Chapter XIV
At this, the most critical moment of her life, it would appear inevitable that Gloria must bend every mental faculty to grappling with the vital issues. And yet, as she sat swallowed up in the big chair, for a space of time she was in a spell, caught up and whirled away from those about her; she forgot Gratton with the white, angry face; she had no eyes for Mark King or for Summerling, Steve Jarrold or Jim Spalding. She was thinking of another day, two years ago, when she and her mother had been alone in this room. They had been busied with the last touches of furniture arrangement; they had discussed locations for chairs and had argued over pictures. Both tired out with a day of effort, they had come near tears in a verbal battle over the best place for the sole article remaining unplaced. Gloria wanted it in the hallway; Mrs. Gaynor pleaded for it over the mantel in the living-room. Finally it was Gloria who cried with sudden laughter:
“Oh, what difference does it make? We’re getting silly over trifles. Have it your way, mamma.”
Trifles! Gloria wondered if any other act of her life had had the tremendous import of that sudden yielding to her mother’s wishes. If the mirror had been placed anywhere else in the universe, even by a few inches removed from its present abiding-place, would there be a Gloria Gaynor in all the world right now? Or would her chair hold quite another sort of person—Mrs. Gratton? If she had not lifted her desperate eyes and seen Mark King reflected at the window, how would she have answered that one final question the “judge” propounded? Would she have said “Yes”? Or would it have been “No”? She did not know; she would never know. She had been on the verge, dizzy with profitless speculation. And now, only the extent of one little word stood between her and an unthinkable condition. That a whole life should be steered down one channel or another—oh, what immeasurably separated channels!—by one’s breath in a single-syllabled word——
“You don’t answer!” a voice was saying irritably.
She started. They were talking to her, they had been talking to her, and now she realized that she had heard voices across a great distance, and by no means as clear to her consciousness as the remembered voice of her mother two years ago arguing for a mirror over the fireplace. She turned her eyes on Gratton, since obviously it was he who insisted on an answer. But King spoke for her.
“Look here, Gratton,” he said bluntly, “as far as I can see there is no reason why Miss Gaynor should pay the least attention to your effervescings if she doesn’t care to. She is a free agent and under no obligations to you.”
“I’ll ask your opinion when I want it,” snapped Gratton. “Miss Gloria——”
“You asked me something?” said Gloria. “Pardon me. I didn’t hear.”
Her aloof reply disconcerted him. Her attitude was spontaneous, unaffected, and hence unconsciously one of polite indifference. Suddenly Gratton, fume as he would, had become of not the least importance.
“You said that you would marry me. Not a dozen minutes ago.”
“Did I?” she demanded coolly. “Are you quite sure I said that?”
“Look here, Miss Gloria.” It was Jim Spalding, who had been ill at ease all along and now had the brains and perhaps the delicacy to understand that this was no place for him. “If you don’t need me after all, I’ll go.”
“And the rest of us with you,” said King. “If Miss Gaynor cares to talk things over with Gratton——”
Gloria put out her hand impulsively, touching King’s arm.
“You stay. Please. Until—he goes.”
King inclined his head gravely, not realizing that his body stiffened under her light touch.
“What about me?” demanded the “judge” sharply. “Am I needed or ain’t I?”
“I’d say not this evening,” King’s dry voice answered him. “Good-night to you.”
“That’s a fine way to treat a man,” cried Summerling truculently. “Here I ride all this way in the dark, and without stoppin’ for so much as supper; here I ain’t had a bite to eat since dinner-time, and it’s good-night and get out! And that hundred dollars I was to get so fast, how about that? Think I’m the man to let folks trample on me and——”
“Maybe Jim will give you a hand-out at his cabin,” King told him. “As for your money, get it out of Gratton if he promised it to you—or,” he added with a flash of heat, “take it out of his hide, for all I care.”
“Wait for me outside, Summerling,” muttered Gratton. “I haven’t said you won’t be needed, have I?”
“Just the same, I wouldn’t mind takin’ what’s comin’ to me now——”
“Man alive!” shouted Gratton, whirling on him. “Haven’t I got enough on my hands without you yelping at me?”
“Just the same——”
“Jim,” called King above the incoherent mouthings, “slip your arm through Summerling’s and lead him off with you. Feed him if you feel like it, and let him stick around for a word with Gratton if he wants. And you, Steve Jarrold, Ben Gaynor isn’t here, but just the same you can take it from me that neither you nor any other of Swen Brodie’s hangdogs is wanted in Ben Gaynor’s house. Out you go.”
Jarrold’s eyes slanted off to Gratton. Then, seeing himself ignored and forgotten, he shrugged his shoulders, pulled on his hat, and went out. Behind him, arm in arm, one smiling widely and the other pulling back and still sputtering, went Jim and the “judge.”
To all this Gloria had given scant attention. The spell no longer lay over her; she was keenly awake to the demands of the present; she was thinking, thinking, thinking! It seemed that she had walked on quicksands; that a hand had drawn her up and placed her where she was now, with solid ground underfoot; but that still all about her were quicksands. What temporary sense of security was hers was due to Mark King, to his presence. As long as he stood there, where she could put out a hand and touch him, she could rest calmly, assured of safety. But when he went, there remained Gratton and his venom. Quicksands all about her in which she would be floundering at this moment but for Mark King——
Her heart was beating normally again, the pallor left her face, which became delicately flushed. Her eyes, large and humid, a sweet grey and once more almost childlike—eyes to remind a man that here, after all, was no woman of the world, but only a young girl—rose to King’s and met his long and searchingly. Yet there was that in their expression that made him understand that she was not looking at him, the physical man, so much as through him. For the first time in her pampered life the day had come when she was face to face with vital issues; when there was no mamma and no papa to turn to; when there were no shoulders other than her own to feel the weight of events. She must do her own thinking, come to her own decisions. Here was no time for a misstep. The one great step she had already taken; she had cried “No!” That step could be reconsidered, retraced; she looked at Gratton’s face and saw that. But now she would not do that; she could not. In the city, seeing the two men together, she had turned to Gratton. Now, here in her father’s log house in the mountains, she wondered that she could have done so. Did men change colour like chameleons, shifted from one environment to another? Or was it she who had been unstable, she who was the chameleon? A queer sensation which had been hers before, and which she was to know more than once in days to follow, mastered her. It seemed that within her, coexistent and for ever in conflict, there were two Glorias: a girl who was very young, spoiled, vain, and selfish; a girl who was older, who looked above and beyond the confines of her own self, who was warmhearted and impulsive, and could be generous. There was the Gloria who was the product of her mother’s teaching and pampering; there was that other Gloria who was the true daughter of a pioneer stock, a girl linked to the city through tradition, bound to the outdoors through instinct. There was the Gloria who was ashamed of Mark King at a formal gathering in her own home; there was the Gloria who was thrilled to the depths of her being as in the forest-lands she knew a breathless moment in the arms of Mark King.
Well, here were considerations to linger over on an idle day. Now, without seeking for hidden springs, there were on the surface certain plain facts. No matter what she had felt toward Gratton before, she detested him now; no matter what he might have appeared in San Francisco, here in his unaccustomed garb he looked to her puny, shallow, and contemptible. He was, as she had told him, a beast. He had betrayed her confidence; he had taken advantage of her headlong youth; he had displayed to her view the vileness within him. He loved her, did he? So much the better. It lay within her power, then, to repay him, if only in part, for what he had made her suffer.
“I repeat, Miss Gloria,” Gratton was saying, a stubborn look in his eyes, “that you promised to marry me. You have had a hard day, I realize; there has been much to unnerve you. I erred in haste, perhaps; I should have waited until you had a night’s rest. But you know why I did not wait. It was for your sake.”
Gloria heard him through with a hard little smile.
“Nothing is further from my intention, Mr. Gratton,” she told him icily, “than to marry you. Now or ever. Please let us consider the matter closed once and for all.”
His fingers worked nervously at his sides. Gloria chose the moment to lift her eyes again fleetingly to King’s. She wanted Gratton to see, she wanted to hurt him all that she could. She looked back to see him wince. Nor did his quick contraction of the brows result from her glance alone; he had seen the look lying unhidden in King’s eyes. Mark King had to-night, for the first time, swept barriers aside and looked straight into his own heart and known that all of the love that was in him to give had been given to Gloria Gaynor; he had come from Jim’s cabin to look on her for the last time; he was giving her up. And then, when he had turned away rather than hear her murmur “Yes,” she had cried out ringingly: “No!” The sod had not fallen upon a beloved face; death had not entered the door; life was not extinguished—where there was life invariably there was hope—he had given Gloria up, yes; but she had come back from beyond the frontier, she had come calling to him. He was certain of nothing just now beyond the tremendous, all-excluding fact that, wise or fool, he loved her. He wanted her with a want that is greater than hunger or thirst, or love of man for man or of man for life itself. Much of this lay shining in his eyes for Gratton to read—or for Gloria.
“I am no boy to be thrown aside like an old glove,” cried Gratton, beside himself, shaken with jealous fury. “You have promised; you have loved me; in your heart you love me now. Shall I stand back for a girl’s nervous whim? I tell you, you shall marry me.”
Gloria’s laughter, cool and insolent, maddened him. He clenched his hands and was swept away by his passion to gusty vehemence:
“Think before you laugh! What if, instead of doing the gentlemanly thing, I refused to marry you? Alone with me all this time; all last night; a clerk to swear I bought clothing for you; a register to show where we engaged a room as man and wife; the San Francisco papers already bandying your name about, already nosing after scandal. You’ve got to marry me; there is nothing else for you to do!”
Gloria flushed hotly. But only in anger this time. King mystified, looking from one to the other, turned at last to Gloria and muttered:
“For God’s sake let me throw him out of the door!”
“I think it might be best first,” she answered quietly, “if Mr. Gratton remained long enough to understand that this is the last time I shall ever speak to him or listen to a word from him. He has tried to get me into a nasty situation; he will do all that he can to promote scandal. But I want him to know that he will, in the end of it all, have my father to reckon with—and my friends.” Again she looked swiftly at King and again Gratton writhed at the look. “Papa will not be here to-night; he is hurt and in Coloma, and I’ll give you his message soon. But——”
“You saw your father! In Coloma!” It was a gasp of astonishment from Gratton. “You said nothing. You brought a message to King here?”
“And you escorted me and never guessed!” Gloria taunted him. “Really it seems too bad, after all of your week-end trips to Coloma, after all of your conferences with the estimable Mr. Swen Brodie!”
His prominent eyes bulged, written large with consternation. For a moment he stood the picture of uncertainty, plucking at his lip.
“Gloria,” he said shortly, “despite all you have said I shall see you again. To-morrow, when we have both rested, I’ll come to you. Now, if you will pardon me, I’ll have a word with King. Strictly business, you may be sure, King,” he concluded sarcastically.
“There’s to be no business between you and me,” King told him promptly.
“But there is. If you’ve got two grains of common sense. Look you, Loony Honeycutt is dead at last. His secret is no longer his secret. Swen Brodie knows something—a whole lot——”
“It strikes me,” frowned King, “that you know more of this than I gave you credit for. Where do you come in?”
“I know—nearly all that it is necessary to know!” His eyes flashed triumphantly. “Think I’m the man to let the crowd of you lift a fortune right under my nose? Here is my proposition, and you’ll thank your stars that I make it: We are not friends, you and I, but that is no reason that we cannot be business associates until this trick is turned. You and I enter into a pact right now, purely business, you understand.” He was speaking more and more rapidly in the grip of a new emotion. “Whatever we find we divide, fifty-fifty;——”
King’s sudden laughter, no pleasant sound in Gratton’s ears, checked the rush of words. To accept Gratton as a partner—on a fifty-fifty split of the spoils! Was the man crazy?
“I have been working with Brodie,” shouted Gratton. “If I go on with him now, with him and the men with him, six or eight of them taking what he gives them either in money or in curses and orders—if, I say, I chip in with him against you, what will the inevitable end be, I ask you? Look at the odds——”
“The inevitable end,” said King sternly, “will be that they’ll pick your bones and kick you out.”
“I demand to know what word Gaynor sent——”
“Will you have him go, Mark?” said Gloria. “He—sickens me.”
King, unleashed by her words, took a quick step forward.
“Gratton,” he said, “you’d better go.”
Gratton, rising to fresh fury, shouted at him:
“And leave you and her here? Alone? All night——”
King bore down upon him and struck him across the mouth, hurling him back so that Gratton tripped and fell. Gloria rose and stood watching, terrified and yet fascinated. She saw Gratton crawl to his feet; his hand went out to the table to draw himself up; it found one of the heavy bronze book-ends; the fingers gripped it so that the tendons stood out like cords. She could see the faces of both men, Gratton’s twitching and vindictive, King’s immobile, looking at once calm and terribly stern. If there were two Glorias within her, one of them fled now; the other watched with quick bright eyes and gloried in the man who had come at her hour of direst need; one vanished, afraid, the other felt a little thrill go singing through her blood. And though that bronze block, were it hurled at King’s head, might have been the death of him, she was not once in doubt as to the end of this conflict. There before her eyes a man contended with a manikin.
“Drop that, Gratton! Do you hear me? Drop it, I say!”
He even drew closer while he spoke. In his voice was assurance that he would be obeyed; in his look was the promise of death or near-death, to be meted out swiftly and relentlessly for disobedience. Gratton, like a man in a daze, hesitated. King’s hand shot out swiftly, gripping his wrist. There was a sudden jerk and the bit of bronze crashed to the floor.
“You’ll go now!”
“Yes, I’ll go. But——”
“On your way, then!”
“But——”
“Shut up!” A tremor not to be repressed shook King’s voice. “And go before I——Just go!”
Gratton caught up his hat, stood for a moment plucking at his lip and staring at Gloria, and then turned and went out. Strangely, only now that he had gone, did Gloria shiver and look after him fearfully. The man here had seemed so futile and yet she had seen that last look, so filled with malevolence that in his wake the room seemed steeped in menace. King must have had somewhat the same sort of an impression; he went to the door and called out loudly:
“Jim! Oh, Jim.”
Jim’s voice answered from the cabin:
“Comin’, Mark.”
“Gratton’s outside. I’ve told him to clear out. Give him about two minutes, and if he’s still here throw a gun on him and run him off the place.”
“Oh, I’m going fast enough.” From somewhere off in the dark it was Gratton’s voice calling back hatefully. “And don’t you forget it, Mark King, I am going where an offer like mine to you will be accepted. We’ll be there before you yet, a dozen men that won’t lay down before you! And you can tell that girl in there, with my compliments, she’ll be on her knees to me before she’s a day older.” He lifted his voice so that Gloria, shivering in the silent house, must hear every word. “You can tell her, too, that if I didn’t telephone to her mother from Oakland, I did call up two of the San Francisco newspaper offices! Tell her to watch for the papers. And when they get wind of the nice little situation to-night, Gloria here all night——”
King had held the door open only to see if Gratton was going to his horse. Now, however, he slammed it suddenly and went back to Gloria. After all, Jim could be depended on to see to Gratton and to do his job thoroughly and with joy in the doing. There was still the message to be had from Ben Gaynor, who, it seemed, lay hurt somewhere in Coloma.
But he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Gloria, and for the moment all thoughts of Gaynor or a message fled from his mind. Again she was as pale as death; she caught at the back of the chair which had served her thus before; she lifted to King eyes sick with terror.
“I haven’t got the straight of things very well,” King said to her, speaking very gently. For in his heart he was thinking: “Poor little kid! She’s only a kid of a girl and she’s pretty near the breaking-point, from the look of things, and small wonder.” But aloud he continued: “Only one thing seems clear. You are tired half to death and worried the other half. I wouldn’t let myself think of that snake Gratton or his poison drippings. Things will work out all right.” He managed a smile of a sort, the first smile to-night, and added: “They always do, you know.”
“Do they?” she asked listlessly. And she, too, forced a smile, so wan and bleak that it came close to putting a dash of tears into King’s eyes.
“For one thing,” he said brusquely, “I’ll bet you haven’t had a bite to eat since you got here; have you?” She shook her head; she hadn’t thought of such a thing as eating. When had she eaten last? Not since she and Gratton, motoring up from San Francisco, had stopped at the wayside lunch-counter? Perhaps that was why this giddy faintness troubled her, why the blood drummed in her ears.
“You’ll sit right down,” commanded King. “Or lie down is better. In two shakes I’ll have something ready for you.”
“You are so good to me.” That came straight from Gloria’s heart; her eyes shone with a gratitude which struck him as far beyond proportion to the small deed of the moment. “I’ll go upstairs a moment; papa’s message——”
“It can wait ten minutes.”
“Let me get it now. I—I will lie down in my room until you call me, if you want me to.”
“That’s good.” He watched her go slowly upstairs and then hastened to the kitchen. He got a wood fire going in the range, scouted for coffee, found a glass jar of bacon, a tin of milk, all kinds of canned goods. And meantime, though occupied with much speculation concerning all that had happened to-night and must have happened before and might happen in the future, he never for an instant entirely forgot Gloria and how pitifully borne down she looked. Gratton had tricked her some way, had coerced her, had come close to breaking her utterly. And yet her indomitable spirit had in the end triumphed over Gratton’s scheming; King would never forget how her voice had rung out in that fearless “No! No and no and no!”
“Just a little kid of a girl.” And he had looked to her for the sanity of mature age. A mere girl, sheltered always by father and mother, spoiled to the nth degree, given no opportunity to develop her own character, to grow up to life’s responsibilities. Her mother had not even told her of her grandparents, being ashamed of them, making Gloria ashamed. Grandparents of whom any one might be justly proud; folk of integrity, of stamina, of fearless hardihood, men and women of that glorious type that builds empires. And Gloria, King sensed, was like them. Deep within her, under the layers of artificiality which her mother had striven so indefatigably and lovingly to lay on, she was like them. He remembered his two days with her alone in the mountains and sought to forget the fragment of one evening in the city. “Here she was her real self; there she had been what her mother had made her over.”
Gloria, with lagging steps, had gone to her room. Now she lay on her bed, her hands pressed tight upon her closed eyes, her will set against heeding the throbbing in her temples as she strove to think clearly. Gratton’s words rang in her ears. They plunged her into panic. For scores of “friends” and hundreds of acquaintances she would furnish a topic of talk. Girls who were jealous of her would get into a warm flurry of excitement; Gloria could picture a dozen of them sitting at their telephones, calling up this, that, and the other Mabel and Ernestine, saying: “Oh, did you hear about Gloria Gaynor? Isn’t it terrible! What could she have been thinking of? I knew she was——” and so forth and so on, “ringing interminable changes.” Youth, though declared by the thoughtless to be a period of heedlessness, takes to heart far more seriously than does Age all happenings which touch its own interests. Pure tragedy is Youth’s own realm. It feels acutely, its imaginings are fearful, it magnifies and distorts beyond all reason. Had Gloria been above thirty instead of under twenty this moment would have been far, far less deeply immersed in the gloom of despair. She suffered dry-eyed.
But Youth, condition of wedded extremes, while it holds tragedy to its bleeding heart, cannot entirely fail in time to listen to the voice of hope. Gloria clung passionately to the one straw offered her: Mark King had come; he had saved her, if only for the moment. If there were further salvation, it lay in Mark King. And so she came presently to a thought that made her sit bolt upright, that set her heart racing, that brought a new look into her eyes. Just now it had seemed so clear that only one thing could save her from clacking diatribes, from torture under the tongues of Ernestines and Mabels and daily newspapers— marriage with Gratton. But Gratton was gone and Mark King was here! If she married King! The “judge” was still here. King was her father’s friend; between men like them there was nothing which would be denied when friendship asked. What if she went to King, saying to him straightforwardly: “Thus and such is my predicament. For my sake—for the sake of papa’s daughter and hence for papa’s sake no less—will you go through the form of marrying me? I shall be no burden; it will make no difference in your life. For to-morrow I will go back to San Francisco and you need never see me again. You can let me have a divorce; you will have lost nothing; I shall have been saved everything. Will you many me, Mark King?”
“Gloria!” King was calling. “Will you come down now? Everything’s ready.”
“Coming,” answered Gloria. “Right away.”
She glanced in her glass as she went out; the colour which had played hide-and-seek all day was again tinting her cheeks a delicate rose. What were fatigue and hunger when hope attended them?
But it happened that Gloria’s impulse, which was at least honest and frank, was for a little held in abeyance, and thus it came about that she lost the opportunity to appear before Mark King at a critical moment as being straight-dealing, direct, and outspoken. She thanked him with her eyes for the lunch he had set forth for her; she gave him a quick little smile as he waited on her. He poured the coffee, gave her milk and sugar, brought the hot things from the stove. And all of the time there was in his eyes a look which he had no suspicion was there, the look of a man’s adoration.
“He will do whatever I ask him to do,” something sang within her.
“Won’t you sit down with me, Mark?” she smiled at him.
And there, while one Gloria had determined to indulge in plain talk, the other Gloria came forward obliquely, demanding the place which had always been hers when it was a case of man and girl together. The smile was the smile of a coquette; it intoxicated; it made a man’s heart beat hard; it brought him in close to her and thrust the world back. She could not have helped the smile or its message.
“I have eaten,” he said a trifle harshly, she thought.
“You are so good to me.” She stirred her coffee and he saw only the lashes and their black shadows on her cheeks. Then she said brightly: “This is our third little picnic together, isn’t it?”
“Then you haven’t forgotten? The others?” The words said themselves for him. The human comedy had begun, or the comedy begun long ago was resumed smoothly in its third act, King unconsciously answering to his cue. After that it was neither Gloria nor himself who played the part of stage-director; that time-honoured responsibility was back in the hands of the oldest of all stage-managers. The wind that drives autumn leaves scurrying, the sun that awakens spring buds were no more resistless or inevitable forces than the one now voicing its dictates.
“It would be—unmaidenly to ask him to marry you,” whispered that other self within her. Oh, if she could only guess which was the real self, which the pretender! “And there is no need. Look at his eyes!”
King saw lying on the table the package done up in an old cloth which she had brought. Further, he knew that he had seen it before and where he had seen it. He knew that at last he had old Loony Honeycutt’s secret where he could put out his hand to it, with none to gainsay him. He knew that with it was a message from his old friend Ben; that Ben, himself, lay at this moment in Coloma hurt. And yet his eyes clung to the eyes of Gloria and all of these things were swept aside in his mind. He saw that when her eyes came to a meeting with his the flush in her cheeks grew hotter. He tried to remember how he had come away from her in San Francisco; how he had given her up for all time. But that memory blurred; in its place he stood with her on a boulder in a creek, holding her in his arms; he stood with her on a mountain top, with the world lost below them. He sought to get a grip on himself; here and now was no time to talk to her of love. She was alone; it was his one job right now to take Ben’s place, to protect her and efface his own madness. But was he mad? And was now no time, after all? She was alone, yes; but if some day she would marry him, was not now the time? What would he not give for the right to stop the nasty mouth of Gratton once and for all.
Fragmentary thoughts, by no means logically aligned. They came and went with other thoughts between, pro and con. But thoughts do not always sway destiny. In the crisis often enough there is no time for so slow a process as thinking; instinct leaps. Instinct compels. All of the thought in the world will not draw a steel needle to a bit of wood; all of the thought in the world will not hold back the same needle from a magnet. There are urges which must be obeyed, the urge of spinning worlds to circling suns, the urge of man to maid.
“Gloria!” he said huskily. “Gloria!”
“Yes, Mark?” she said quietly, trying to speak very calmly and as though she did not know, oh, so well, all that tumult that lay behind his calling her name. But despite her determination she was agitated; the moment had come; there was no stopping it. And did she want it? What did she want? What, exactly, did she feel?
She knew what was in his heart! His soul exulted as the certainty rushed upon him. She knew what he was going to say; words were needless between them. And the colour merely deepened in her cheeks while she hid her eyes from him.
He came to her swiftly. She rose as swiftly to her feet. He saw that a tremor shook her. He saw that she did not draw back from him; her eyes at last lifted to meet his own. They baffled him; he could not read their meaning. But they shone on him softly; they were the eyes of her whom he loved. Like magnet and steel they were swept together. He had her in his arms; he felt against his breast the wild flutter of her heart, against his face the soft brushing of her hair. He felt her body tense but unresisting in his arms; suddenly she relaxed, her head was against his breast. Gloria in his arms—Gloria’s sweet face hidden from him against his rough shirt——
“Gloria!” he cried again. “Gloria!”
“The—the bacon!” gasped Gloria. “It’s burning——”
She freed herself, and while he let her go he stood watching her with the new look in his eyes. Scarlet-faced she flashed her look at him from across the table. Then she fled to the stove and retrieved the burning bacon as though here were the one matter of transcendent importance. King began to laugh, his laughter as joyous as a boy’s.
“Gloria——”
“That’s five times you’ve said ‘Gloria,’” she informed him hurriedly. “And——Please, Mark,” as he moved toward her. “And you haven’t read papa’s letter yet. And—and I’m dying to know what is in that funny package. Aren’t you?”
“If I’m dying at all,” he told her gravely, though he found a smile to answer her own—and two very serious smiles they were—“it is of quite another complaint. And this time——”
“But please, Mark! I am here all alone—with you—and——”
“I know. I haven’t forgotten. But, Gloria——”
They both started to a sudden sound outside, a scuffling on the porch. Involuntarily Gloria, prone to nervous alarm in her overwrought condition, moved hastily back toward him from whom just now she had escaped. They glanced toward the sound; they saw at the window the puckered and perplexed face of the “judge”; they were just in time to see a big hand grasp him by the shoulder and yank him out of sight. They heard Summerling expostulate; they heard Jim Spalding’s far from gentle voice cursing him.
King understood, at least in part, what must lie under Gloria’s look of distress. Surely circumstance had placed her in an equivocal position to-night. Summerling was the type to blab; he was in no charitable frame of mind; he had found her alone here with men, had come to marry her to one man, and now had seen her in the arms of another. There was but one answer, even to Mark King.
“Some time you are going to marry me, Gloria,” he said gravely. “Why not now?”
“It sounds like—like an advertisement, Mark,” she laughed somewhat wildly.
“Poor little kid,” he muttered, seeing how she trembled. “But, Gloria, why not? Some time you are going to give yourself to me, aren’t you, dear? While this man is still here, won’t you let him marry us? It will give me the right to shut that fool Gratton’s mouth for him and——Oh, Gloria, my dear, my dear——”
She stood staring at him with wide eyes. He pleaded with her.
“Will you, Gloria?”
And then from lips which did not smile he heard the very faint but no longer evasive “Yes.”
“Now, Gloria?”
“Yes, Mark. If you are sure that you want me.” She spoke humbly; at the instant she was humble. “But,” she added hastily, “still you haven’t read poor papa’s letter. He was very anxious. Let me go a minute, Mark. I am going upstairs. I—I want to phone to mamma first. And while I am gone you can read papa’s letter, and—and——” Her face was hot with blushes.
“And arrange with the judge,” he said, his own voice uncertain. “Yes, Gloria.”
She ran by him then. He heard her going upstairs, he heard a door closing after her. Then like a man who treads on air he went to the window and threw it up and called:
“Jim! Tell the judge not to go. I have business with him. I want him and you here in ten minutes.”
And then when Jim’s voice had answered him he thought to take up the parcel on the table—largely because Gloria had asked him! A hurried letter from Ben and the parcel from Honeycutt’s. Something here for which he had been seeking, working, for years, remembered now only because Gloria had made the request that they be not forgotten.
To withdraw his racing thoughts from Gloria and her golden promise, to bend them to a letter—this was in the beginning an effort. But Ben’s words caught him when he had read the first line. He had opened the packet, ripping off the old encasement of cloth. There was a book, a Bible that looked to be centuries old, battered, the covers gone; Gaynor’s letter was slipped into it:
“Dear Mark
“Honeycutt’s dead. I’ve got his secret. But Brodie came near doing me in. Honeycutt, dying, sent for me. I got there just in time. He gave me the Bible; it was the “parson’s” and then Gus Ingle’s. As I was going out of the cabin Brodie and two of his gang swooped down on me. In the dark I pitched the Bible clear and they did not see; it was just that near! They came close to killing me; when I came to I found they’d been through my pockets. I don’t know how much Brodie knows. I do know he is working with Gratton, the dirty crook. I think you can beat them to it, hands down. And, for God’s sake, Mark, and for my sake if not for your own, don’t let the grass grow! I am on the edge of absolute bankruptcy; laid up this way I don’t see a chance unless you find what we’ve been after so long and find it quick. Will you start without any delay? As soon as you get this phone to Charlie Marsh at Coloma. Leave word for me. And let that word be that nothing on earth will stop you! Then I won’t go crazy here with worry. And watch out for Gratton as well as Brodie.
“BEN.”
A bit of the old interest swept back over King as he read; the old excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben’s note into the stove and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful labourings, was the “secret” at last—Gus Ingle’s message come to him across the dead years:
“Good god I never see such gold nor no man neither and when he come in to camp you could reed in his look he had found it because no man could have looked at that Mother load and not look like Jimmy. And big Brodie grabbed him by the throat and shook him and nearly killed him until Jimmy told. And I guess there was enough there for everybody in all the world. We went down the gorge to the narrow place over on the big seedar that had broke off and that was how we come to the First Caive, and then we come to Caive number thre and two. And good god have mercy on my soul when Ime dead but I got the thought right then if it was only all mine—we worked all seven until we dropped that day and night and early in the morning and the storm was coming but we stayed. And for two weeks maybe thre we lost track of time until this grate big pile of gold was dug that I am setting right on top of right now how can a man eat gold when he is dying of hunger and burn it when he is freezing. And it was big Brodie killed pore Manny I seen him and the next day or maybe it was two days Dago was gone and never come back was it Manny’s goast got him and drug him down the cliffs screaming horrible and in the gorge—anyway that was Two. and I am all that is left and I am going—I tride to get out and the Big storm drov me back and all I can see is Jimmy Kelp and the parson if I had not of killed them they would killed me sure and big Brodie’s gone he is crazy and cant never make it back across the mountains in this storm, and Baldy Winch he took a big nugget and went off, and he stoled what handful of grub there was. And now I can look down in the gorge and see the water all white and snow and ice sickles and I am afraide to get lost in the caives and if I write all this in the bible that was preacher Elsons and tie it up safe in oilcloath and canvas and make a bote out of a chunk of wood and throw it in the river maybe it will get to one of the camps down there and a good man will find it and Ile give him half. You come up the old trail past where the thre Eytalians had their camp last year and over the big mountain strate ahead and about another seven miles strate on and then there is the pass with the big black rocks on one side and streaks of white granite on the other and down into the gorge and strate up four or five miles where the old seedar broke off and fell acrost. My god here goes.
“GUS INGLE.”
To any man who knew the Sierra hereabouts less intimately than did Mark King, Gus Ingle’s message would have brought only stupefaction. But to King now, as to Ben Gaynor before him, the “secret” lay bare. Old names held on; the three Italians had given a name to what was now known as Italy Gulch. The caves were on a certain fork of the American River then, and King had approximately the distances and direction.
“What is more,” he thought triumphantly, “I know where two caves are in there. But where the devil is ‘Caive thre’?”
Here he started up and thrust the old Bible into his shirt. There were steps on the porch. Jim and the “judge” were coming——