The Flaming Jewel - Robert W. Chambers (popular romance novels .txt) 📗

tears on her partly hidden face, her nervous hands tremulous, restless, now seeking his, convulsively, now striving to escape his clasp--eloquent, uncertain little hands that seemed to tell so much and yet were telling him nothing he could understand.

"Eve, dear," he said, "are you in pain? What is it that has happened to you? I thought you were all right. You seemed all right----"

"I am," she said in a smothered voice. "You'll stay here with me, won't you?"

"Of course I will. It's just the reaction. It's all over. You're relaxing. That's all, dear. You're safe. Nothing can harm you now----"

"Please don't leave me."

After a moment: "I won't leave you.... I wish I might never leave you."

In the tense silence that followed her trembling ceased. Then his heart, heavy, irregular, began beating so that the startled pulses in her body awoke, wildly responsive.

Deep emotions, new, unfamiliar, were stirring, awaking, confusing them both. In a sudden instinct to escape, she turned and partly rose on one elbow, gazing blindly about her out of tear-marred eyes.

"I want my room to myself," she murmured in a breathless sort of way, "--I want you to go out, please----"

A boyish flush burnt his face. He got up slowly, took his rifle from the corner, went out, closing the door, and seated himself on the stairs.

And there, on guard, sat Trooper Stormont, rigid, unstirring, hour after hour, facing the first great passion of his life, and stunned by the impact of its swift and unexpected blow.

* * * * *


In her chamber, on the bed's edge, sat Eve Strayer, her deep eyes fixed on space. Vague emotions, exquisitely recurrent, new born, possessed her. The whole world, too, all around her seemed to have become misty and golden and all pulsating with a faint, still rhythm that indefinably thrilled her pulses to response.

Passion, full-armed, springs flaming from the heart of man. Woman is slow to burn. And it was the delicate phantom of passion that Eve gazed upon, there in her unpainted chamber, her sun-tanned fingers linked listlessly in her lap, her little feet like bruised white flowers drooping above the floor.

Hour after hour she sat there dreaming, staring at the tinted ghost of Eros, rose-hued, near-smiling, unreal, impalpable as the dusty sunbeam that slanted from her window, gilding the boarded floor.

* * * * *


Three spectres, gliding near, paused to gaze at State Trooper Stormont, on guard by the stairs. Then they looked at the closed door of Eve's chamber.

Then the three spectres, Fate, Chance and Destiny, whispering together, passed on toward the depths of the sunset forest.


EPISODE FIVE

DROWNED VALLEY

I

The soft, bluish forest shadows had lengthened, and the barred sun-rays, filtering through, were tinged with a rosy hue before Jake Kloon, the hootch runner, and Earl Leverett, trap thief, came to Drowned Valley.

They were still a mile distant from the most southern edge of that vast desolation, but already tamaracks appeared in the beauty of their burnt gold; little pools glimmered here and there; patches of amber sphagnum and crimson pitcher-plants became frequent; and once or twice Kloon's big boots broke through the crust of fallen leaves, soaking him to the ankles with black silt.

Leverett, always a coward, had pursued his devious and larcenous way through the world, always in deadly fear of sink holes.

His movements and paths were those of a weasel, preferring always solid ground; but he lacked the courage of that sinuous little beast, though he possessed all of its ferocity and far more cunning.

Now trotting lightly and tirelessly in the broad and careless spoor of Jake Kloon, his narrow, pointed head alert, and every fear-sharpened instinct tensely observant, the trap-thief continued to meditate murder.

Like all cowards, he had always been inclined to bold and ruthless action; but inclination was all that ever had happened.

Yet, even in his pitiable misdemeanours he slunk through life in terror of that strength which never hesitates at violence. In his petty pilfering he died a hundred deaths for every trapped mink or otter he filched; he heard the game protector's tread as he slunk from the bagged trout brook or crawled away, belly dragging, and pockets full of snared grouse.

Always he had dreamed of the day when, through some sudden bold and savage stroke, he could deliver himself from a life of fear and live in a city, grossly, replete with the pleasures of satiation, never again to see a tree or a lonely lake or the blue peaks which, always, he had hated because they seemed to spy on him from their sky-blue heights.

They were spying on him now as he moved lightly, furtively at Jake Kloon's heels, meditating once more that swift, bold stroke which forever would free him from all care and fear.

He looked at the back of Kloon's massive head. One shot would blow that skull into fragments, he thought, shivering.

One shot from behind,--and twenty thousand dollars,--or, if it proved a better deal, the contents of the packet. For, if Quintana's bribery had dazzled them, what effect might the contents of that secret packet have if revealed?

Always in his mean and busy brain he was trying to figure to himself what that packet must contain. And, to make the bribe worth while, Leverett had concluded that only a solid packet of thousand-dollar bills could account for the twenty thousand offered.

There might easily be half a million in bills pressed together in that heavy, flat packet. Bills were absolutely safe plunder. But Kloon had turned a deaf ear to his suggestions,--Kloon, who never entertained ambitions beyond his hootch rake-off,--whose miserable imagination stopped at a wretched percentage, satisfied.

One shot! There was the back of Kloon's bushy head. One shot!--and fear, which had shadowed him from birth, was at an end forever. Ended, too, privation,--the bitter rigour of black winters; scorching days; bodily squalor; ills that such as he endured in a wilderness where, like other creatures of the wild, men stricken died or recovered by chance alone.

A single shot would settle all problems for him.... But if he missed? At the mere idea he trembled as he trotted on, trying to tell himself that he couldn't miss. No use; always the coward's "if" blocked him; and the coward's rage,--fiercest of all fury,--ravaged him, almost crazing him with his own impotence.

* * * * *


Tamaracks, sphagnum, crimson pitcher-plants grew thicker; wet woods set with little black pools stretched away on every side.

It was still nearly a mile from Drowned Valley when Jake Kloon halted in his tracks and seated himself on a narrow ridge of hard ground. And Leverett came lightly up and, after nosing the whole vicinity, sat down cautiously where Kloon would have to turn partly around to look at him.

"Where the hell do we meet up with Quintana?" growled Kloon, tearing a mouthful from a gnawed tobacco plug and shoving the remainder deep into his trousers pocket.

"We gotta travel a piece, yet.... Say, Jake, be you a man or be you a poor dumb critter what ain't got no spunk?"

Kloon, chewing on his cud, turned and glanced at him. Then he spat, as answer.

"If you got the spunk of a chipmunk you and me'll take a peek at that there packet. I bet you it's thousand-dollar bills--more'n a billion million dollars, likely."

Kloon's dogged silence continued. Leverett licked his dry lips. His rifle lay on his knees. Almost imperceptibly he moved it, moved it again, froze stiff as Kloon spat, then, by infinitesimal degrees, continued to edge the muzzle toward Kloon.

"Jake?"

"Aw, shut your head," grumbled Kloon disdainfully. "You allus was a dirty rat--you sneakin' trap robber. Enough's enough. I ain't got no use for no billion million dollar bills. Ten thousand'll buy me all I cal'late to need till I'm planted. But you're like a hawg; you ain't never had enough o' nothin' and you won't never git enough, neither,--not if you wuz God a'mighty you wouldn't."

"Ten thousand dollars hain't nothin' to a billion million, Jake."

Kloon squirted a stream of tobacco at a pitcher plant and filled the cup. Diverted and gratified by the accuracy of his aim, he took other shots at intervals.

Leverett moved the muzzle of his rifle a hair's width to the left, shivered, moved it again. Under his soggy, sun-tanned skin a pallor made his visage sickly grey.

"Jake?"

No answer.

"Say, Jake?"

No notice.

"Jake, I wanta take a peek at them bills."

Merely another stream of tobacco soiling the crimson pitcher.

"I'm--I'm desprit. I gotta take a peek. I gotta--gotta----"

Something in Leverett's unsteady voice made Kloon turn his head.

"You gol rammed fool," he said, "what you doin' with your----"

The loud detonation of the rifle punctuated Kloon's inquiry with a final period. The big, soft-nosed bullet struck him full in the face, spilling his brains and part of his skull down his back, and knocking him flat as though he had been clubbed.

Leverett, stunned, sat staring, motionless, clutching the rifle from the muzzle of which a delicate stain of vapour floated and disappeared through a rosy bar of sunshine.

In the intense stillness of the place, suddenly the dead man made a sound; and the trap-robber nearly fainted.

But it was only air escaping from the slowly collapsing lungs; and Leverett, ashy pale, shaking, got to his feet and leaned heavily against an oak tree, his eyes never stirring from the sprawling thing on the ground.

* * * * *


If it were a minute or a year he stood there he could never have reckoned the space of time. The sun's level rays glimmered ruddy through the woods. A green fly appeared, buzzing about the dead man. Another zig-zagged through the sunshine, lacing it with streaks of greenish fire. Others appeared, whirling, gyrating, filling the silence with their humming. And still Leverett dared not budge, dared not search the dead and take from it that for which the dead had died.

A little breeze came by and stirred the bushy hair on Kloon's head and fluttered the ferns around him where he lay.

Two delicate, pure-white butterflies--rare survivors of a native species driven from civilization into the wilderness by the advent of the foreign white--fluttered in airy play over the dead man, drifting away into the woodland at times, yet always returning to wage a fairy combat above the heap of soiled clothing which once had been a man.

Then, near in the ferns, the withering fronds twitched, and a red squirrel sprung his startling alarm, squeaking, squealing, chattering his opinion of murder; and Leverett, shaking with the shock, wiped icy