Book: The Rainbow Trail

Z >> Zane Grey >> The Rainbow Trail




He tapped on the door and she came out. After all, it was a meeting
vastly different from what his feeling made him imagine it might have
been. She was nervous, frightened, as were all the other women, for
that matter. She was alone in the cottage. He made haste to reassure
her about the improbability of any further trouble such as had befallen
the last week. As he had always done on those former visits to her,
he talked rapidly, using all his wit, and here his emotion made him
eloquent; he avoided personalities, except to tell about his prospects
of work in the village, and he sought above all to lead her mind from
thought of herself and her condition. Before he left her he had the
gladness of knowing he had succeeded.

When he said good night he felt the strange falsity of his position.
He did not expect to be able to keep up the deception for long. That
roused him, and half the night he lay awake, thinking. Next day he
was the life of the work and study and play in that village. Kindness
and good-will did not need inspiration, but it was keen, deep passion
that made him a plotter for influence and friendship. Was there a
woman in the village whom he might trust, in case he needed one? And
his instinct guided him to her whom he had liked well--Ruth. Ruth
Jones she had called herself at the trial, and when Shefford used the
name she laughed mockingly. Ruth was not very religious, and sometimes
she was bitter and hard. She wanted life, and here she was a prisoner
in a lonely valley. She welcomed Shefford's visits. He imagined that
she had slightly changed, and whether it was the added six months with
its trouble and pain or a growing revolt he could not tell. After a
time he divined that the inevitable retrogression had set in: she had
not enough faith to uphold the burden she had accepted, nor the courage
to cast it off. She was ready to love him. That did not frighten
Shefford, and if she did love him he was not so sure it would not be
an anchor for her. He saw her danger, and then he became what he had
never really been in all the days of his ministry--the real helper.
Unselfishly, for her sake, he found power to influence her; and
selfishly, for the sake of Fay Larkin, he began slowly to win her
to a possible need.

The days passed swiftly. Mormons came and went, though in the
open day, as laborers; new cabins went up, and a store, and other
improvements. Some part of every evening Shefford spent with Fay,
and these visits were no longer unknown to the village. Women
gossiped, in a friendly way about Shefford, but with jealous tongues
about the girl. Joe Lake told Shefford the run of the village talk.
Anything concerning the Sago Lily the droll Mormon took to heart. He
had been hard hit, and admitted it. Sometimes he went with Shefford
to call upon her, but he talked little and never remained long.
Shefford had anticipated antagonism on the part of Joe; however,
he did not find it.

Shefford really lived through the busy day for that hour with Fay in
the twilight. And every evening seemed the same. He would find her
in the dark, alone, silent, brooding, hopeless. Her mood did not
puzzle him, but how to keep from plunging her deeper into despair
baffled him. He exhausted all his powers trying to do for her what
he had been able to do for Ruth. Yet he failed. Something had
blunted her. The shadow of that baneful trial hovered over her,
and he came to sense a strange terror in her. It was mostly always
present. Was she thinking of Jane Withersteen and Lassiter, left
dead or imprisoned in the valley from which she had been brought so
mysteriously? Shefford wearied his brain revolving these questions.
The fate of her friends, and the cross she bore--of these was tragedy
born, but the terror--that Shefford divined came of waiting for the
visit of the Mormon whose face she had never seen. Shefford prayed
that he might never meet this man. Finally he grew desperate. When he
first arrived at the girl's home she would speak, she showed gladness,
relief, and then straightway she dropped back into the shadow of her
gloom. When he got up to go then there was a wistfulness, an unspoken
need, an unconscious reliance, in her reluctant good night.

Then the hour came when he reached his limit. He must begin his
revelation.

"You never ask me anything--let alone about myself," he said.

"I'd like to hear," she replied, timidly.

"Do I strike you as an unhappy man?"

"No, indeed."

"Well, how DO I strike you?"

This was an entirely new tack he had veered to.

"Very good and kind to us women," she said.

"I don't know about that. If I am so, it doesn't bring me happiness.
. . . Do you remember what I told you once, about my being a preacher
--disgrace, ruin, and all that--and my rainbow-chasing dream out here
after a--a lost girl?"

"I--remember all--you said," she replied, very low.

"Listen." His voice was a little husky, but behind it there seemed a
tide of resistless utterance. "Loss of faith and name did not send me
to this wilderness. But I had love--love for that lost girl, Fay
Larkin. I dreamed about her till I loved her. I dreamed that I would
find her--my treasure--at the foot of a rainbow. Dreams! . . . When
you told me she was dead I accepted that. There was truth in your
voice. I respected your reticence. But something died in me then. I
lost myself, the best of me, the good that might have uplifted me. I
went away, down upon the barren desert, and there I rode and slept and
grew into another and a harder man. Yet, strange to say, I never
forgot her, though my dreams were done. As I toiled and suffered and
changed I loved her--if not her, the thought of her--more and more.
Now I have come back to these walled valleys--to the smell of pinyon,
to the flowers in the nooks, to the wind on the heights, to the silence
and loneliness and beauty. And here the dreams come back and SHE is
WITH me always. Her spirit is all that keeps me kind and good, as you
say I am. But I suffer, I long for her alive. If I love her dead,
how could I love her living! Always I torture myself with the vain
dream that--that she MIGHT not be dead. I have never been anything
but a dreamer. And here I go about my work by day and lie awake at
night with that lost girl in my mind. . . . I love her. Does that
seem strange to you? But it would not if you understood. Think. I
had lost faith, hope. I set myself a great work--to find Fay Larkin.
And by the fire and the iron and the blood that I felt it would cost
to save her some faith must come to me again. . . . My work is undone
--I've never saved her. But listen, how strange it is to feel--now--
as I let myself go--that just the loving her and the living here in the
wildness that holds her somewhere have brought me hope again. Some
faith must come, too. It was through her that I met this Indian, Nas
Ta Bega. He has saved my life--taught me much. What would I ever
have learned of the naked and vast earth, of the sublimity of the
wild uplands, of the storm and night and sun, if I had not followed
a gleam she inspired? In my hunt for a lost girl perhaps I wandered
into a place where I shall find a God and my salvation. Do you marvel
that I love Fay Larkin--that she is not dead to me? Do you marvel
that I love her, when I KNOW, were she alive, chained in a canyon, or
bound, or lost in any way, my destiny would lead me to her, and she
should be saved?"

Shefford ended, overcome with emotion. In the dusk he could not see
the girl's face, but the white form that had drooped so listlessly
seemed now charged by some vitalizing current. He knew he had spoken
irrationally; still he held it no dishonor to have told her he loved
her as one dead. If she took that love to the secret heart of living
Fay Larkin, then perhaps a spirit might light in her darkened soul.
He had no thought yet that Fay Larkin might ever belong to him. He
divined a crime--he had seen her agony. And this avowal of his was
only one step toward her deliverance.

Softly she rose, retreating into the shadow.

"Forgive me if I--I disturb you, distress you," he said. "I wanted to
tell you. She was--somehow known to you. I am not happy. And are YOU
happy? . . . Let her memory be a bond between us. . . . Good night."

"Good night."

Faintly as the faintest whisper breathed her reply, and, though it
came from a child forced into womanhood, it whispered of girlhood not
dead, of sweet incredulity, of amazed tumult, of a wondering, frantic
desire to run and hide, of the bewilderment incident to a first hint
of love.

Shefford walked away into the darkness. The whisper filled his soul.
Had a word of love ever been spoken to that girl? Never--not the love
which had been on his lips. Fay Larkin's lonely life spoke clearly in
her whisper.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Next morning as the sun gilded the looming peaks and shafts of gold
slanted into the valley she came swiftly down the path to the spring.

Shefford paused in his task of chopping wood. Joe Lake, on his knees,
with his big hands in a pan of dough, lifted his head to stare. She
had left off the somber black hood, and, although that made a vast
difference in her, still it was not enough to account for what struck
both men.

"Good morning," she called, brightly.

They both answered, but not spontaneously. She stopped at the spring
and with one sweep of her strong arm filled the bucket and lifted it.
Then she started back down the path and, pausing opposite the camp,
set the bucket down.

"Joe, do you still pride yourself on your sour dough?" she asked.

"Reckon I do," replied Joe, with a grin.

"I've heard your boasts, but never tasted your bread," she went on.

"I'll ask you to eat with us some day."

"Don't forget," she replied.

And then shyly she looked at Shefford. She was like the fresh dawn,
and the gold of the sun shone on her head.

"Have you chopped all that wood--so early?" she asked.

"Sure," replied Shefford, laughing. "I have to get up early to keep
Joe from doing all the camp chores."

She smiled, and then to Shefford she seemed to gleam, to be radiant.

"It'd be a lovely morning to climb--'way high."

"Why--yes--it would," replied Shefford, awkwardly. "I wish I didn't
have my work."

"Joe, will YOU climb with me some day?"

"I should smile I will," declared Joe.

"But I can run right up the walls."

"I reckon. Mary, it wouldn't surprise me to see you fly."

"Do you mean I'm like a canyon swallow or an angel?"

Then, as Joe stared speechlessly, she said good-by and, taking up the
bucket, went on with her swift, graceful step.

"She's perked up," said the Mormon, staring after her. "Never heard
her say more 'n yes or no till now."

"She did seem--bright," replied Shefford.

He was stunned. What had happened to her? To-day this girl had not
been Mary, the sealed wife, or the Sago Lily, alien among Mormon
women. Then it flashed upon him--she was Fay Larkin. She who had
regarded herself as dead had come back to life. In one short night
what had transformed her--what had taken place in her heart? Shefford
dared not accept, nor allow lodgment in his mind, a thrilling idea that
he had made her forget her misery.

"Shefford, did you ever see her like that?" asked Joe.

"Never."

"Haven't you--something to do with it?"

"Maybe I have. I--I hope so."

"Reckon you've seen how she's faded--since the trial?"

"No," replied Shefford, swiftly. "But I've not seen her face in
daylight since then."

"Well, take my hunch," said Joe, soberly. "She's begun to fade like
the canyon lily when it's broken. And she's going to die unless--"

"Why man!" ejaculated Shefford. "Didn't you see--"

"Sure I see," interrupted the Mormon. "I see a lot you don't. She's
so white you can look through her. She's grown thin, all in a week.
She doesn't eat. Oh, I know, because I've made it my business to find
out. It's no news to the women. But they'd like to see her die. And
she will die unless--"

"My God!" exclaimed Shefford, huskily. "I never noticed--I never
thought. . . . Joe, hasn't she any friends?"

"Sure. You and Ruth--and me. Maybe Nas Ta Bega, too. He watches her
a good deal."

"We can do so little, when she needs so much."

"Nobody can help her, unless it's you," went on the Mormon. "That's
plain talk. She seemed different this morning. Why, she was alive--
she talked--she smiled. . . . Shefford, if you cheer her up I'll go
to hell for you!"

The big Mormon, on his knees, with his hands in a pan of dough, and
his shirt all covered with flour, presented an incongruous figure of a
man actuated by pathos and passion. Yet the contrast made his emotion
all the simpler and stronger. Shefford grew closer to Joe in that
moment.

"Why do you think _I_ can cheer her, help her?" queried Shefford.

"I don't know. But she's different with you. It's not that you're a
Gentile, though, for all the women are crazy about you. You talk to
her. You have power over her, Shefford. I feel that. She's only a
kid."

"Who is she, Joe? Where did she come from?" asked Shefford, very low,
with his eyes cast down.

"I don't know. I can't find out. Nobody knows. It's a mystery--to
all the younger Mormons, anyway."

Shefford burned to ask questions about the Mormon whose sealed wife
the girl was, but he respected Joe too much to take advantage of him
in a poignant moment like this. Besides, it was only jealousy that
made him burn to know the Mormon's identity, and jealousy had become
a creeping, insidious, growing fire. He would be wise not to add fuel
to it. He rejected many things before he thought of one that he could
voice to his friend.

"Joe, it's only her body that belongs to--to . . . . Her soul is lost
to--"

"John Shefford, let that go. My mind's tired. I've been taught so
and so, and I'm not bright. . . . But, after all, men are much alike.
The thing with you and me is this--we don't want to see HER grave!"

Love spoke there. The Mormon had seized upon the single elemental
point that concerned him and his friend in their relation to this
unfortunate girl. His simple, powerful statement united them; it gave
the lie to his hint of denseness; it stripped the truth naked. It was
such a wonderful thought-provoking statement that Shefford needed time
to ponder how deep the Mormon was. To what limit would he go? Did he
mean that here, between two men who loved the same girl, class, duty,
honor, creed were nothing if they stood in the way of her deliverance
and her life?

"Joe Lake, you Mormons are impossible," said Shefford, deliberately.
"You don't want to see her grave. So long as she lives--remains on
the earth--white and gold like the flower you call her, that's enough
for you. It's her body you think of. And that's the great and
horrible error in your religion. . . . But death of the soul is
infinitely worse than death of the body. I have been thinking of
her soul. . . . So here we stand, you and I. You to save her life
--I to save her soul! What will you do?"

"Why, John, I'd turn Gentile," he said, with terrible softness. It
was a softness that scorned Shefford for asking, and likewise it flung
defiance at his creed and into the face of hell.

Shefford felt the sting and the exaltation.

"And I'd be a Mormon," he said.

"All right. We understand each other. Reckon there won't be any call
for such extremes. I haven't an idea what you mean--what can be done.
But I say, go slow, so we won't all find graves. First cheer her up
somehow. Make her want to live. But go slow, John. AND DON'T BE WITH
HER LATE!"

. . . . . . . . . . .

That night Shefford found her waiting for him in the moonlight--a girl
who was as transparent as crystal-clear water, who had left off the
somber gloom with the black hood, who tremulously embraced happiness
without knowing it, who was one moment timid and wild like a half-
frightened fawn, and the next, exquisitely half-conscious of what it
meant to be thought dead, but to be alive, to be awakening, wondering,
palpitating, and to be loved.

Shefford lived the hour as a dream and went back to the quiet darkness
under the cedars to lie wide-eyed, trying to recall all that she had
said. For she had talked as if utterance had long been dammed behind
a barrier of silence.

There followed other hours like that one, indescribable hours, so
sweet they stung, and in which, keeping pace with his love, was the
nobler stride of a spirit that more every day lightened her burden.

The thing he had to do, sooner or later, was to tell her he knew she
was Fay Larkin, not dead, but alive, and that, not love nor religion,
but sacrifice, nailed her down to her martyrdom. Many and many a time
he had tried to force himself to tell her, only to fail. He hated to
risk ending this sweet, strange, thoughtless, girlish mood of hers.
It might not be soon won back--perhaps never. How could he tell what
chains bound her? And so as he vacillated between Joe's cautious
advice to go slow and his own pity the days and weeks slipped by.

One haunting fear kept him sleepless half the nights and sick even in
his dreams, and it was that the Mormon whose sealed wife she was might
come, surely would come, some night. Shefford could bear it. But what
would that visit do to Fay Larkin? Shefford instinctively feared the
awakening in the girl of womanhood, of deeper insight, of a spiritual
realization of what she was, of a physical dawn.

He might have spared himself needless torture. One day Joe Lake eyed
him with penetrating glance.

"Reckon you don't have to sleep right on that Stonebridge trail," said
the Mormon, significantly.

Shefford felt the blood burn his neck and face. He had pulled his
tarpaulin closer to the trail, and his motive was as an open page to
the keen Mormon.

"Why?" asked Shefford.

"There won't be any Mormons riding in here soon--by night--to visit
the women," replied Joe, bluntly. "Haven't you figured there might
be government spies watching the trails?"

"No, I haven't."

"Well, take a hunch, then," added the Mormon, gruffly, and Shefford
divined, as well as if he had been told, that warning word had gone
to Stonebridge. Gone despite the fact that Nas Ta Bega had reported
every trail free of watchers! There was no sign of any spies, cowboys,
outlaws, or Indians in the vicinity of the valley. A passionate
gratitude to the Mormon overcame Shefford; and the unreasonableness of
it, the nature of it, perturbed him greatly. But, something hammered
into his brain, if he loved one of these sealed wives, how could he
help being jealous?

The result of Joe's hint was that Shefford put off the hour of
revelation, lived in his dream, helped the girl grow farther and
farther away from her trouble, until that inevitable hour arrived
when he was driven by accumulated emotion as much as the exigency
of the case.

He had not often walked with her beyond the dark shade of the pinyons
round the cottage, but this night, when he knew he must tell her, he
led her away down the path, through the cedar grove to the west end
of the valley where it was wild and lonely and sad and silent.

The moon was full and the great peaks were crowned as with snow. A
coyote uttered his cutting cry. There were a few melancholy notes
from a night bird of the stone walls. The air was clear and cold,
with a tang of frost in it. Shefford gazed about him at the vast,
uplifted, insulating walls, and that feeling of his which was more
than a sense told him how walls like these and the silence and shadow
and mystery had been nearly all of Fay Larkin's life. He felt them
all in her.

He stopped out in the open, near the line where dark shadow of the
wall met the silver moonlight on the grass, and here, by a huge flat
stone where he had come often alone and sometimes with Ruth, he faced
Fay Larkin in the spirit to tell her gently that he knew her, and
sternly to force her secret from her.

"Am I your friend?" he began.

"Ah!--my only friend," she said.

"Do you trust me, believe I mean well by you, want to help you?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Well, then, let me speak of you. You know one topic we've never
touched upon. You!"

She was silent, and looked wonderingly, a little fearfully, at him,
as if vague, disturbing thoughts were entering the fringe of her mind.

"Our friendship is a strange one, is it not?" he went on.

"How do I know? I never had any other friendship. What do you mean
by strange?"

"Well, I'm a young man. You're a--a married woman. We are together a
good deal--and like to be."

"Why is that strange?" she asked.

Suddenly Shefford realized that there was nothing strange in what was
natural. A remnant of sophistication clung to him and that had spoken.
He needed to speak to her in a way which in her simplicity she would
understand.

"Never mind strange. Say that I am interested in you, and, as you're
not happy, I want to help you. And say that your neighbors are curious
and oppose my idea. Why do they?"

"They're jealous and want you themselves," she replied, with sweet
directness. "They've said things I don't understand. But I felt
they--they hated in me what would be all right in themselves."

Here to simplicity she added truth and wisdom, as an Indian might have
expressed them. But shame was unknown to her, and she had as yet only
vague perceptions of love and passion. Shefford began to realize the
quickness of her mind, that she was indeed awakening.

"They are jealous--were jealous before I ever came here. That's only
human nature. I was trying to get to a point. Your neighbors are
curious. They oppose me. They hate you. It's all bound up in the--
the fact of your difference from them, your youth, beauty, that you're
not a Mormon, that you nearly betrayed their secret at the trial in
Stonebridge."

"Please--please don't--speak of that!" she faltered.

"But I must," he replied, swiftly. "That trial was a torture to you.
It revealed so much to me. . . . I know you are a sealed wife. I know
there has been a crime. I know you've sacrificed yourself. I know
that love and religion have nothing to do with--what you are. . . .
Now, is not all that true?"

"I must not tell," she whispered.

"But I shall MAKE you tell," he replied, and his voice rang.

"Oh no, you cannot," she said.

"I can--with just one word!"

Her eyes were great, starry, shadowy gulfs, dark in the white beauty
of her face. She was calm now. She had strength. She invited him to
speak the word, and the wistful, tremulous quiver of her lips was for
his earnest thought of her.

"Wait--a--little," said Shefford, unsteadily. "I'll come to that
presently. Tell me this--have you ever thought of being free?"

"Free!" she echoed, and there was singular depth and richness in her
voice. That was the first spark of fire he had struck from her.
"Long ago, the minute I was unwatched, I'd have leaped from a wall
had I dared. Oh, I wasn't afraid. I'd love to die that way. But
I never dared."

"Why?" queried Shefford, piercingly.

She was silent then.

"Suppose I offered to give you freedom that meant life?"

"I--couldn't--take it."

"Why?"

"Oh, my friend, don't ask me any more."

"I know, I can see--you want to tell me--you need to tell."

"But I daren't."

"Won't you trust me?"

"I do--I do."

"Then tell me."

"No--no--oh no!"

The moment had come. How sad, tragic, yet glorious for him! It would
be like a magic touch upon this lovely, cold, white ghost of Fay
Larkin, transforming her into a living, breathing girl. He held his
love as a thing aloof, and, as such, intangible because of the living
death she believed she lived, it had no warmth and intimacy for them.
What might it not become with a lightning flash of revelation? He
dreaded, yet he was driven to speak. He waited, swallowing hard,
fighting the tumultuous storm of emotion, and his eyes dimmed.

"What did I come to this country for?" he asked, suddenly, in ringing,
powerful voice.

"To find a girl," she whispered.

"I've found her!"

She began to shake. He saw a white hand go to her breast.

"Where is Surprise Valley? . . . How were you taken from Jane
Withersteen and Lassiter? . . . I know they're alive. But where?"

She seemed to turn to stone.

"Fay!--FAY LARKIN! . . . I KNOW YOU!" he cried, brokenly.

She slipped off the stone to her knees, swayed forward blindly with
her hands reaching out, her head falling back to let the moon fall
full upon the beautiful, snow-white, tragically convulsed face.




XIII. THE STORY OF SURPRISE VALLEY


" . . . Oh, I remember so well! Even now I dream of it sometimes. I
hear the roll and crash of falling rock--like thunder. . . . We rode
and rode. Then the horses fell. Uncle Jim took me in his arms and
started up the cliff. Mother Jane climbed close after us. They kept
looking back. Down there in the gray valley carne the Mormons. I see
the first one now. He rode a white horse. That was Tull. Oh, I
remember so well! And I was five or six years old.

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