She looked at him sharply now. "Are you Paul Carey Hilliard's son--the son of Roxana Hilliard?" she asked. She pointed a finger at him.

"Yes," he answered with thin lips. His eyes narrowed. His face was all Latin, all cruel.

"Well"--Miss Blake slid her hands reflectively back and forth on the bone arms of her chair. She had put down her work. "I was just thinking," she said slowly and kindly, "that the son of your mother would be rather extra careful in choosing the mother of his sons."

"I shall be very careful," he answered between the thin lips. "I _am_ being careful."

She fell back with an air of relief. "Oh," she said, as though illuminated. "O-oh! I understand. Then it's all right. I didn't read your game."

His face caught fire at her apparent misunderstanding.

"I don't read yours," he said.

"Game? Bless you, I've no game to play. I'm giving Sheila her chance. But I'm not going to give her a chance at the cost of your happiness. You're too good a lad for that. I thought you were going to ask her to be your wife. And I wasn't going to allow you to do it--blind. I was going to advise you to come back three years from now and see her again. Maybe this fine clean air and this life and this honest work and the training she gets from me will make her straight. My G.o.d! Cosme Hilliard, have you set eyes on Hudson? What kind of girl travels West from New York at Sylvester Hudson's expense and in his company and queens it in the suite at his hotel?"

"Miss Blake," he muttered, "do you _know_ this?"

The cigarette had burnt itself out. Cosme's face was no longer cruel. It was dazed.

She laughed shortly. "Why, of course, I know Sheila. I know her whole history--and it's some history! She's twice the age she looks. Do you think I'd have her here with me this way without knowing the girl? I tell you, I want to give her a chance. I don't care if you try to test her out. I'd like to see if two months has done anything for her. She was real set on being a good girl when she quit Hudson. I don't _know_, but I'm willing to bet that she'll turn you down."

From far away up the mountain-side came the fierce baying of the dog pack. Cosme pulled himself together and stood up. His face had an ignorant, baffled look, the look of an unskilled and simple mind caught in a web.

"I reckon she--she isn't coming down," he said slowly, without lifting his eyes from the floor. "I reckon I'll be going. I won't wait."

He walked to the door, his steps falling without spring, and went out and so across the porch and the clearing to his horse.

At the sound of the closing door there came a flurry of movement in the loft. The trap was raised. Sheila came quickly down the ladder. She was dressed in a pair of riding-breeches and her hair was cropped like Miss Blake's just below the ears. The quaintest rose-leaf of a Rosalind she looked, just a wisp of grace, utterly unlike a boy. All the soft, slim litheness with its quick turns revealed--a little figure of unconscious sweet enchantment. But the face was flushed and tear-stained, the eyes distressed. She stood, hands on her belt, at the foot of the ladder.

"Why has he gone? Why didn't he wait?"

Miss Blake turned a frank, indulgent face. But it was deeply flushed. "Oh, shucks!" she said, "I suppose he got tired. Why didn't you come down?"

Sheila sent a look down her slim legs. "Oh, because I _am_ a fool. Miss Blake--did you _really_ burn my two frocks--both of them?" Her eyes coaxed and filled.

"It's all they're fit for, my dear. You can make yourself new ones. You know it's more sensible and comfortable, too, to work and ride in breeches. I know what I'm doing, child.--I've lived this way quite a number of years. You look real nice. I can't abide female floppery, anyhow. What's it a sign of? Rotten slavery." She set her very even teeth together hard as she said this.

But Sheila was neither looking nor listening. She had heard horse's hoofs. Her cheeks flamed. She ran to the door. She stood on the porch and called.

"Cosme Hilliard! Come back!"

There was no answer. A few minutes later she came in, pale and puzzled.

"He didn't even wave," she said. "He turned back in his saddle and stared at me. He rode away staring at me. Miss Blake--what did you say to him?

You were talking a long time."

"We were talking," said Miss Blake, "about dogs and how to raise 'em. And then he up and said goodbye. Oh, Sheila, it's all right. He'll be back when he's got over being miffed. Why, he expected you to come tumblin'

down the ladder head over heels to see him--a handsome fellow like that!

Shucks! Haven't you ever dealt with the vanity of a young male before?

It's as jumpy as a rabbit. Get to work."

And, as though to justify Miss Blake's prophecy, just ten days later, Hilliard did come again. It was a Sunday and Sheila had packed her lunch and gone off on "n.i.g.g.e.r Baby" for the day. The ostensible object of her ride was a visit to the source of Hidden Creek. Really she was climbing away from a hurt. She felt Hilliard's wordless departure and prolonged absence keenly. She had not--to put it euphemistically--many friends. Her remedy was successful. Impossible, on such a ride, to cherish minor or major pangs. She rode into the smoky dimness of pine-woods where the sunlight burned in flecks and out again across the little open mountain meadows, jeweled with white and gold, blue and coral-colored flowers, a stained-gla.s.s window scattered across the ground. From these glades she could see the forest, an army of tall pilgrims, very grave, going up, with long staves in their hands, to worship at a high shrine. The rocks above were very grave, too, and grim and still against the even blue sky. Across their purplish gray a waterfall streaked down struck crystal by the sun. An eagle turned in great, swinging circles. Sheila had an exquisite lifting of heart, a sense of entire fusion, body blessed by spirit, spirit blessed by body.

She felt a distinct pleasure in the flapping of her short, sun-filled hair against her neck, at the pony's motion between her unhampered legs, at the moist warmth of his neck under her hand--and this physical pleasure seemed akin to the ecstasy of prayer.

She came at last to a difficult, narrow, canon trail, where the pony hopped skillfully over fallen trees, until, for very weariness of his choppy, determined efforts, she dismounted, tied him securely, and made the rest of her climb on foot. Hidden Creek tumbled near her and its voice swelled. All at once, round the corner of a great wall of rock, she came upon the head. It gushed out of the mountain-side in a tumult of life, not in a single stream, but in many frothy, writhing earth-snakes of foam. She sat for an hour and watched this mysterious birth from the mountain-side, watched till the pretty confusion of the water, with its half-interpreted voices, had dizzied and dazed her to the point of complete forgetfulness of self. She had entered into a sort of a trance, a Nirvana ... She shook herself out of it, ate her lunch and scrambled quickly back to "n.i.g.g.e.r Baby." It was late afternoon when she crossed the mountain glades. Their look had mysteriously changed. There was something almost uncanny now about their brilliance in the sunset light, and when she rode into the streaked darkness of the woods, they were full of ghostly, unintelligible sounds. To rest her muscles she was riding with her right leg thrown over the horn as though on a side saddle--a great ma.s.s of flowers was tied in front of her. She had opened her shirt at the neck and her head was bare. She was singing to keep up her heart. Then, suddenly, she had no more need of singing. She saw Cosme walking toward her up the trail.

His face lacked all its vivid color. It was rather haggard and stern. The devils he had swept out of his heart a fortnight earlier had, since then, been violently entertained. He stepped out of the path and waited for her, his hands on his hips. But, as she rode down, she saw this look melt. The blood crept up to his cheeks, the light to his eyes. It was like a rock taking the sun. She had smiled at him with all the usual exquisite grace and simplicity. When she came beside him, she drew rein, and at the same instant he put his hand on the pony's bridle. He looked up at her dumbly, and for some reason she, too, found it impossible to speak. She could see that he was breathing fast through parted lips and that the lips were both cruel and sensitive. His hand slid back along "n.i.g.g.e.r Baby's" neck, paused, and rested on her knee. Then, suddenly, he came a big step closer, threw both his arms, tightening with a python's strength, about her and hid his face against her knees.

"Sheila," he said thickly. He looked up with a sort of anguish into her face. "Sheila, if you are not fit to be the mother of my children, you are _sure_ fit for any man to love."

Her soft, slim body hardened against him even before her face. They stared at each other for a minute.

"Let me get down," said Sheila.

He stepped back, not quite understanding. She dropped off the horse, dragging her flowers with her, and faced him. She did not feel small or slender. She felt as high as a hill, although she had to look up at him so far. Her anger had its head against the sky.

"Why do you talk about a man's love?" she asked him with a queer sort of patience. "I think--I hope--that you don't know anything about a man's love, oh, the _way_ men love!" She thought with swift pain of Jim, of Sylvester; "Oh, the _way_ they love!" And she found that, under her breath, she was sobbing, "d.i.c.kie! d.i.c.kie!" as though her heart had called.

"Will you take back your horse, please?" she said, choking over these sobs which hurt her more at the moment than he had hurt her. "I'll never ride on him again. Don't come back here. Don't try to see me any more. I suppose it--it--the way you love me--is because I was a barmaid, because you heard people speak of me as 'Hudson's Queen.'" She conquered one of the sobs. "I thought that after you'd looked into my face so hard that night and stopped yourself from--from--my lips, that you had understood."

She shook her head from side to side so violently, so childishly, that the short hair lashed across her eyes. "No one ever will understand!" She ran away from him and cried under her breath, "d.i.c.kie! d.i.c.kie!"

She ran straight into the living-room and stopped in the middle of the floor. Her arms were full of the flowers she had pulled down from "n.i.g.g.e.r Baby's" neck.

"What did you want to bring in all that truck--?" Miss Blake began, rising from the pianola, then stopped. "What's the matter with you?" she asked. "Did your young man find you? I sent him up the trail." Her red eyes sparkled.

"He insulted me!" gasped Sheila. "He dared to insult me!" She was dramatic with her helpless young rage. "He said I wasn't fit to--to be the mother of his children. And"--she laughed angrily, handling behind Cosme's back the weapon that she had been too merciful to use--"and _his_ mother is a murderess, found guilty of murder--and of worse!"

A sort of ripple of sound behind made her turn.

Cosme had followed her, was standing in the open door, and had heard her speech. The weapon had struck home, and she saw how it had poisoned all his blood.

He vanished without a word. Sheila turned back to Miss Blake a paler face. She let fall all her flowers.

"Now he'll never come back," she said.

She climbed up the ladder to her loft.

There she sat for an hour, listening to the silence. Her mind busied itself with trivial memories. She thought of Amelia Plecks.... It would have comforted her to hear that knock and the rattle of her dinner tray.

The little sitting-room at Hudson's Hotel, with its bit of tapestry and its yellow tea-set and its vases filled with flowers, seemed to her memory as elaborate and artificial as the boudoir of a French princess.

Farther than Millings had seemed from her old life did this dark little gabled attic seem from Millings. What was to be the end of this strange wandering, this withdrawing of herself farther and farther into the lonely places! She longed for the noise of Babe's hearty, irrepressible voice with its smack of chewing, of her step coming up the stairs to that little bedroom under Hudson's gaudy roof. Could it be possible that she was homesick for Millings? For the bar with its lights and its visitors and its big-ap.r.o.ned guardian? Her lids were actually smarting with tears at the recollection of Carthy's big Irish face.... He had been such a good, faithful watch-dog. Were men always like that--either watch-dogs or wolves? The simile brought her back to Hidden Creek. It grew darker and darker, a heavy darkness; the night had a new soft weight. There began to be a sort of whisper in the stillness--not the motion of pines, for there was no wind. Perhaps it was more a sensation than a sound, of innumerable soft numb fingers working against the silence ... Sheila got up, shivering, lighted her candle, and went over to the small, four-paned window under the eaves. She pressed her face against it and started back.

Things were flying toward her. She opened the sash and a whirling scarf of stars flung itself into the room. It was snowing. The night was blind with snow.

CHAPTER IX

WORK AND A SONG