The Barrier by Rex Beach (universal ebook reader .txt) 📗

"We'll see. I wish to God I'd had your decision when I was your age, this story would be different, and easier to tell." He waited a moment, then settled to his self-appointed task. "I was mining at the time up in the Mother Lode country of California, which was the frontier then, pretty much as this is now, only we had better things to eat. I came from the East, or my people did, but I was ranch-raised, and loved the hills and woods and places where you don't talk much, so I went to prospecting because it took me out where the sun was bright and I could see the wild things at play. I was one of the first men into a camp named Chandon—helped to build it, in fact, and got hold of some ground that looked real good. It was hard mining, however, and, being poor, I was still gripping my drill and hammer after the town had grown up.

"A woman came out from the East—Vermont, it was—and school-teaching was her line of business, only she hadn't been raised to it, and this was her first clatter at the game; but things had broke bad for her people, and ended in her pulling stakes and coming West all alone. Her folks died and left her up against it, I gathered from what little she told me—sort of an old story, I guess, and usual too, only for her. She was plumb unusual."

He seemed to ponder this a moment, and then resumed:

"It don't make any difference to you how I first saw her, and how I began to forget that anything else in the world was worth having but her. I'd lived in the woods all my life, as I said, and knew more about birds and bugs and bees than I did about women; I hadn't been broke proper, and didn't know how to act with them; but I laid out to get this girl, and I did fairly well. There's something wild in every woman that needs to be tamed, and it isn't like the wildness that runs in wood critters; you can win that over by gentleness, but you have to take it away from a woman. Every live thing that couldn't talk was my friend; but I made the mistake of courting my own kind the same way, not knowing that when two of any species mate the male must rule. I was too gentle. Even so, I reckon I'd have won out only for another man. Dan Bennett was his name—the kind that dumb animals hate, and—well, that takes his measure. His range adjoined mine, and, though I'd never seen him, I heard stories now and then—the sort of tales you can't tell to a good woman; so it worried me when I heard of his attentions to this girl. Still, I thought she'd surely find him out and recognize the kind of fellow he was; but, Lord! a woman, can't tell a man from a dog, and there wasn't any one to warn her. There were plenty of women who knew him, but they were the ones who flew by night, while she lived in the sunshine; and women of that kind don't make complaint, anyhow.

"This Bennett came from the town below, where he ran a saloon and a brace game or two; but being as he rode into our camp and out again in the night, and as I didn't drink nor listen to the music of the little rolling ball, why, we never met, even after he began coming to Chandon. Understand, I wasn't too good for those amusements; I just didn't happen to hanker after them, for I was living with the image of the little school-ma'am in my mind, and that destroyed what bad habits I'd formed.

"It was along in the early spring that she began to see I had notions about her, but my damned backwardness wouldn't let me speak, and, in addition, I was getting closer to ore every shot at the mine, and was holding off until I could lay both myself and my goldmine at her feet, and ask her to take the two of us, so if one didn't pan out the other might. But it seemed like I'd never get into pay. The closer I got the harder I worked, and, of course, the less I saw of her, likewise the oftener Bennett came. I reckon no man ever worked like I did—two shifts a day, eighteen hours, with six to sleep. The skin came off of my hands, and I staggered when I came out into the daylight, for the rock was hard, and I had no money to hire a helper; but I was young and strong, and the hope of her was like drink and food and sleep to me. At last I struck it, and still I waited awhile longer till I could be sure. Then I went down to my little shack and put on my other clothes. I remember I'd gone so thin that they hung loose, and my palms were so raw I had hard work handling the buttons, and got my shirt all bloody, for I'd been in the drift forty hours, without sleep and breathing powder smoke, till my knees buckled and wobbled under me. To this day the smell of stale powder smoke makes a woman of me; but that morning I sang, for I was going for my bride, and the world was brighter than it has ever been for eighteen years. The little school-house was closed, at which I remembered that the term was over. I'd been living underground for weeks and lost track of the days, so that I had to count them up on my fingers. It took me a long time, for I was pretty tired in my head; but when I'd figured it out I went on to where she was boarding.

"The woman of the place came to the door, a Scotch-woman. She had a mole on her chin, I remember, a brownish-black mole with three hairs in it. She wore an apron, too, that was kind of checkered, and three buttons were open at the neck of her dress. I recall a lot more of little things about her, though the rest of what happened is rather dreamy.

"I asked for Merridy, and she told me she'd gone away—gone with Bennett, the night before, while I was coughing blood from the powder smoke; that they were married in the front room, and that the bride looked beautiful. She had cried a bit on leaving Chandon, and—and—that was about all. I counted the buttons on the Scotchwoman's waist eight or ten times, and by-and-by she asked if I was sick. But I wasn't. She was a kind-hearted woman, and I'd been to her house a good deal, so she asked me to come in and rest. I wasn't tired, so I went away, and climbed back up to the little shack and the mine that I hated now."

The trader paused, and, reaching for the bottle, poured himself out a glass of brandy, which he spilled into his throat raw, then continued:

"I turned into a kind of hermit after that, and I wasn't good to associate with. Men got so they shunned me, and I knew they told strange stories, because I heard them whisper when I went to the stores for grub once a month. I changed all over, till even my squirrels and partridges and other friends quit me; once in awhile I got out a ton or two of rock and sold it, but I never worked the mine or opened it up—I couldn't bear to go inside the drift. I tried it time and again, but the smell of its darkness drove me out; every foot of its ragged walls had left its mark on me, and my heart was torn and gouged and shivered worse than its seams and ledges. I could have sold it, but there was no place for me to go, and what did I want with money? I was shy of the world, like a crippled child that dreads the daylight, and I shrank from going out where people might see my scars; so I stayed there by myself nursing the hurt that never got any better. You see, I'd been raised among the hills and rocks, and I was like them in a way; I couldn't grow and alter and heal up.

"From time to time I heard of her, but the news, instead of gladdening me, as it would have gladdened some men, wrung out what bits of suffering were left in me, and I fairly ached for her. Nobody comes to see clearer than a woman deceived, so it didn't take her long to find out the kind of man Bennett was. He wasn't like her at all, and the reason he had courted her so hotly was just that he had had everything that rightly belongs to a man like him, and had sickened of it, so he wanted her because she was clean and pure and different; and realizing that he couldn't get her any other way, he had married her. But she was a treasure no bad man could appreciate, and so he tired quickly, even before the little one came.

"When I heard that she had borne him a daughter I wrote her a letter, which took me a month to compose, and which I tore up. One day a story came to me that made me saddle my horse to ride down and kill him—and, mind you, I was a man who made pets of little wild, trusting things. But I knew she would surely send for me when her pain became too great, so I uncinched my gear and hung it up, and waited and waited and waited. Three long, endless years I waited, almost within sound of her voice, without a word from her, without a glimpse of her, and every hour of that time went by as slowly as if I had held my breath. Then she called to me, and I went.

"I tell you, I was thankful that day for the fortune that had made me take good care of my horse, for I rode like Death on a wind-storm. It grew moonlight as I raced down the valley, and the foam from the animal's muzzle lodged on my clothes, and made me laugh and swear that the morning sun would show Dan Bennett's blood in its place. I rode through the streets of Mesa, where they lived, and past the lights of his big saloon, where I heard the sound of devil's revelry and a shrill-voiced woman singing—a woman the like of which he had tried to make my Merridy. I never skulked or sneaked in those days, and no man ever made me take back roads, so I came up to his house from the front and tied my horse to his gate-post. She heard me on the steps and opened the door.

"'You sent for me,' said I. 'Where is he?' But he had gone away to a neighboring camp, and wouldn't be back until morning, at which I felt the way a thief must feel, for I'd hoped to meet him in his own house, and I wasn't the kind to go calling when the husband was out. I couldn't think very clearly, however, because of the change in her. She was so thin and worn and sad, sadder than any woman I'd ever seen, and she wasn't the girl I'd known three years before. I guess I'd changed a heap myself; anyhow, that was the first thing she spoke about, and the tears came into her eyes as she breathed:

"'Poor boy! poor boy! You took it very hard, didn't you?'"

"'You sent for me,' said I. 'Which road did he take?'"

"'There's nothing you can do to him,' she answered back. 'I sent for you to make sure that you still love me."

"'Did you ever doubt it?' said I, at which she began to cry, sobbing like a woman who has worn out all emotion.

"'Can you feel the same after what I've made you suffer?' she said, and I reckon she must have read the answer in my eyes; for I never was much good at talking, and the sight of her, so changed, had taken the speech out of me, leaving nothing but aches and pains and ashes in its place. When she saw what she wished to know, she told me the story, the whole miserable story, that I'd heard enough of to suspect. Why she'd married the other man she couldn't explain herself, except that it was a woman's whim—I had stayed away and he