The Plow-Woman Part 36

The preacher smiled down, and to every side. Then he clucked to Shadrach. The tugs straightened. The wagon rolled slowly out of the post.

The sunlight shone upon the green box and the red wheels, and upon the staunch old driver, who never once looked back. Above him, emblem of the sublime Martyr, sagged the high board cross.

CHAPTER XXI

A MEETING BY THE FORD

Under the cottonwoods that shadowed the landing-place, the clematis trailed its tufts of fluffy grey; a cl.u.s.ter of wind-flowers nodded, winking their showy blue eyes; birds whisked about to fetch straws and sc.r.a.ps for their building; and the gra.s.s, bright green, but stubby, wore a changing spatterwork of sun and leaf.

Marylyn let drop her bonnet and the cow-horn that hung by a thong to her wrist. Then, with folded hands, she looked up and around her, sniffing the warm air in delight. The Texas home had never offered such a lovely retreat. There, the arid _mesa_ had grown th.o.r.n.y mesquite, scraggled cypress, or stunted live-oak for a shade; sand had whirled ceaselessly before a high, hot wind; no flowers had bloomed but the pale toadflax and the p.r.i.c.kly-pear; and beside the salt lakes of that almost waterless waste had nested only the vulture.

But this! It was like the blossom-strewn plain that burst upon them as, desert-wearied, they travelled into Central Texas; like the glimpses of April woodland in the Upper and Lower Cross Timbers. It made generous return for the long, merciless winter; more--in one glance, in one breath, it swept away a whole winter of hateful memories!

She caught up bonnet and horn and chose a seat close to the river.

Before her was a gap in the knotted grapevine heaps that clung along the brink of the bank; through it, veiled only by some tendrils that swung wishfully across, lay a wedge-like vista of muddy water, bottom-land, bluff, and sky. The mid-morning sun glinted upon the treacherous current, upon the wet gra.s.s of the bottom-land, upon the green-brown bluff and the Gatling at its top, upon the far, curving azure of the sky. Against the dazzle, her blue eyes winked harder than the breeze-tossed anemones; stretching out upon her back, she rested them in the s.h.i.+fting canopy of foliage.

A startled kingbird flashed past her, coming from a tree by the cut. She got up, and saw a man in uniform standing near. He was a young man, with a flushed face and wildly rumpled hair. In one hand he held a ta.s.selled hat; in the other, a rifle. He leaned forward from behind a bull-berry bush, and his look was guiltily eager and admiring.

As startled as the kingbird, she grasped the cow-horn and lifted it to her lips.

But she did not blow a warning. The uniform retreated in cowardly haste, the ta.s.selled hat lowered, and the eyes beseeched.

A moment. Then, the man smiled and shook his hat at her roguishly.

"A-ah!" he said--in the tone of one who has made a discovery--"I didn't know before that a fairy lives in this grove!"

Marylyn glanced over a shoulder. "Does there?" she questioned, half whispering.

He took a forward step. "There does," he answered solemnly. "It's Goldenhair, as well as I can make out. But where on earth are the bears?"

Instantly, she had her bonnet. "My! my!" she said. "_Bears!_ Indians is bad enough." She peered into the long heaps of tangled grapevine.

"Oh, now!" he exclaimed self-accusingly. He whipped a knee with the hat.

"Now, I've gone and scared you! Say, honest! There isn't a bear in a hundred miles--I'd stake my stupid head on it."

"But Golden----" she began.

"Goldenhair?" He smiled again, by way of entreaty. "Why, Goldenhair is--you."

She clapped on her bonnet in a little flurry, pulling it down to hide the last yellow wisp.

Misunderstanding the action, he began to plead. "Oh, don't go; _please_ don't go! I've wanted to meet you for months and months. I've heard so much about you--Lounsbury's told me."

She gave him a quick look from under the bonnet's rim. "Mr. Lounsbury,"

she repeated, and stiffened her lips.

"Yes."

"He don't know much about me, I reckon. He ain't been to see us for 'months and months.'" She began to dig at the ground with the toe of a shoe.

"Well--well----" he floundered, "he's been awful rushed, lately--needed at Clark's--there now. I promised to--to tend to his business here for him. But he told me about you, just the same, and about your sister, too. Say, but she is a brick!"

She gave him another look, slightly resentful, but inquiring. "What's a 'brick'?" she demanded.

"It's a person that's all grit," he answered earnestly.

"That's Dallas," she agreed.

He pa.s.saged in cavalry fas.h.i.+on until he was between her and the shack.

Then he a.s.sumed a front that was cautiously humble. "Lounsbury's had the best of it," he complained. "He's known you right from the start. And this is the first chance I've ever had to know you."

She stopped toeing. "But I don't know you," she returned. "Mr.

Lounsbury's never told me----"

"Well, I'll tell you: I'm Robert Fraser, from the Fort. That's really all there is to say about me. You see, I've only been in one fight--that was last fall--and I've never even killed an Indian."

She pulled nervously at her bonnet-strings. "You're a soldier," she said. "And pa--pa'd be mad as a hornet if he knew I'd spoke to you."

Fraser took another step forward. "Pa won't know," he declared.

"Promise you won't tell?" she asked, blus.h.i.+ng consciously.

He cast about him as if to find a proper token for his vow. "I promise,"

he answered, hat on heart; "I promise by the Great Horn Spoon!"

"You're the first I--I ever talked to," she faltered.

"That's good!"

"No, it's bad. Because I promised pa once that I wouldn't ever have anything to do with a soldier. And now I'm breaking my word."

"But he's dead wrong----"

"That's what Dallas says."

"Does she? Bless her heart! Then, why don't you both desert and come over to the enemy?"

"Pa says you _are_ enemy."

"We were," he corrected soberly. "But the war is over now."

"Maybe it is," she said, wistful, "but pa is still a-fighting."

"And Goldenhair's drafted when she'd rather have peace. Too bad!" He motioned her to the seat by the gap.