She had come very close to madness, and now her brain was dumb and dark as though it had been shut into a blank-walled cell. She stood with her hands hanging. She had no will nor wish to pray. The knowledge had come to her that if she went out and looked this winter Pan in the face, her brain would snap, either to life or death. It would burst its prison ... She stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, through the immense cold height of air up at the stars.

All at once a door flew open in her soul and she knew G.o.d ... no visible presence and yet an enveloping reality, the G.o.d of the savage earth, of the immense sky, of the stars, the G.o.d unsullied and untempted by man's worship, no G.o.d that she had ever known, had ever dreamed of, had ever prayed to before. She did not pray to Him now. She let her soul stand open till it was filled as were the stars and the earth with light....

The next day Sheila found her voice and sang at her work. She gave herself an overwhelming task of cleaning and scrubbing. She was on her knees like a charwoman, sniffing the strong reek of suds, when there came a knocking at her door. She leapt up with pounding heart. But the knocking was more like a sc.r.a.ping and it was followed by a low whine. For a second Sheila's head filled with a fog of terror and then came a homely little begging bark, just the throaty, snuffling sob of a homeless puppy.

Sheila took Cosme's six-shooter, saw that it was loaded, and, standing in the shelter of the door, she slowly opened it. A few moments later the gun lay a yard away on the soapy, steaming floor and Berg was held tight in her arms. His ecstasy of greeting was no greater than her ecstasy of welcome. She cried and laughed and hugged and kissed him. That night, after a mighty supper, he slept on her bed across her feet. Two or three times she woke and reached her hand down to caress his rough thick coat.

The warmth of his body mounted from her feet to her heart. She thought that he had been sent to her by that new G.o.d. As for Berg, he had found his G.o.d again, the taming touch of a small human hand.

It was in May, one morning in May--she had long ago lost count of her days--when Sheila stepped across her sill and saw the ground. Just a patch it was, no bigger than a tablecloth, but it made her catch her breath. She knelt down and ran her hands across it, sifted some gravel through her fingers. How strange and various and colorful were the atoms of stone, rare as jewels to her eyes so long used to the white and violet monotony of snow. Beyond the gravel, at the very edge of the drift, a slender crescent of green startled her eyes and--yes--there were a dozen valorous little golden flowers, as flat and round as fairy doubloons.

Attracted by her cry, Berg came out, threw up his nose, and snuffed.

Spring spoke loudly to his nostrils. There was sap, rabbits were about--all of it no news to him. Sheila sat down on the sill and hugged him close. The sun was warm on his back, on her hands, on the boards beneath her.

"May--May--May--" she whispered, and up in the firs quite suddenly, as though he had thrown reserve to the four winds, a bluebird repeated her "May--May--May" on three notes, high, low, and high again, a little musical stumble of delight. It had begun again--that whistling-away of winter fear and winter hopelessness.

The birds sang and built and the May flies crept up through the snow and spun silver in the air for a brief dazzle of life.

The sun was so warm that Berg and Sheila dozed on their doorsill. They did little else, these days, but dream and doze and wait.

The snow melted from underneath, sinking with audible groans of collapse and running off across the frozen ground to swell Hidden Creek. The river roared into a yellow flood, tripped its trees, sliced at its banks. Sheila snowshoed down twice a day to look at it. It was a sufficient barrier, she thought, between her and the world. And now, she had attained to the savage joy of loneliness. She dreaded change.

Above all she dreaded Hilliard. That warmth of his beauty had faded utterly from her senses. It seemed as faint as a fresco on a long-buried wall. Intrusion must bring anxiety and pain, it might bring fear. She had had long communion with her stars and the G.o.d whose name they signaled. She, with her dog friend under her hand, had come to something very like content.

The roar of Hidden Creek swelled and swelled. After the snow had shrunk into patches here and there under the pines and against hilly slopes, there was still the melting of the mountain glaciers.

"n.o.body can possibly cross!" Sheila exulted. "A man would have to risk his life." And it was in one of those very moments of her savage self-congratulation when there came the sound of nearing hoofs.

She was sitting on her threshold, watching the slow darkness, a sifting-down of ashes through the still air. It was so very still that the little new moon hung there above the firs like faint music. Silver and gray, and silver and green, and violet--Sheila named the delicacies of dappled light. The stars had begun to shake little shivers of radiance through the firs. They were softer than the winter stars--their keenness melted by the warm blue of the air. Sheila sat and held her knees and smiled. The distant, increasing tumult of the river, so part of the silence that it seemed no sound at all, lulled her--Then--above it--the beat of horse's hoofs.

At first she just sat empty of sensation except for the shock of those faint thuds of sound. Then her heart began to beat to bursting; with dread, with a suffocation of suspense. She got up, quiet as a thief. The horse stopped. There came a step, rapid and eager. She fled like a furtive shadow into the house, fell on her knees there by the hearth, and hid her face against the big hide-covered chair. Her eyes were full of cold tears. Her finger-tips were ice. She was shaking--shuddering, rather--from head to foot. The steps had come close, had struck the threshold. There they stopped. After a pause, which her pulses filled with shaken rhythm, her name was spoken--So long it had been since she had heard it that it fell on her ear like a foreign speech.

"Sheila! Sheila!"

She lifted her head sharply. It was not Hilliard's voice.

"Sheila--" There was such an agony of fear in the softly spoken syllables, there was such a weight of dread on the breath of the speaker, that, for very pity, Sheila forgot herself. She got up from the floor and moved dazedly to meet the figure on the threshold. It was dimly outlined against the violet evening light. Sheila came up quite close and put her hands on the tense, hanging arms. They caught her. Then she sobbed and laughed aloud, calling out in her astonishment again and again, softly, incredulously--

"_You_, d.i.c.kie? Oh, d.i.c.kie, d.i.c.kie, it's--_you_?"

CHAPTER XIV

SHEILA AND THE STARS

Hilliard's first messenger had been hindered by death. Several times it seemed that his second messenger would suffer the same grim prevention.

But this second messenger was young and set like steel to his purpose. He left the railroad at Millings, hired a horse, crossed the great plain above the town and braved the Pa.s.s, dangerous with overbalanced weights of melting snow. There, on the lonely Hill, he had his first encounter with that Arch-Hinderer. A snow-slide caught him and he left his horse buried, struggling out himself from the cold smother like a maimed insect to lie for hours by the road till breath and life came back to him. He got himself on foot to the nearest ranch, and there he hired a fresh horse and reached Rusty, at the end of the third day.

Rusty was overshadowed by a tragedy. The body of the trapper, Hilliard's first messenger, had been found under the melting snow, a few days before, and to the white-faced young stranger was given that stained and withered letter in which Hilliard had excused and explained his desertion.

Nothing, at Rusty, had been heard of Sheila. No one knew even that she had ever left Miss Blake's ranch--the history of such lonely places is a sealed book from snowfall until spring. Their tragedies are as dumb as the tragedies of animal life. No one had ever connected Sheila's name with Hilliard's. No one knew of his plans for her. The trapper had set off without delay, not even going back to his house, some little distance outside of Rusty, to tell his wife that he would be bringing home a lodger with him. There was, to be sure, at the office a small bundle of letters all in the same hand addressed to Miss Arundel. They had to wait, perforce, till the snow-bound country was released.

"It's not likely even now," sly and twinkling Lander of the hotel told d.i.c.kie, "that you can make it to Miss Blake's place. No, sir, nor to Hilliard's neither. Hidden Creek's up. She's sure some flood this time of the year. It's as much as your life's good for, stranger."

But d.i.c.kie merely smiled and got for himself a horse that was "good in deep water." And he rode away from Rusty without looking back.

He rode along a lush, wet land of roaring streams, and, on the bank of Hidden Creek, there was a roaring that drowned even the beating of his heart. The flood straddled across his path like Apollyon.

A dozen times the horse refused the ford--at last with a desperate toss of his head he made a plunge for it. Almost at once he was swept from the cobbled bed. He swam st.u.r.dily, but the current whirled him down like a straw--d.i.c.kie slipped from the saddle on the upper side so that the water pressed him close to the horse, and, even when they both went under, he held to the animal with hands like iron. This saved his life.

Five blind, black, gasping minutes later, the horse pulled him up on the farther bank and they stood trembling together, dazed by life and the warmth of the air.

It was growing dark. The heavy shadow of the mountain fell across them and across the swollen yellow river they had just escaped. There began to be a dappling light--the faint shining of that slim young moon. She was just a silver curl there above the edge of the hill. In an hour she would set. Her brightness was as shy and subtle as the brightness of a smile.

The messenger pulled his trembling body to the wet saddle and, looking about for landmarks that had been described to him, he found the faint trail to Hilliard's ranch. Presently he made out the low building under its firs. He dropped down, freed the good swimmer and turned him loose, then moved rapidly across the little clearing. It was all so still.

Hidden Creek alone made a threatening tumult. d.i.c.kie stopped before he came to the door. He stood with his hands clenched at his sides and his chin lifted. He seemed to be speaking to the sky. Then he stumbled to the door and called,

"Sheila--"

She seemed to rise up from the floor and stand before him and put her hands on his arms.

A sort of insanity of joy, of childish excitement came upon Sheila when she had recognized her visitor. She flitted about the room, she laughed, she talked half-wildly--it had been such a long silence--in broken, ejaculatory sentences. It was d.i.c.kie's dumbness, as he leaned against the door, looking at her, that sobered her at last. She came close to him again and saw that he was shivering and that streams of water were running from his clothes to the floor.

"Why, d.i.c.kie! How wet you are!"--Again she put her hands on his arms--he was indeed drenched. She looked up into his face. It was gray and drawn in the uncertain light.

"That dreadful river! How did you cross it!"

d.i.c.kie smiled.

"It would have taken more than a river to stop me," he said in his old, half-demure, half-ironical fashion. And that was all Sheila ever heard of that brief epic of his journey. He drew away from her now and went over to the fire.

"d.i.c.kie"--she followed him--"tell me how you came here. How you knew where I was. Wait--I'll get you some of Cosme's clothes--and a cup of tea."

This time, exhausted as he was, d.i.c.kie did not fail to stand up to take the cup she brought him. He shook his head at the dry clothes. He didn't want Hilliard's things, thank you; he was drying out nicely by the fire.

He wasn't a bit cold. He sat and drank the tea, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. He was, after all, just the same, she decided--only more so. His d.i.c.kie-ness had increased a hundredfold. There was still that quaint look of having come in from the fairy doings of a midsummer night. Only, now that his color had come back and the light of her lamp shone on him, he had a firmer and more vital look. His sickly pallor had gone, and the blue marks under his eyes--the eyes were fuller, deeper, more brilliant. He was steadier, firmer. He had definitely shed the pitifulness of his childhood. And Sheila did not remember that his mouth had so sweet a firm line from sensitive end to end of the lips.

Her impatience was driving her heart faster at every beat.

"You _must_, please, tell me everything now, d.i.c.kie," she pleaded, sitting on the arm of Hilliard's second chair. Her cheeks burned; her hair, grown to an awkward length, had come loose from a ribbon and fallen about her face and shoulders. She had made herself a frock of orange-colored cotton stuff--something that Hilliard had bought for curtains. It was a startling color enough, but it could not dim her gypsy beauty of wild dark hair and browned skin with which the misty and spiritual eyes and the slightly straightened and saddened lips made exquisite disharmony.

d.i.c.kie looked up at her a minute. He put down his cup and got to his feet. He went to stand by the shelf, half-turned from her.

"Tell me, at least," she begged in a cracked key of suspense, "do you know anything about--_Hilliard_?"

At that d.i.c.kie was vividly a victim of remorse.

"Oh--Sheila--d.a.m.n! I _am_ a beast. Of course--he's all right. Only, you see, he's been hurt and is in the hospital. That's why I came."

"You?--Hilliard?--d.i.c.kie. I can't really understand." She pushed back her hair with the same gesture she had used in the studio when Sylvester Hudson's offer of "a job" had set her brain whirling.