The Hunted Woman - James Oliver Curwood (books to read for beginners TXT) 📗

there was a slight tremble in her voice when she said:
"This--is the place?"
"Yes. It should be just above the timber. I believe I can see the upper break of the little box canyon Keller told me about."
She rode without speaking until they entered the timber. They were just in time. As he lifted her down from her horse the clouds opened, and the rain fell in a deluge. Her hair was wet when he got her in the tent. MacDonald had spread out a number of blankets, but he had disappeared. Joanne sank down upon them with a little shiver. She looked up at Aldous. It was almost dark in the tent, and her eyes were glowing strangely. Over them the thunder crashed deafeningly. For a few minutes it was a continual roar, shaking the mountains with mighty reverberations that were like the explosions of giant guns. Aldous stood holding the untied flap against the beat of the rain. Twice he saw Joanne's lips form words. At last he heard her say:
"Where is Donald?"
He tied the flap, and dropped down on the edge of the blankets before he answered her.
"Probably out in the open watching the lightning, and letting the rain drench him," he said. "I've never known old Donald to come in out of a rain, unless it was cold. He was tying up the horses when I ran in here with you."
He believed she was shivering, yet he knew she was not cold. In the half gloom of the tent he wanted to reach over and take her hand.
For a few minutes longer there was no break in the steady downpour and the crashing of the thunder. Then, as suddenly as the storm had broken, it began to subside. Aldous rose and flung back the tent-flap.
"It is almost over," he said. "You had better remain in the tent a little longer, Ladygray. I will go out and see if MacDonald has succeeded in drowning himself."
Joanne did not answer, and Aldous stepped outside. He knew where to find the old hunter. He had gone up to the end of the timber, and probably this minute was in the little box canyon searching for the grave. It was a matter of less than a hundred yards to the upper fringe of timber, and when Aldous came out of this he stood on the summit of the grassy divide that separated the tiny lake Keller had described from the canyon. It was less than a rifle shot distant, and on the farther side of it MacDonald was already returning. Aldous hurried down to meet him. He did not speak when they met, but his companion answered the question in his eyes, while the water dripped in streams from his drenched hair and beard.
"It's there," he said, pointing back. "Just behind that big black rock. There's a slab over it, an' you've got the name right. It's Mortimer FitzHugh."
Above them the clouds were splitting asunder. A shaft of sunlight broke through, and as they stood looking over the little lake the shaft broadened, and the sun swept in golden triumph over the mountains. MacDonald beat his limp hat against his knee, and with his other hand drained the water from his beard.
"What you goin' to do?" he asked.
Aldous turned toward the timber. Joanne herself answered the question. She was coming up the slope. In a few moments she stood beside them. First she looked down upon the lake. Then her eyes turned to Aldous. There was no need for speech. He held out his hand, and without hesitation she gave him her own. MacDonald understood. He walked down ahead of them toward the black rock. When he came to the rock he paused. Aldous and Joanne passed him. Then they, too, stopped, and Aldous freed the girl's hand.
With an unexpectedness that was startling they had come upon the grave. Yet not a sound escaped Joanne's lips. Aldous could not see that she was breathing. Less than ten paces from them was the mound, protected by its cairn of stones; and over the stones rose a weather-stained slab in the form of a cross. One glance at the grave and Aldous riveted his eyes upon Joanne. For a full minute she stood as motionless as though the last breath had left her body. Then, slowly, she advanced. He could not see her face. He followed, quietly, step by step as she moved. For another minute she leaned over the slab, making out the fine-seared letters of the name. Her body was bent forward; her two hands were clenched tightly at her side. Even more slowly than she had advanced she turned toward Aldous and MacDonald. Her face was dead white. She lifted her hands to her breast, and clenched them there.
"It is his name," she said, and there was something repressed and terrible in her low voice. "It is his name!"
She was looking straight into the eyes of John Aldous, and he saw that she was fighting to say something which she had not spoken. Suddenly she came to him, and her two hands caught his arm.
"It is terrible--what I am going to ask of you," she struggled. "You will think I am a ghoul. But I must have proof! I must--I must!"
She was staring wildly at him, and all at once there leapt fiercely through him a dawning of the truth. The name was there, seared by hot iron in that slab of wood. The name! But under the cairn of stones----
Behind them MacDonald had heard. He towered beside them now. His great mountain-twisted hands drew Joanne a step back, and strange gentleness was in his voice as he said:
"You an' Johnny go back an' build a fire, Mis' Joanne. I'll find the proof!"
"Come," said Aldous, and he held out his hand again.
MacDonald hurried on ahead of them. When they reached the camp he was gone, so that Joanne did not see the pick and shovel which he carried back. She went into the tent and Aldous began building a fire where MacDonald's had been drowned out. There was little reason for a fire; but he built it, and for fifteen minutes added pitch-heavy fagots of storm-killed jack-pine and spruce to it, until the flames leapt a dozen feet into the air. Half a dozen times he was impelled to return to the grave and assist MacDonald in his gruesome task. But he knew that MacDonald had meant that he should stay with Joanne. If he returned, she might follow.
He was surprised at the quickness with which MacDonald performed his work. Not more than half an hour had passed when a low whistle drew his eyes to a clump of dwarf spruce back in the timber. The mountaineer was standing there, holding something in his hand. With a backward glance to see that Joanne had not come from the tent, Aldous hastened to him. What he could see of MacDonald's face was the lifeless colour of gray ash. His eyes stared as if he had suffered a strange and unexpected shock. He went to speak, but no words came through his beard. In his hand he held his faded red neck-handkerchief. He gave it to Aldous.
"It wasn't deep," he said. "It was shallow, turribly shallow, Johnny--just under the stone!"
His voice was husky and unnatural.
There was something heavy in the handkerchief, and a shudder passed through Aldous as he placed it on the palm of his hand and unveiled its contents. He could not repress an exclamation when he saw what MacDonald had brought. In his hand, with a single thickness of the wet handkerchief between the objects and his flesh, lay a watch and a ring. The watch was of gold. It was tarnished, but he could see there were initials, which he could not make out, engraved on the back of the case. The ring, too, was of gold. It was one of the most gruesome ornaments Aldous had ever seen. It was in the form of a coiled and writhing serpent, wide enough to cover half of one's middle finger between the joints. Again the eyes of the two men met, and again Aldous observed that strange, stunned look in the old hunter's face. He turned and walked back toward the tent, MacDonald following him slowly, still staring, his long gaunt arms and hands hanging limply at his side.
Joanne heard them, and came out of the tent. A choking cry fell from her lips when she saw MacDonald. For a moment one of her hands clutched at the wet canvas of the tent, and then she swayed forward, knowing what John Aldous had in his hand. He stood voiceless while she looked. In that tense half-minute when she stared at the objects he held it seemed to him that her heart-strings must snap under the strain. Then she drew back from them, her eyes filled with horror, her hands raised as if to shut out the sight of them, and a panting, sobbing cry broke from between her pallid lips.
"Oh, my God!" she breathed. "Take them away--take them away!"
She staggered back to the tent, and stood there with her hands covering her face. Aldous turned to the old hunter and gave him the things he held.
A moment later he stood alone where the three had been, staring now as Joanne had stared, his heart beating wildly.
For Joanne, in entering the tent, had uncovered her face; it was not grief that he saw there, but the soul of a woman new-born. And as his own soul responded in a wild rejoicing, MacDonald, going over the summit and down into the hollow, mumbled in his beard:
"God ha' mercy on me! I'm doin' it for her an' Johnny, an' because she's like my Jane!"


CHAPTER XVI
Plunged from one extreme of mental strain to another excitement that was as acute in its opposite effect, John Aldous stood and stared at the tent-flap that had dropped behind Joanne. Only a flash he had caught of her face; but in that flash he had seen the living, quivering joyousness of freedom blazing where a moment before there had been only horror and fear. As if ashamed of her own betrayal, Joanne had darted into the tent. She had answered his question a thousand times more effectively than if she had remained to tell him with her lips that MacDonald's proofs were sufficient--that the grave in the little box canyon had not disappointed her. She had recognized the ring and the watch; from them she had shrank in horror, as if fearing that the golden serpent might suddenly leap into life and strike.
In spite of the mightiest efforts she might have made for self-control Aldous had seen in her tense and tortured face a look that was more than either dread or shock--it was abhorrence, hatred. And his last glimpse of her face had revealed those things gone, and in their place the strange joy she had run into the tent to hide. That she should rejoice over the dead, or that the grim relics from the grave should bring that new dawn into her face and eyes, did not strike him as shocking. In Joanne his sun had already begun to rise and set. He had come to understand that for her the grave must hold its dead; that the fact of death, death under the slab that bore Mortimer FitzHugh's name, meant life for her, just as it meant life and all things for him. He had prayed for it, even while he dreaded that it might not be. In him all things were now submerged in the wild thought that Joanne was free, and the grave had been the key to her freedom.
A calmness began to