Peak and Prairie Part 4

"Yes, in England, or in Ireland, or anywhere round there. If I'd shot so much as a miserable pheasant on your land you'd have--you'd have _had me up before the bailey_!"

Clearly the girl's reading of English fiction had confused her ideas of British magistracy. But Sir Bryan was generous, and overlooked side issues.

"Is this your land?" he asked, gazing at the wild mountain side, and then at the flaming cheeks of the girl. She stood there like an animated bit of autumn coloring.

"Of course it's my land," she declared.

"But I didn't know it was your land."

"You knew it wasn't _yours_!" she cried vehemently.

Poor Sir Bryan was hopelessly bewildered. The great West was, after all, not quite like the rest of the world, if charming young ladies owned the mountain sides, danced attendance upon by bears of dangerous aspect and polished manners. He blushed violently, but he did not look in the least awkward.

"I wish you would tell me your name," he said, feeling that if this remarkable young lady possessed anything so commonplace as a name, the knowledge of it might place him on a more equal footing with her.

"Certainly, Mr. Bryan," she replied. "My name is Merriman; Kathleen Merriman," and she looked at him with great dignity but with no relenting.

"Well, Miss Merriman, I don't suppose there's any good in talking about it. My being awfully sorry doesn't help matters any. I don't see that there's anything to be done about it, but to have the carca.s.s carted off your land as soon as may be."

"Carted off my land!" the girl cried, with kindling indignation. "You need not trouble yourself to do anything of the kind." Then, with a sudden change to the elegiac, she fixed her mournful gaze upon her departed friend and said, "I shall bury him where he lies!"

In this softened mood she seemed less formidable, and Sir Bryan so far plucked up his spirit as to make a suggestion.

"Perhaps I could help you," he said. "If I had a shovel, or something, I think I could dig a first-rate grave."

The fair mourner looked at him doubtfully, and then she looked at his namesake, and apparently the poetic justice of the thing appealed to her.

"There's a spade over at the house," she said, "and I don't know that it's any more than fair that you should bury him."

Sir Bryan's spirits rose still higher at the hope of partial expiation of his crime; but with his rising spirits came a premonition of a good healthy appet.i.te which would soon be due, and he asked meekly: "Would you mind, then, if I were to go back to town first, to get something to eat? A person doesn't dig so well, I suppose, on an empty stomach."

"No, you'd better stay and get your dinner with me. It will take you pretty much all day to bury Brian. You probably never buried a bear before," she added, as patronizingly as if she herself had been a professional grave-digger, "and you don't know what a piece of work it's going to be."

They started to push their way through the scrub-oaks.

"Shall I lead your horse for you?" Sir Bryan asked.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE VAST SEA OF THE PRAIRIE."]

"No, thank you. Comrag will follow, all right;" and Comrag did follow, so close upon their heels, that Sir Bryan was in momentary expectation of being trampled upon.

Comrag was an unbeautiful beast, and he permitted himself startling liberties; crowding himself in between his mistress and her companion, helping himself without ceremony to a bunch of asters which Sir Bryan had in his hand, and neighing straight into the young baronet's ear as they came in sight of the house.

The "house" was a mere hut, painted red, entirely dwarfed by an ungainly chimney of rough stone. The little hut was built against a huge boulder, which towered above the chimney itself, and looked as though it had stood there since the foundation of the earth. There was a rustic veranda along the front of this diminutive dwelling, which stood on a slight eminence; and, as Sir Bryan stepped upon the veranda, he drew a long breath of amazement and delight. Looking down over the broad, oak-clad slope of the mountain, he beheld the vast sea of the prairie, stretching for leagues upon leagues away to the low horizon. From that height the view seemed limitless, and the illusion of the sea, which always hovers over the prairies, was complete.

As his hostess came out with a long-handled spade in her hand, he cried, "That is the most magnificent thing I ever saw!"

She did not answer immediately, but stood leaning upon the spade, and gazing forth as intently as if it had been to her too a revelation.

Then she drew a long breath and said, in a rapt tone, as though the words came to her one by one: "Yes, it makes you feel sometimes as if your soul would get away from you."

They stood there for a while, watching the cloud-shadows swimming upon that mystic sea. The smoke of an express train on the horizon seemed fairly to crawl, so great was the distance.

"That looks like the smoke of a steamer," Sir Bryan observed.

"Then you think it seems like the sea, as everybody else does," she answered. "I never saw the sea, myself, but I don't believe it can be finer than this."

There was another pause, and then, with a sudden change of mood, to which she seemed subject, the rapt wors.h.i.+pper turned her thoughts to practical things, saying briskly: "Here's your spade, Mr. Bryan. You had better go and begin, while I get the dinner. I'll fire a shot when it's ready."

Sir Bryan obediently took the spade.

"How am I to find my way to the bear?" he asked.

All about the little clearing was an unbroken wilderness of scrub-oaks, gorgeous but bewildering.

"Why, you can just follow Comrag's tracks," she said, pointing toward the spot where the hoof-prints emerged from the brush. "You'd better leave your rifle here," she added with some asperity, "You might take a fancy to shoot Comrag if he strayed your way."

It was Sir Bryan Parkhurst's first attempt at digging, and he devoutly hoped it might be his last. He thought at first that he should never get his spade inserted into the earth at all, so numerous and exasperating were the hindrances it met with. The hardest and grittiest of stones, tangled roots, and solid cakes of earth, which seemed to cohere by means of some subterranean cement, offered a complicated resistance, which was not what he had expected of Mother Earth. He began to fear that that much bepraised dame was something of a vixen after all.

The other Brian lay, meanwhile, in all the dignity and solemnity of funeral state, awaiting burial. As Sir Bryan toiled at his thankless task he found himself becoming strangely impressed. There seemed to be a weird and awesome significance in the scene. He did not know why it was, but the beetling crags above him, the consciousness of the marvellous plains below, the rhythmic murmur of the wind in the pine trees near at hand, the curious impenetrableness of the old earth, the kings.h.i.+p of death a.s.serting itself in the motionless brute which he had killed, but which he was powerless to make alive again--all these weird and unaccustomed influences seemed to be clutching at his imagination, taking liberties with his sense of ident.i.ty. He had just about reached the conclusion that it was all a mistake about his being anybody in particular, when a shot rang out and reminded him that he was, at any rate, ravenously hungry.

Five minutes later he had washed his hands at the toy sink of a toy kitchen and was seated at a snowy table on the little veranda, partaking of a mutton stew which seemed a dish fit for the G.o.ds.

It had been something of a shock to Sir Bryan to find places laid for only two. He had never before enjoyed a _tete-a-tete_ meal with a young lady, and it was some minutes before he could rid his mind of the impression that an irate chaperon was about to appear from behind the boulder, or, for the matter of that, from the depths of the earth itself. His recent experience of the difficulty of penetrating the surface of the earth might have given him a sense of security in that direction, had he not cherished an exaggerated opinion of the prowess of the traditional chaperon in thwarting the pleasures of the young. The comeliness, too, of his hostess led him, by inference, to suppose that the chaperon in question would prove to be of a peculiarly vicious and aggressive type. No such apparition came, however, to disturb his satisfaction, and he gradually came to believe in the lawfulness of the situation. His face may have betrayed something of the questionings which were racking his mind, for the self-possessed Kathleen, after heaping his plate with stew for the second time, gave him an elder-sisterly look, and said: "Mr. Bryan, you are such a very discreet young man, that I believe I will answer all the questions you are dying to ask."

Sir Bryan blushed, as he always hated himself for doing, and the nut-brown maid continued:

"Yes, I live here all alone. I am taking up a claim. No. n.o.body molests me, and I get on beautifully. Sometimes my friends come up and spend a few days with me, but not often. Comrag and I do the marketing once or twice a week. I've got a lovely cool cellar up against the boulder under the house."

All this she said like a child repeating a lesson she has learned by rote, which the teacher wants to hear, but which the child finds rather uninteresting. But Sir Bryan listened as if it had been the most exciting tale he had ever heard. Thus encouraged she proceeded with the dry statement of facts.

"I've only got to stay here a month longer to secure the claim. I've got three hundred acres, and it has cost me just three hundred dollars to take it up and to build my house and Comrag's stall. I could sell out to-morrow for five hundred dollars, but I don't know that I would sell for five thousand. Because I have such a beautiful time here. I feel somehow as if I had struck root."

Sir Bryan knew exactly what she meant. In spite of the sailor hat and s.h.i.+rt waist, she had the air of having grown up among the rocks and glowing oak leaves. He said nothing, but his attentive att.i.tude asked for more.

"Oh, yes! and about Brian Boru," she proceeded. "I found him last June, lying up against a tree with his leg broken. I fed him until his leg was mended, and--and"--with a little catch in her breath--"he adored me! See how green it looks off to the south," she hastened to add, brus.h.i.+ng her hand across her eyes.

An hour after dinner, as Sir Bryan still labored at that contumacious grave, his hostess came and seated herself upon the rock, whence he, in the first flush of triumph, had surveyed the dead bear. Sir Bryan could not but feel flattered by this kind attention, and, being particularly anxious to acquit himself creditably before so distinguished a spectator, he naturally became more and more awkward at his work.

The young lady considerately divided her attention between the futile efforts of the amateur grave-digger and the flippant behavior of a black and white magpie, which was perched on the branch of a dead pine near by, derisively jerking its long tail. She wondered whether the magpie perhaps shared her astonishment, that an able-bodied son of Erin should not take more naturally to a spade. She had supposed that, if there was one weapon that an Irishman thoroughly understood, it was that which her new acquaintance was struggling with. She c.o.c.ked her head on one side, with something of a magpie air, while a little crease appeared between her eyebrows.

"Why don't you coax it a little more?" she suggested.

Sir Bryan straightened himself up and stood there, very red in the face, trying to make out whether she was laughing at him. Then he laughed at himself and said, "I believe you are right. I was getting vindictive."

After that he seemed to get on better.

They buried the bear just as the heavy shadow of the mountain fell across their feet. By the time the last clod of earth had fallen upon the grave, the mountain shadow had found its way a hundred miles across the plains, and a narrow golden rim, like a magic circlet, glimmered on the horizon.