Leave Her to Heaven (5 page)

The fishing camp lay at the junction of two canyons, and the spot was walled in by steep wooded slopes rising four or five hundred feet above the level greensward where the cabins were placed. The riders reached there in late afternoon, the horses picking their surefooted way down the last sharp slant of rocky trail; and already in the bottom of the canyon shadows lay, so that it was as though they went down into a clear pool of faintly tinted water. The brooks sang in the high silence; and when they paused to alight, Mrs. Berent groaned and declared she would never let herself be set upon a horse again. ‘I feel as though I'd been paddled with a hammer,' she cried, and demanded to be lifted from her horse, gasping with angry pain at every touch.

Harland and Robie next morning fished downstream two or three miles to where the main brook plunged into a narrower canyon, with cascades a dozen feet high and deep pools alive with trout. Robie said this lower gorge extended six or eight miles till the brook came to desert lands and lost itself. ‘It's hard walking,' he admitted. ‘But there's good fishing all the way. Sometimes
when we're going out to the ranch I fish down through, have a horse meet me at the lower end.'

‘I'd like to try that.'

‘Better wait till we leave,' Robie advised. ‘It's too long a tramp down and back in one day.' So this adventure was postponed.

Harland at first, though he was intensely aware of her, saw little of Ellen. She took a horse every morning and rode away alone, reappearing just in time to change for dinner. But on the fourth day, ranch business would engage Robie; and when Harland heard this, preferring not to fish alone, he asked:

‘What about a wild turkey?' On the twenty-mile ride in from the ranch, they had seen three flocks of hens and chicks. ‘Danny told me to be sure and shoot one for him.'

‘Go ahead,' Robie assented. ‘They're out of season, but we can spare one. Take a gun and ride around till you see a flock and then put your horse right at them. They hate to take wing, and they never try it unless they can get a level or a downhill run for a takeoff. If you can drive them uphill you can often get right among them. It's tricky shooting, but you'll have some fun out of it.'

Ellen — they were at breakfast — spoke from across the table. ‘I can help you get a fine gobbler, Mr. Harland, if you wish. I watched six of them, feeding on grasshoppers, yesterday; and they're sure to be back today.'

Robie said at once: ‘That's the idea! Ellen knows every turkey on the ranch by its first name, Harland. You go along with her.'

Harland, afraid his voice would betray the sudden quickening of his pulses, hesitated; and Ellen said: ‘We needn't start till after lunch. They only feed there in the afternoon.'

‘Why, fine,' Harland agreed, and he explained: ‘You see Danny, my brother, has had infantile, and he made me promise to bring back a full report of everything the ranch had to offer.' To conceal his eagerness he turned to Robie. ‘He spoke of wild horses, too; said Lin told him there were some here.'

Lin cried quickly: ‘You bet there are! You come along with me
tomorrow — I'm going with Dad today — and maybe we'll see them.'

Harland, to hide his excited anticipation, turned to his cabin and spent the forenoon writing a long letter to Danny. He began by describing the pretty girl who sat opposite him in the observation car and who read his book and went to sleep over it. He knew how amusing Danny would find that episode, and he made much of it; but when he came to speak of his arrival here, some impulse led him to avoid saying that that same girl was in the party, and that they were to hunt turkeys together this afternoon. He stayed in his cabin till Mrs. Robie called that lunch was ready. When they had eaten and their horses were at the door, Harland would have forgotten the need for a gun, but Ellen reminded him, and they went to the rack and she bade him take a pump gun and a handful of shells. He put the gun in the saddle boot, and they mounted and set out.

Ellen led the way, turning up the north canyon, taking almost at once a side trail that climbed steeply through the pines. Riding behind her, he watched the light sway of her shoulders and her pliant waist. When now and then on a level reach they trotted briefly, she did not rise but held her seat after the western fashion. Harland, more used to an English saddle with shortened stirrups, found it hard to relax; and he tried to imitate her yielding grace. They went in silence, pausing briefly now and then where on the lofty trails a break in the forest allowed them to look down some far canyon to the desert like the sea beyond.

They crossed two ridges and descended into a valley like a park, through which a trickling brook meandered; and since the canyon floor was wide and smoothly turfed they rode now side by side, and flower masses, fringed gentians by the thousands and many other blossoms, were a carpet everywhere. Harland silently chose words to paint the beauty of the scene, but Ellen showed no desire to talk and he did not speak till after half a mile she turned aside.

‘We'll leave the horses here,' she told him, and led the way into the forest that cloaked the canyon walls, and they tethered the
beasts where from the open they could not be seen, and went back afoot. ‘We must lie and wait for them,' she explained. ‘They feed down this canyon almost every afternoon.'

‘There's not much cover,' he commented. There was in fact, except for slight irregularities of the ground, none at all. The grass was cropped short, and the flowers were only inches tall, and no underbrush grew in the open anywhere.

‘We'll just lie still,' she said. ‘As long as we don't move, they won't notice us.'

She led the way to a single tree of some dwarf variety which Harland could not name, and which grew near the brookside and about equally distant from the forest on either hand. Its lowest branches were five or six feet above the ground, but at its base there was a slight saucer-shaped depression. Ellen lay at length, face down, in such a position that she could, even without raising her head, look up the canyon; and Harland hesitated, uncertain where to post himself, till she said: ‘Here, beside me. We'll be able to see them coming for almost half a mile.' She added: ‘I was here yesterday and they passed close by me, never noticing.'

Harland took the place she indicated, so near her that he could have touched her if he chose, could without moving have laid his arm across her shoulders. Since the lone tree gave scant shade
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, the baking sun was strong upon them, warming them through and through; the little saucer-shaped depression was as full of warm sweet-scented air as a cup is full of cream. For a while she did not speak, and this long silence seemed to enter into Harland like a fragrance in his nostrils; and he caught the scent of the sunned grass on which he lay. When his neck began to ache from long staring up the empty canyon, he looked down among the grass roots, watching the busy insect life there. A small green bug climbed one grass blade, crossed to another, and descended to the ground again. A grasshopper landed a yard from their faces and stared at them with tremendous eyes and then with a wooden clatter of wings leaped away. An ant threaded a circuitous path through the grass till it reached Harland's sleeve. It climbed on his wrist and then went along his arm to his elbow and down out
of sight; but her elbow was so near his that almost at once the ant reappeared on hers. She was lying with her chin on her crossed hands, looking up the canyon; and Harland followed the ant's progress up her arm and across her shoulder. Her shirt was open at the neck, and it embarked upon the smooth sea of her throat before she felt it and quickly brushed it off.

‘I was watching it,' Harland said lazily. ‘Wondering how far it would dare go. It went along my arm and across to yours.'

‘Father and I used to lie like this and watch the little things in the grass world,' she assented. ‘When we were waiting for birds, sometimes we lay for hours side by side; but it never seemed long to me.'

‘You and he had fine times together.' She nodded, and he asked: ‘Collecting specimens, birds and things?'

‘Not only that.' Her murmuring tones could not have been heard a dozen feet away. ‘From the time I was able to walk, we were both happiest when we were together, and out of doors. Sometimes in the winter we took skis and carried packs and slept in the snow; and sometimes we went fishing, for salmon, in Newfoundland, and in New Brunswick, and around the Gaspé.' Harland found it hard to believe that their paths, so often parallel, had never crossed. ‘Once we went to Georgia, went into the Okefenokee swamp, and found an ivory-billed woodpecker; and we talked there with a man who had seen passenger pigeons within five years — or thought he had. Father was never convinced of that. And — especially since he gave up teaching — we went to many places.'

‘You haven't fished here, since we came.'

‘No. When he and I were here we caught trout to eat; but catching salmon has taken the sport out of fishing for trout, for me.'

‘I've done some salmon fishing on the Codroy, and the Resti-gouche, and at Anticosti. Danny and I. We met Glen Robie and Lin at Anticosti.'

She turned her head, resting her cheek on her folded arms, looking at him steadily. ‘I told you once that you were like my
father,' she reminded him. ‘I mean you are like him when he was younger, when I was still a child. He too was fair, and lean, and gentle.' Harland felt his color heighten, and she asked: ‘How old are you?'

‘Thirty.'

‘I thought at first you were older. You look years younger since we reached here. I think you were tired when we came. You were tired on the train.'

He did not answer this, but after a moment, feeling close to her, wishing to draw closer, he said: ‘Robie told me about your father. He told me — why you have come here now.'

She turned her head, looking once more up the canyon. ‘We mustn't move,' she explained. ‘Their eyes are keen.' He thought her words were a rebuff, as though she meant to ignore what he had said; but then she told him frankly: ‘Mother isn't used to riding, but I hope she can sit a horse tomorrow. Then we'll take his ashes up to the high basin he loved.'

He did not speak. The sun lay on them strongly, but the air that drifted down the canyon was dry, so the heat was no discomfort. Silence drew them closer, and as if she felt this and sought the release of conversation, presently she asked: ‘Is your father alive?'

‘No, my father and mother are both dead. There's just Danny and me.' Without looking toward her he felt her head turn, felt her watching him again. ‘We've always been close, Danny and I,' he said. ‘Although he's much younger than I, only thirteen now. Since he had infantile, I've spent all my time with him, till this trip.' He added: ‘I even put my work aside.'

She asked curiously: ‘Your work and Danny — are they all your life?'

He smiled, understanding what she did not say. ‘I suppose you mean — why have I not married?'

‘Why have you not married?' she assented.

‘Well, I've been busy, working hard.' Then he added: ‘I noticed your ring.'

She looked at her hand where the diamond caught the sun.
‘His name is Quinton.' Her voice was empty of all expression. ‘He's a lawyer, lives in Maine.'

‘Russell Quinton?' Harland was surprised.

‘Yes. Do you know him?'

‘I met him once,' he told her. Quinton was almost fat, almost bald, almost middle-aged; and Harland wondered what common ground these two could have found. ‘We were both fishing the Upsalquitch. He came downstream, stopped to eat lunch, then went on.' Quinton had been in ill-humor that day, and Harland had not liked the man, had not liked what Leick afterward told him about Quinton.

‘He was a friend of my father's,' she said, ‘and father liked him, and Mr. Quinton wished we might be engaged. But I will never marry him.'

Harland felt his heart quicken, as a horse quickens at the faint warning touch of the spur. Conscious of her eyes upon him, be paid for a moment no attention to the movement far up the canyon. Something, probably some of Robie's cattle, had drifted out of the shadows of the trees into the sunned open there, but he hardly saw them. Her quiet words had carried an astonishing impact. She wore Quinton's ring — but she would never marry him! A turbulence possessed Harland, but then he realized that those cattle up the canyon were very dark, almost black; and as his eyes and his mind focussed upon them, he said in a low whisper: ‘I see turkeys!'

She did not move, still watching him. ‘How far away?' she asked.

‘Quarter of a mile at least. They're so big I thought they were cattle.'

From the corner of his eye he saw her head turn, very slowly, till she too could look that way. ‘Big gobblers,' she said then. ‘Six of them.' One of the tremendous birds made a running leap, its wings half opening; and she murmured: ‘Catching grasshoppers. They'll work down this way. Be very still. Completely still.'

Harland obeyed her, and they lay motionless, watching the
slowly approaching birds. Now and then she whispered some word almost soundlessly; and he answered, hardly moving his lips, feeling his pulse pound, at once completely conscious of her beside him and yet trembling with the keen tension of this waiting. The turkeys seemed gigantic. Lying prone, looking up the canyon toward them as they approached, Harland's vision was to some degree distorted, so that the birds appeared to be larger than they were, and very near; but when at last he slid his gun a little forward, she whispered warningly:

‘No, wait! Let them come as close as they will.' And she added: ‘I'll tell you when to shoot.' And a little later she said: ‘Watch the one that's second from the right, now. Take him when you shoot. He's magnificent! Can you see his beard? Keep your eye on him.'