket with her boots under her head. He bowed his forehead against his hands and pondered the situation gloomily. He was trying to retrace the course of the rough banter that had led him, at last, to this strange exposé of his own emotion. Then vague conjecture filled his mind of what she would do, and of how she would act toward him in the morning. He was in the position, in a way, of one who has striven to take the fort by storm, and, being repulsed, he must content himself with laboriously laying siege to the place and
waiting for days and weeks and even months to tell. These thoughts in turn grew dim in his mind.

A pain in his back suddenly recalled him. He found that he had fallen asleep and must have sat in that cramped position for hours. Already the gray of the dawn was outlining the eastern hills. Every movement was a pain as he rose and stretched his limbs; the blood came tingling back, and he laughed at his own folly.

Then he turned to see if Jack was smiling silently at him. But she was gone. Perhaps she was foraging for wood with which to rekindle the fire. She was not there. He turned with a frown and swept the ravine up and down in search of her, but nowhere was there the glimmer of the white horse. Still scowling, he gathered an armful of dry wood and started the fire freshly. Perhaps she had gone for an early morning canter. Then, as the light flared, he glimpsed something white that stirred and fluttered under a rock.

It was a jagged corner of paper and, on it, scrawled almost illegibly as if it had been written by firelight, he read:

He read it over once. He read it twice. He read it again before the full meaning trickled like light into his brain—light through a keyhole. Then he swore softly, steadily as running water. Once more his gaze swung around the horizon, but he could not even guess. She might have gone toward any point of the compass.

Dix Van Dyck felt the most tremendous loneliness of
his life. It welled up in him like water—it brimmed him to the throat. Over such rocky ground it would be very hard to trail her. He stared up at the mountains as if they could speak to him.

One by one and range by range, they were swinging up out of the purples of night and on their highest summit already there was a stain of rose and a stain of yellow—indiscriminate splotches of color startlingly vivid, as if a giant with an invisible paint brush were smearing them at random. But they were all unknown, all strange faces that looked down at him. He knew at once that he could never trace her in this rock wilderness. The very fact filled him with a limitless desire to find her—a strange mixture of emotions. Not love, exactly, but something like it. It was rather the sense of loss that comes to the prospector when he makes a rich strike, goes away for provisions, and returns to find that he has lost the location of his treasure—a lost mine in the desert. Men have been known to waste their lives following some such intangible clue, and Dix Van Dyck had this possibility of waste in him. The blood of the prospector who will follow the hope of a brave tomorrow across the desert year after year, rejoicing in the search rather than in the finding, was in his blood.

What Jack meant to him was merely a definite goal toward which he might strive. The energy that he had dissipated in a thousand careless and reckless ways now centered toward one purpose. She was his vanished mine, his lost treasure. She was priceless because she was unknown, guessed at. Her beauty, her strangeness, the singular superstition that surrounded and accompanied her, all had a part in making him turn toward her.

He set himself methodically to discover a way in which he might capture her again. It was, in the first place, obvious that he could never outstrip that glorious
white stallion she rode. Even if he could, it was equally certain that he could never trace her through an unfamiliar country where the hand of the law might be lying in wait for him at any turn. One hold, it seemed, he possessed over her, however intangible it might be. She liked him. Perhaps she liked him for somewhat the same reasons that he liked her—because he was different, unknown to her either by type or example.

He had often stalked young antelope, lying prone in the grass within their sight and raising now and then a foot and leg to show over the top of the verdure. The antelope would stand, watching the strange appearance with bright, fascinated eyes, and then come a little closer to examine it. Always they kept on, with a curiosity greater than their caution, until at last they were within easy shooting distance.

He felt now, in the same way, that he had only to remain there quiet and at length the girl would circle back to the place. Yet this might mean a delay of days and days, and in the meantime the hounds of the law would be on his track. Moreover, the one thing in the world that he could least endure was inaction.

It was on this account that he chose the least promising way of reaching her. He skirted about among the rocks until he found the trail of her horse as she had ridden from the camp. Small, short steps they were at first, and the traces of the girl’s boots went alongside. Apparently she had led the horse for a short distance from the place where Dix slept by the fire, and she had held back the stallion so that his steps would fall lightly on the rock. In a little way the double track ceased. The four prints of a standing horse were plain where she had mounted. Then the steps of the horse grew wider apart and more distinct. She had gone on from there at a trot.

The direction was straight across the ravine, at right
angles to the course she had told him to pursue up the valley, across the mountains and then following the river to the north. Dix Van Dyck growled to himself. Certainly she had intended to leave him in the lurch. He fastened his eyes on the rocky side of the ravine and trotted his horse up the steep slope. The signs were not hard to follow. The iron shoes of the stallion, striking the rock, chopped off little fragments that blazed away as plain to the practiced eye of Dix Van Dyck as if the course had been marked in ink across white paper.

He came now, however, upon a harder strata of rock where a glass would be necessary to follow the imprints even of iron shoes. But at this point the trail wound sharply to the right, as if the rider had swerved from the hard rocks by preference and chosen a course along the gravel at the side. This swerving trail puzzled Dix Van Dyck deeply. It was most unusual for a rider of the desert to change a course because of so slight an obstacle, particularly when riding a shod horse.

However, he did not waste time in wonder. He was too interested in the fresh trail. By the way the sand had drifted in upon the tracks, blurring them under the drive of the brisk wind, she could not have passed that way more than three hours before. His heart looked up with hope.

In this manner he came to the crest of the ridge along the left side of the cañon—a sharp crest, dipping down on the farther side almost as abruptly as it rose from the first valley. Just past the summit the trail veered sharply to the left and stopped in a maze of signs. It was a great slab of reddish stone, of copper coloring, but even that hard surface had taken numerous imprints. In a hundred places the stone was marked, and, as he read the sign, the horse had several times turned around and around here, as if chafing under a restraint that held him for an appreciable interval. Examining the ground at the edges
of the rock, he caught the imprint of the girl’s boot. She had dismounted here, then. The track was very fresh—not more than an hour old, as far as he could judge, though even the most experienced, he knew, often go astray in such matters.

Why she should stop here when she was barely started on her way he could not by any means imagine. A brief halt might be explained in a hundred ways, but here she must have kept the nervous, restive stallion for a full hour, or even more. Such marks could not have been made in a much shorter period. Finally he saw on a gravelly ledge a place where she had sat down.

Most certainly her actions were strange. He was so perturbed in the effort to unravel the meaning that he swung from his horse and sat down on the identical ledge where she must have been only a short time before. Then light broke upon him.

From that position, looking between two low ridges of rock at his left, he found himself staring down past the tops of the cottonwoods and onto the exact site of his late camp. There was still a faint column of smoke wavering up from the fire that he had hastily extinguished with sand—a slender mark against the atmosphere no more distinct than the tracery of a chalk pencil over a slate. She had stopped her horse in the shelter of the ridge and sat there to look back on the camp. She had seen him waken and stir about. She had waited there until she saw him take the trail after her. Did it mean that she actually expected him to follow her? Was that the meaning of the plain trail she had left?

He started up with an exclamation and swung into the saddle. Plain as writing down the slope her trail continued. He galloped along it with a reckless speed.