Heart's Kindred

To marry Bunchy, the Inger thought as he lounged in the street outside the Inn on her wedding night, was the worst that could come to her. He drifted into a saloon across the way, one of the meaner places, and on this night of plenty almost unfrequented. He sat down at a table in range with the doors of the Inn, and drank reflectively. That day that he had had her, what if he had galloped away with her to the foothills, to the camp, to the other side of somewhere? He sat thinking of her, wondering why he had not dared it, playing at what might have been.

On the table lay a San Francisco newspaper, three days old. As he drank he glanced at the headlines. “War May Last Another Year,” he read. “Reserves of Three Nations to be Called Out Within the Month.”

The thought had come to him before, since the money came. To-night he turned to it in a kind of relief: Why not go there? There was fighting worth a man’s hand. Drunken Indians, an outlaw or two, a horse thief strung up in a wink and all over – these were all that he knew of warfare. Was he to die with no more understanding than this of how a man might live and die? The thing was happening now – the adventure of the great guns and the many deaths. Yet he, a man like other men, sat here idle. He closed his eyes and lay with those men in the trenches, or leapt up to kill again and again at fifty yards, saw the men roll in torture, saw them red and grovelling in red… A lust of the thing came on him. He wanted it, as he wanted no other thing that his mind had ever played with. He forgot Jem Moor’s daughter in that imaginary desert. He swallowed and tasted and opened his eyes as on a forgotten world. He pounded the table for more liquor.

“Why don’t you go to the war, you scared, snivelling Pale-liver?” he demanded of the shuffling bartender.

The small man’s little red-rimmed and red-shot eyes lighted, and his lips drew back over black teeth.

“If I was a young dog like you, I’d be there stickin’ in the lead, you bet,” he said. “What you ’fraid of?”

“Nothin’,” said the Inger, suddenly; “I’m goin’!”

“Plough some of ’em up prime for me,” begged the old man. “I croaked two men myself afore I was your age. It were in a sheriff’s raid, though,” he regretfully added.

The Inger looked at him thoughtfully. It occurred to him that though he was credited with it, he himself had never killed a man in his life. Yet killing was a man’s job, and over there was the war, and he had the means to get to it. There was need of more to kill – and to be killed. And he had been hanging on a shelf of Whiteface for all these months!

He drained his glass and went to the door, as if the need to do something at once were upon him. He saw that the wedding guests were filling the streets, and moving into the Inn. All of Inch was out there – the women gorgeous in all that they had, and even some of the men dressed in the clothes which they wore on a journey. Already some were drunken, and all were loud with merriment, which they somehow felt was required of them, like eating three times a day or scorning a stranger. Everywhere there were children, who must needs go where the grown folk went or be left alone. “Parents Must Keep Children Off the Floor,” was posted on the walls of the Inch public dance halls.

Next to the office door, the door of the hotel bar stood open now, and by the array of cut colored paper hanging from the chandeliers, he guessed that the wedding was to be solemnized in there. This was natural – the bar was the largest room in the house, and the most magnificent in the town – the only bar, in fact, with a real mirror at the back. Moreover, Bunchy’s barkeeper was a man of parts, being a bass singer and a justice of the peace. With his apron laid aside, he was to give a tune while the guests assembled, and afterward it was he who was to perform the ceremony. Nobody thought of expecting the ceremony to be held in Jem Moor’s ’dobe.

It was Jem Moor himself who, while the wedding guests were still noisily passing in the hotel, the Inger saw coming down the street. He was neatly dressed in the best he had, and though one trouser leg had crept to the top of a boot, and his red cravat was under an ear, still he bore signs of a sometime careful toilet. He broke into an uneven run – the running of a man whose feet are old and sore – and disappeared in the doorway of the Inn office.

The Inger’s look followed him, speculatively.

“But one more drink and I could be over there makin’ more kinds of hell than usual,” he said to himself, and went back to the bar.

He was draining his glass when the sound of confused talk and movement came to him, and, as he wheeled, he saw that across the street the interior of the Inn bar and office were in an uproar. The wedding guests were rising, there were shouts and groans, and a shrill scream or two. Some came running to the street, and over all there burst occasional great jets of men’s laughter.

“’S up?” asked the old barkeeper behind him.

The Inger did not answer. He stood in the doorway waiting for something. He did not know what he waited for, but the imminent thing, whatever it was, held him still. A hope, which he could not have formulated, came shining slowly toward him, in him.

In a moment, Jem Moor emerged from the office door, still brokenly running, seeking to escape from those who crowded with him, questioning him. The Inger strolled from the doorway, across the street, took his way through the little group which fell back for him, and brought his hand down on the old man’s shoulder.

“Anything wrong?” he inquired.

Jem Moor looked up at him. He was pinched and the lines of his nose were drawn, and his lips were pulling.

“She’s skipped,” he said. “I’m in for ’Leven Hundred odd, to Bunchy.”

Something in the Inger leaped out and soared. He stood there, saying what he had to say, conscious all the time that as soon as might be he should be free to soar with it.

“Alone?” he demanded.

Jem Moor held out a scrap of paper. The Inger took it and read, the others peering over his arms and shoulders.

“Dad,” it said, “I can’t go Bunchy. I know what this’ll do to you, but I can’t never do it – I can’t. I’ve gone for good. Dear old Dad, don’t you hate me.

“Lory.”

The tears were running down Jem Moor’s face.

“‘Leven Hundred odd,” said he, “and I ain’t a red. Not a red.”

The Inger threw up his head.

“Lord Harry,” he cried. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Buck up!” he cried, bringing down his hand on Jem’s little shoulder. “And drink up! Come along in!”

He led the way to the Mission Saloon, and bade the man take orders for everybody. Then he went to the back of the place, and found for himself ink and a pen, and tore a leaf from a handy account book. When he had filled in the name of his bank, he wrote and signed:

“Pay to Bunchy Haight, Twelve Hundred Dollars and be damned to him.”

Then he wrote out a receipt to Jem Moor, with a blank for the sum and for Bunchy’s signature.

When he could, he drew Jem in a corner and thrust at him the papers. The little man stared at them, with a peculiarly ugly, square dropping of his jaw, and eyes pointed at top.

“Don’t bust,” said the Inger, “and don’t think it’s you. It ain’t you. The check isn’t drawn to you, is it? I want to hell-and-devil Bunchy some, that’s all. Shut up your mouth!” he added, when Jem tried gaspingly to thank him.

Then he got out of the place, where sharp music was beginning and the ten or twelve women were dancing among the tables, and went down the street, thronged now with the disappointed guests, intent on forcing the ruined evening to some wild festivity. When they called to him to join them, he hardly heard. He went straight through the town and shook it from him and met the desert, and took his own trail.

The night was now one of soft, thick blackness, on which the near stars pressed. The air had a sharp chill – as if it bore no essence of its own but hung empty of warmth when the daylight was drained from it. The stillness was insistent. In a place of water, left from the rains, and still deep enough to run in ripples over the sedge, frogs were in chorus.

There was a sentinel pepper tree on the edge of the town and here a mocking-bird sang out, once, and was still. These left behind, and the saw and crack and beat of the music dying, the Inger faced the dark, gave himself to the exultation which flowed in him, mounted with it to a new place.

The liquor which he had drunk was in his veins, and to this the part of him which understood all the rest of him credited his swimming delight. But separate from this, as his breath was separate, there came and went like a pulse, something else which he could not possibly have defined, born in him in the street, when he had heard Jem Moor’s bad news.

He threw out his arms and ran, staggering. What was there that he must do? Here he was, ready for it. What was there that he must do? Then he remembered. The War! He would have that. That was what he could do.

He stood still on the desert, and imagined himself one of thousands on the plain. What if he were with them there in the darkness? What if the rise of the sand were the edge of the opposite trenches, with men breathing behind them, waiting? With a drunken laugh, he pulled his revolver, and fired and shouted. Why, he could plough his way through anything. He should not go down – not he! But he should be fighting like this in the field of civilized men, and not taking his adventures piecemeal, in a back lot of the world, with a skulking sheriff or two and Bunchy for adversary. To-morrow! He would go to-morrow, and find what his life could give him.

But this other thing that was pulsing in him … the girl! What about her? Was he not to find her, was he not to have her? He closed his eyes and swam in the thought of her. War and the woman – suddenly he was aflame with them both.

When he went into the wood, he went singing. He himself was the centre of the night and of his universe. The wood, Whiteface, his journey, the war, lay ready to his hand as accessory and secondary to his consciousness. He felt his own life, and other life was its background. He made a long crying guttural noise, like an animal. He shook his great body and crashed through the undergrowth, the young saplings stinging his cheeks. To-morrow – he would be off to-morrow…

He emerged upon the little space which was his home. The fire had fallen and was a red glow, and a watching eye. Rolled in his blanket beside it lay his father, deeply breathing. In a moment the Inger became another being. He stood tense, stepped softly, entered quietly the open door of his hut.

Within something stirred, was silent, stirred again, with a movement as of garments. Out of the darkness, her voice came:

“Mr. Inger: … It’s Lory Moor.”

III

For a moment he thought that this would be a part of his crazy dreaming, and he said nothing. But then he knew that she had risen and was standing before him; and he heard her breath, taken tremblingly. Her words came rushing – almost the first words that he had ever heard her say:

“You been down there. You know. I don’t know where to go. Oh – don’t tell ’em!”

“Tell ’em,” he muttered, stupidly. “Tell ’em?”

“I can’t do it,” she said gaspingly. “I can’t – I can’t.”

She was sobbing, and the Inger, so lately a flame of intent and desire, did not dare to touch her, and had no least idea what to say to her. In a moment she was able to speak again.

“I thought I could hide here for a day or two,” she said, “till they quit huntin’. Then I could get away. Would you hide me, somehow? – would you?”

He was silent, trying to think, with a head not too clear, how best to do it; and she misunderstood.

“Don’t make me go back – don’t tell Dad and Bunchy! If you can’t hide me, I’ll go now,” she said.

“What you talkin’?” he said, roughly. “I’m thinkin’. Thinkin’ up how. Thinkin’ up how.” He put his hands to his temples. “My head don’t think,” he said thickly.

“Here in the hut,” she said, eagerly and clearly. “They’ll never think of comin’ up here. Why, I don’t hardly know you.”

“Won’t they though?” said the Inger, suddenly, and dimly remembered Bunchy, and the blow for the sake of the girl. Last, there came dancing to him something about a check for the debt to Bunchy which she had not paid.

“As it happens,” said the Inger, “this is jus’ the first place where they will come lookin’ for you. Jus’ the first place…”

“Why?” she cried.

“Nev’ you mind,” he said.

He could almost see her, standing within his door, her white face blooming from the black. But his sense of her was obscured to him by the need for immediate action, and by his utter present inability to cope with that need.

“How’d you come – to come – to come up here?” he asked curiously.

For a breath she hesitated, and there was a soft taking of breath in her answer.

“I didn’t know no woman I could tell,” she said, “nor no other decent man.”

From head to foot a fire went over the Inger, such as he had never known. And first he was weak with her words, and then he was jubilantly strong. He put them away, but they lay within him burning, where again and again he could turn to them for warmth.

“How – how’d you hit the trail up?” he asked almost gently.

Again she was silent for a moment, and her answer was very low.

“I’d been by here once-to-twice before,” she said.

Hazily he turned this over. The trail led only to his hut. No one ever came who had not come to be there. Unless —

He threw back his head as something new swam to consciousness. She stood quietly, waiting to hear what he would do. Some sense of this sudden new dependence on him beset him like words.

“They’s a way over the mountain,” he muttered. “I made it in that sheriff business. Can you take that?”

“I’ll go any way,” she said.

“It’s pretty rough,” he told her. “It’s pretty rough,” he repeated with intense care. “I’ll take you. I’ll take you,” he insisted thickly.

“You mean you’d go with me?” she asked.

“You’d never fin’ it if I didn’t,” he told her. “Y-you’d never fin’ it. Never.”

“I’ll go any way,” she repeated. “But I didn’t mean to – to come down on to you like that.”

“Tha’s nothing,” he said. “Tha’s nothing. Tha’s nothing.”

He put his hand to his head, with the need to touch it and to make it work properly. He had to think of things to do, and how could he do that? His father, for example – what should he do about him? He went a few steps without the door, and tried to consider, looking at the sleeping figure by the fire. The faint glow of the coals made a little ring of dim light. In it he stood, swaying.

“Oh my God,” she said, behind him. “You are drunk.”

“Li’l bit,” he admitted. “Li’l bit. Not enough to scare a b-baby.”

She put this away scornfully. “Scare nothin’,” she said sharply. “Can you keep to the trail? That’s all.”

He laughed foolishly. “Tha’s all right,” he repeated, “I can find trail, drunk or sober.”

She stood pressing her hands in and out and turning helplessly to the dark. The dark gave her back only the lights of Inch.

“There’s nothing else to do,” she said dully. “If you show me the trail, maybe I can keep you on it.”

In some indeterminate shame, he went without a word, brought his blanket, and turned again to the hut.

“I’ve got a kit,” she said. “It’s got enough to eat. Do you understand? Don’t get anything else. Oh, let’s start, let’s start!”

As he emerged, his hand had brushed the feathers of the wood duck. He took it down and slung it fumblingly to his roll of blanket. Less by taking thought than by old instinct, he remembered his cartridge belt, and found and strapped it on. Then he stood hesitating.

“Gotta tell ’em,” he suggested, looking at his father.

She had shouldered her pack and stood waiting.

“Why?” she demanded. “It’ll only be harder for him if they come. This way he won’t know, and he can tell ’em so.”

In this there was reason, but not, it seemed, enough reason. The Inger stood trying to recall something pressing on him for remembrance: if not his father, what was it that he must do or fetch, before he left. He put both hands to his head, but in there was only a current and a beating.

“There’s s’more to do,” he said indistinctly.

Lory Moor stepped toward him and laid her hand briskly on his shoulder, with a boy’s gesture of eager haste.

“The trail – the trail!” she said, with authority. “Find us the trail.”

Without a word he started, went round the end of the hut, and plunged into the wood, which ran down to the very wall. In a half dozen steps the ascent began.

Even by daylight the trail was little more than an irregular line of bent branches and blazed trunks. Since he had finished it, the Inger had taken it a dozen times by daylight with a boy’s delight in a secret way. By night he had never taken it at all. But he had the woodsman’s instinct and, now that his thoughts were stilled or lost in a maze of their own inconsequent making, this secondary consciousness was for a time paramount. He went as a man goes who treads his own ways, and though he went irregularly and sometimes staggeringly, he managed at first to keep to the course that he had taken.

Over the mountain by the trail to the railway station – that had become clear to him. When they should reach it or how the railway should serve, was not his concern at all. Meanwhile, here she was with him. He tried to get this straight, and cursed his head that only buzzed with the knowledge and whipped him with the need to keep to the trail.

“Lory Moor,” he tried to grasp it; “Jem Moor’s girl. She never married Bunchy at all. She’s here —with me. I’ve got her with me…”

The girl was not a pace behind him. She had stretched out her hand and laid it on his roll of blanket and thus, though seeing nothing, she was able to fit her steps somewhat to his, to halt when he halted, to swerve or to slow or to retrace. She was profoundly thankful for his consent to take her away, and in that consent she rested without thought or plan.

An hour passed before the Inger missed the trail. In a stretch fairly free of undergrowth, he stood still for a moment to take his bearings, and thrust out his hand against a declivity, sharp with fallen rock. To the right the wall extended to meet the abrupt shoulder of the slope; to the left it dropped away so that a stone, sent down, went crashing far below.

“Stay here,” the Inger commanded, and found his way up in a shower of falling rocks, to the summit of the obstruction. He clung to a tree, and listened. The mountain brook, which they should cross some rods ahead, was not yet audible. On the other side the rocks fell precipitately; and leaning out, he seemed to sense tree-tops.

“Look out!” he called, and clambered down again, and bade her wait while he went and came back and went and came back in vain. She heard him stumbling, no more fit to find a trail than to think his thoughts.

“I’m stumped,” he said. “We’ve got wrong somewheres.”

She answered nothing. She was sitting on the ground where he had left her. Her silence touched him somehow as a rebuke. “You think it’s because I’m drunk,” he said, in a challenge.

“I don’t think anything,” she answered. “Rest a little – then mebbe we can get right again.”

He flung himself down on his face. The scent of pine needles and dead leaves was there, waiting for him. The stillness of the wood took them both, and for a few minutes they were silent.

And as he lay there, with her sitting beside him, something of the desert, of an hour before, came running along his veins and took him, and, something, too, of the time when he had had her before him on his horse, galloping. When that time had been he could not say; but he remembered it with distinctness, and that day he had had his arms about her.

“We rode – on a horse,” he submitted, suddenly. “C’n you ’member that day?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Don’t talk,” she begged him, “just rest. I want to rest.”

The Inger was silent. His mind was busy trying to piece together what he knew of that day – of her there before him on his horse, of her face laughing at him as she ran away.

“You threw me a kiss,” he offered, after a pause.

“Don’t talk, don’t talk,” she begged him. “I can’t breathe – let me rest.”

“I wish it was that day now,” he said foolishly, and drew a deep breath, and lay quiet. But in a few minutes he roused himself, his mind struggling with a new problem. What a fool he was, wishing for that day, when here she was, just the same as then. What was the matter with this day?

“Wha’s the matter with this day?” he inquired, reasonably. Then he remembered. They were lost, of course. The trail was gone – gone clean off.

“Gone clean off,” he muttered, reproachfully. “Damn dirty trick to play.”

Then he was shot through with his dominant consciousness. Here she was, here she was – with him. There was something else, something that she had said which made a reason why he should not touch her. But what was that? It was gone – gone clean off, gone with the trail…

Back upon him came flooding the desire of the desert, as he had run with the thought of her and with the thought of battle. Then he had believed that she belonged to Bunchy. That was a lie and Bunchy was a fool. Everything was different, and now here she was and nobody knew…

He lifted himself, and scrambled forward toward her.

“We’re lost,” he said thickly. “Wha’d we care? Wha’d we care…”

He put out his arms, but they did not touch her. He swept a circle, and they did not enclose her. Alarmed, he rose and lurched forward, feeling out in all directions, an arm’s span. And she was not within his reach nor within the crazy length which he ran, with outspread hands, trying to find her.

At last his foot caught in a root and he fell, and lay there, and began quietly weeping. Now she was gone and the trail was gone. He was treated like a dog by both of them. He fumbled for his pack, but he had slipped that off when he climbed the rocks, and now that was gone too. He wept, and lay still. In a few moments he was sleeping.

IV

When he awoke, he looked into soft branches, gray in dim light. The whole mountain was lyric with birds. There was no other sound, save the lift and touch of branches, and the chatter of a squirrel, and there was as yet no sun.

He remembered. And with the memory, a rush of aching, eating shame seized on him and he closed his eyes again. Then he thought that he must have dreamed it all. And that it was impossible that such a thing should be. Yet here he was in the woods, where she had left him because he was a fool. Where had she gone? He sprang up, mad to find her, possessed by the need to make amends, and by the sheer need to find her.

As he sat up, he threw off his blanket, and he marvelled that this should have been covering him. Then he found himself looking into Lory Moor’s face.

She was sitting near him, wrapped in her own blanket, leaning against a tree. She was wide awake, and by all signs she had been so for a long time, for a great cluster of mountain violets lay on her blanket.

When she saw that he was awake, she smiled, and this seemed to the Inger the most marvellous thing that ever had befallen him: that she was there and that she smiled.

He looked at her silently, and slowly under the even brownness of his skin, the color rose from his throat to his forehead, and burned crimson. But more than this color of shame, it was his eyes that told. They were upon her, brown, deep, like the eyes of a dog that has disobeyed, and has come back. For a moment he looked at her, then he dropped his face in his hands.

She moved so quietly that he did not hear her rise. He merely felt her hand on his shoulder. And when he looked up again, she was sitting there beside him.

“Don’t,” she said.

He looked at her in amazement. Her look was gentle, her voice had been gentle.

“You mustn’t,” she said. “It’s all over now.”

“What do you think of me? What do you think of me?” he muttered, stupidly.

She shrugged lightly. “It don’t make any difference what I think of you,” she said. “Ain’t it whether I’m goin’ to get away from Inch or not? Ain’t that the idea?”

When he came to think of it, that was the immediate concern. With his first utterance he had blundered, as he had blundered since the moment when she had put herself in his keeping. None the less his misery was too sharp to dismiss. But he had no clear idea how to ask a woman’s forgiveness – a thing that he had never done in his life.