The Lighted Match Part 1

The Lighted Match.

by Charles Neville Buck.

CHAPTER I

AN OMEN IS CONSTRUED

"When a feller an' a gal washes their hands in the same basin at the same time, it's a tol'able good sign they won't git married this year."

The oracle spoke through the bearded lips of a farmer perched on the top step of his cabin porch. The while he construed omens, a setter pup industriously gnawed at his boot-heels.

The girl was bending forward, her fingers spread in a tin basin, as the man at her elbow poured water slowly from a gourd-dipper. Heaped, in disorder against the cabin wall, lay their red hunting-coats, crops, and riding gauntlets.

The oracle tumbled the puppy down the steps and watched its return to the attack. Then with something of melancholy retrospect in his pale eyes he pursued his reflections. "Now there was Sissy Belmire an' Bud Thomas, been keeping company for two years, then washed hands in common at the Christian Endeavor picnic an'--" He broke off to shake his head in sorrowing memory.

The young man, holding his muddied digits over the water, paused to consider the matter.

Suddenly his hands went down into the basin with a splash.

"It is now the end of October," he enlightened; "next year comes in nine weeks."

The sun was dipping into a cloud-bank already purpled and gold-rimmed.

Shortly it would drop behind the bristling summit-line of the hills.

The girl looked down at tell-tale streaks of red clay on the skirt of her riding habit, and shook her head. "'Twill never, never do to go back like this," she sighed. "They'll know I've come a cropper, and they fancy I'm as breakable as Sevres. There will be no end of questions."

The young man dropped to his knees and began industriously plying a brush on the damaged skirt. The farmer took his eyes from the puppy for an upward glance. His face was solicitous.

"When I saw that horse of yours fall down, it looked to me like he was trying to jam you through to China. You sure lit hard!"

"It didn't hurt me," she laughed as she thrust her arms into the sleeves of her pink coat. "You see, we thought we knew the run better than the whips, and we chose the short cut across your meadow. My horse took off too wide at that stone fence. That's why he went down, and why we turned your house into a port of repairs. You have been very kind."

The trio started down the gra.s.s-grown pathway to the gate where the hunters stood hitched. The young man dropped back a few paces to satisfy himself that she was not concealing some hurt. He knew her half-masculine contempt for acknowledging the fragility of her s.e.x.

Rea.s.surance came as he watched her walking ahead with the unconscious grace that belonged to her pliant litheness and expressed itself in her superb, almost boyish carriage.

When they had mounted and he had reined his bay down to the side of her roan, he sat studying her through half-closed, satisfied eyes though he already knew her as the Moslem priest knows the Koran. While they rode in silence he conned the inventory. Slim uprightness like the strength of a young poplar; eyes that played the whole color-gamut between violet and slate-gray, as does the Mediterranean under sun and cloud-bank; lips that in repose hinted at melancholy and that broke into magic with a smile. Then there was the suggestion of a thought-furrow between the brows and a chin delicately chiseled, but resolute and fascinatingly uptilted.

It was a face that triumphed over mere prettiness with hints of challenging qualities; with individuality, with possibilities of purpose, with glints of merry humor and unspoken sadness; with deep-sleeping potentiality for pa.s.sion; with a hundred charming whimsicalities.

The eyes were just now fixed on the burning beauty of the sunset and the thought-furrow was delicately accentuated. She drew a long, deep breath and, letting the reins drop, stretched out both arms toward the splendor of the sky-line.

"It is so beautiful--so beautiful!" she cried, with the rapture of a child, "and it all spells Freedom. I should like to be the freest thing that has life under heaven. What is the freest thing in the world?"

She turned her face on him with the question, and her eyes widened after a way they had until they seemed to be searching far out in the fields of untalked-of things, and seeing there something that clouded them with disquietude.

"I should like to be a man," she went on, "a man and a _hobo_." The furrow vanished and the eyes suddenly went dancing. "That is what I should like to be--a hobo with a tomato-can and a fire beside the railroad-track."

The man said nothing, and she looked up to encounter a steady gaze from eyes somewhat puzzled.

His pupils held a note of pained seriousness, and her voice became responsively vibrant as she leaned forward with answering gravity in her own.

"What is it?" she questioned. "You are troubled."

He looked away beyond her to the pine-topped hills, which seemed to be marching with lances and ragged pennants, against the orange field of the sky. Then his glance came again to her face.

"They call me the Shadow," he said slowly. "You know whose shadow that means. These weeks have made us comrades, and I am jealous because you are the sum of two girls, and I know only one of them. I am jealous of the other girl at home in Europe. I am jealous that I don't know why you, who are seemingly subject only to your own fancy, should crave the freedom of the hobo by the railroad track."

She bent forward to adjust a twisted martingale, and for a moment her face was averted. In her hidden eyes at that moment, there was deep suffering, but when she straightened up she was smiling.

"There is nothing that you shall not know. But not yet--not yet! After all, perhaps it's only that in another incarnation I was a vagrant bee and I'm homesick for its irresponsibility."

"At all events"--he spoke with an access of boyish enthusiasm--"I 'thank whatever G.o.ds may be' that I have known you as I have. I'm glad that we have not just been idly rich together. Why, Cara, do you remember the day we lost our way in the far woods, and I foraged corn, and you scrambled stolen eggs? We were forest folk that day; primitive as in the years when things were young and the best families kept house in caves."

The girl nodded. "I approve of my shadow," she affirmed.

The smile of enthusiasm died on his face and something like a scowl came there.

"The chief trouble," he said, "is that altogether too decent brute, Pagratide. I don't like double shadows; they usually stand for confused lights."

"Are you jealous of Pagratide?" she laughed. "He pretends to have a similar sentiment for you."

"Well," he conceded, laughing in spite of himself, "it does seem that when a European girl deigns to play a while with her American cousins, Europe might stay on its own side of the pond. This Pagratide is a commuter over the Northern Ocean track. He hara.s.ses the Atlantic with his goings and comings."

"The Atlantic?" she echoed mockingly.

"Possibly I was too modest," he amended. "I mean me and the Atlantic--particularly me."

From around the curve of the road sounded a tempered shout. The girl laughed.

"You seem to have summoned him out of s.p.a.ce," she suggested.

The man growled. "The local from Europe appears to have arrived." He gathered in his reins with an almost vicious jerk which brought the bay's head up with a snort of remonstrance.

A horseman appeared at the turn of the road. Waving his hat, he put spurs to his mount and came forward at a gallop. The newcomer rode with military uprightness, softened by the informal ease of the polo-player.

Even at the distance, which his horse was lessening under the insistent pressure of his heels, one could note a boyish charm in the frankness of his smile and an eagerness in his eyes.

"I have been searching for you for centuries at least," he shouted, with a pleasantly foreign accent, which was rather a nicety than a fault of enunciation, "but the quest is amply rewarded!"

He wheeled his horse to the left with a precision that again bespoke the cavalryman, and bending over the girl's gauntleted hand, kissed her fingers in a manner that added to something of ceremonious flourish much more of individual homage. Her smile of greeting was cordial, but a degree short of enthusiasm.

"I thought--" she hesitated. "I thought you were on the other side."

The newcomer's laugh showed a glistening line of the whitest teeth under a closely-cropped dark mustache.

"I have run away," he declared. "My honored father is, of course, furious, but Europe was desolate--and so--" He shrugged his shoulders.