Gabriel Conroy Part 27

"How know you this?"

Arthur arose and drew his chair a little nearer his fair client.

"You have been good enough to intrust me with an important and honourable secret. Let me show my appreciation of that confidence by intrusting you with one equally important. I knew that the identification was imperfect and hurried, because _I_ was present. In the report of the _Expedicion_ you will find the name, if you have not already read it, of Lieutenant Arthur Poinsett. That was myself."

Donna Dolores raised herself to a sitting posture.

"But why did you not tell me this before?"

"Because, first, I believed that you knew that I was Lieutenant Poinsett. Because, secondly, I did _not_ believe that you knew that Arthur Poinsett and Philip Ashley were one and the same person."

"I do not understand," said Donna Dolores slowly, in a hard metallic voice.

"I am Lieutenant Arthur Poinsett, formerly of the army, who, under the a.s.sumed name of Philip Ashley, brought Grace Conroy out of Starvation Camp. I am the person who afterwards abandoned her--the father of her child."

He had not the slightest intention of saying this when he first entered the room, but something in his nature, which he had never tried to control, brought it out. He was neither ashamed of it nor apprehensive of its results; but, having said it, leaned back in his chair, proud, self-reliant, and self-sustained. If he had been uttering a moral sentiment he could not have been externally more calm or inwardly less agitated. More than that, there was a certain injured dignity in his manner, as he rose, without giving the speechless and astonished woman before him a chance to recover herself, and said--

"You will be able now to know whether your confidence has been misplaced. You will be able now to determine what you wish done, and whether I am the person best calculated to a.s.sist you. I can only say, Donna Dolores, that I am ready to act either as your witness to the identification of the real Grace Conroy, or as your legal adviser, or both. When you have decided which, you shall give me your further commands, or dismiss me. Until then, _adios_!"

He bowed, waved his hand with a certain grand courtesy, and withdrew.

When Donna Dolores raised her stupified head, the door had closed upon him.

When this conceited young gentleman reached his own room, he was, I grieve to say, to some extent mentally, and, if I may use the word, morally exalted by the interview. More than that, he was in better spirits that he had been since his arrival. From his room he strode out into the corridor. If his horse had been saddled, he would have taken a sharp canter over the low hills for exercise, pending the decision of his fair client, but it was the hour of the noonday _siesta_, and the courtyard was deserted. He walked to the gate, and looked across the plain. A fierce wind held uninterrupted possession of earth and sky.

Something of its restlessness, just at that instant, was in Arthur's breast, and, with a glance around the corridor, and a momentary hesitation, as an opening door, in a distant part of the building, suggested the possibility of another summons from Donna Dolores, he stepped beyond the walls.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE BULLS OF THE BLESSED TRINITY.

The absolute freedom of illimitable s.p.a.ce, the exhilaration of the sparkling sunlight, and the excitement of the opposing wind, which was strong enough to oblige him to exert a certain degree of physical strength to overcome it, so wrought upon Arthur, that in a few moments he had thrown off the mysterious spell which the Rancho of the Blessed Trinity appeared to have cast over his spirits, and had placed a material distance between himself and its gloomy towers. The landscape, which had hitherto seemed monotonous and uninspiring, now became suggestive; in the low dome-shaped hills beyond, that were huddled together like half-blown earth bubbles raised by the fiery breath of some long-dead volcano, he fancied he saw the origin of the mission architecture. In the long sweep of the level plain, he recognised the calm, uneventful life that had left its expression in the patient gravity of the people. In the fierce, restless wind that blew over it--a wind so persistent and perpetual that all umbrage, except a narrow fringe of dwarfed willows defining the line of an extract watercourse, was hidden in sheltered canons and the lee-ward slopes of the hills--he recognized something of his own restless race, and no longer wondered at the barrenness of the life that was turned towards the invader. "I daresay," he muttered to himself, "somewhere in the lee-ward of these people's natures may exist a luxurious growth that we shall never know.

I wonder if the Donna has not"--but here he stopped; angry, and, if the truth must be told, a little frightened at the persistency with which Donna Dolores obtruded herself into his abstract philosophy and sentiment.

Possibly something else caused him for the moment to dismiss her from his mind. During his rapid walk he had noticed, as an accidental, and by no means an essential feature of the bleak landscape, the vast herds of crawling, purposeless cattle. An entirely new and distinct impression was now forming itself in his consciousness--namely, that they no longer were purposeless, vagrant, and wandering, but were actually obeying a certain definite law of attraction, and were moving deliberately toward an equally definite object. And that object was himself!

Look where he would; before, behind, on either side, north, east, south, west,--on the bleak hill-tops, on the slope of the _falda_, across the dried-up _arroyo_, there were the same converging lines of slowly moving objects towards a single focus--himself! Although walking briskly, and with a certain definiteness of purpose, he was apparently the only unchanging, fixed, and limited point in the now active landscape.

Everything that rose above the dead, barren level was now moving slowly, irresistibly, instinctively, but unmistakably, towards one common centre--himself! Alone and unsupported, he was the helpless, unconscious nucleus of a slowly gathering force, almost immeasurable in its immensity and power!

At first the idea was amusing and grotesque. Then it became picturesque.

Then it became something for practical consideration. And then--but no!--with the quick and unerring instincts of a powerful will, he choked down the next consideration before it had time to fasten upon or paralyse his strength. He stopped and turned. The Rancho of the Blessed Trinity was gone! Had it suddenly sank in the earth, or had he diverged from his path? Neither; he had simply walked over the little elevation in the plain beside the _arroyo_ and _corral_, and had already left the Rancho two miles behind him.

It was not the only surprise that came upon him suddenly like a blow between the eyes. The same mysterious attraction had been operating in his rear, and when he turned to retrace his steps towards the Mission, he faced the staring eyes of a hundred bulls not fifty yards away. As he faced them, the nearest turned, the next rank followed their example, the next the same, and the next, until in the distance he could see the movement repeated with military precision and sequence. With a sense of relief, that he put aside as quickly as he had the sense of fear, he quickened his pace, until the nearest bull ahead broke into a gentle trot, which was communicated line by line to the cattle beyond, until the whole herd before him undulated like a vast monotonous sea. He continued on across the _arroyo_ and past the _corral_ until the blinding and penetrating cloud of dust, raised by the plunging hoofs of the moving ma.s.s before him, caused him to stop. A dull reverberation of the plain--a sound that at first might have been attributed to a pa.s.sing earthquake--now became so distinct that he turned. Not twenty yards behind him rose the advance wall of another vast, tumultuous sea of tossing horns and undulating backs that had been slowly following his retreat! He had forgotten that he was surrounded.

The nearest were now so close upon him that he could observe them separately. They were neither large, powerful, vindictive nor ferocious.

On the contrary, they were thin, wasted, haggard, anxious beasts, economically equipped and gotten up, the better to wrestle with a six months' drought, occasional famine, and the incessant buffeting of the wind--wild and untamable, but their staring eyes and nervous limbs expressed only wonder and curiosity. And when he ran toward them with a shout, they turned, as had the others, file by file, and rank by rank, and in a moment were, like the others, in full retreat. Rather, let me say, retreated as the others _had_ retreated, for when he faced about again to retrace his steps toward the Mission, he fronted the bossy bucklers and inextricable horns of those he had driven only a few moments ago before him. They had availed themselves of his diversion with the rear-guard to return.

With the rapidity of a quick intellect and swift perceptions, Arthur saw at once the resistless logic and utter hopelessness of his situation.

The inevitable culmination of all this was only a question of time--and a very brief period. Would it be sufficient to enable him to reach the _casa_? No! Could he regain the _corral_? Perhaps. Between it and himself already were a thousand cattle. Would they continue to retreat as he advanced? Possibly. But would he be overtaken meanwhile by those in his rear?

He answered the question himself by drawing from his waistcoat pocket his only weapon, a small "Derringer," and taking aim at the foremost bull. The shot took effect in the animal's shoulder, and he fell upon his knees. As Arthur had expected, his nearer comrades stopped and sniffed at their helpless companion. But, as Arthur had not expected, the eager crowd pressing behind over-bore them and their wounded brother, and in another instant the unfortunate animal was prostrate and his life beaten out by the trampling hoofs of the resistless, blind, and eager crowd that followed. With a terrible intuition that it was a foreshadowing of his own fate, Arthur turned in the direction of the _corral_, and ran for his very life!

As he ran he was conscious that the act precipitated the inevitable catastrophe--but he could think of nothing better. As he ran, he felt, from the shaking of the earth beneath his feet, that the act had once more put the whole herd in equally active motion behind him. As he ran, he noticed that the cattle before him retreated with something of his own precipitation. But as he ran, he thought of nothing but the awful fate that was following him, and the thought spurred him to an almost frantic effort. I have tried to make the reader understand that Arthur was quite inaccessible to any of those weaknesses which mankind regard as physical cowardice. In the defence of what he believed to be an intellectual truth, in the interests of his pride or his self-love, or in a moment of pa.s.sion, he would have faced death with unbroken fort.i.tude and calmness. But to be the victim of an accident; to be the lamentable sequel of a logical succession of chances, without motive or purpose; to be sacrificed for nothing--without proving or disproving anything; to be trampled to death by idiotic beasts, who had not even the instincts of pa.s.sion or revenge to justify them; to die the death of an ignorant tramp, or any negligent clown--a death that had a ghastly ludicrousness in its method, a death that would leave his body a shapeless, indistinguishable, unrecognisable clod, which affection could not idealise nor friends.h.i.+p reverence,--all this brought a horror with it so keen, so exquisite, so excruciating, that the fastidious, proud, intellectual being fleeing from it might have been the veriest dastard that ever turned his back on danger. And superadded to it was a superst.i.tious thought that for its very horror, perhaps, it was a retribution for something that he dared not contemplate!

And it was then that his strength suddenly flagged. His senses began to reel. His breath, which had kept pace with the quick beating of his heart, intermitted, hesitated, was lost! Above the advancing thunder of hoofs behind him, he thought he heard a woman's voice. He knew now he was going crazy; he shouted and fell; he rose again and staggered forward a few steps and fell again. It was over now! A sudden sense of some strange, subtle perfume, beating up through the acrid, smarting dust of the plain, that choked his mouth and blinded his eyes, came swooning over him. And then the blessed interposition of unconsciousness and peace.

He struggled back to life again with the word "Philip" in his ears, a throbbing brow, and the sensation of an effort to do something that was required of him. Of all his experience of the last few moments only the perfume remained. He was lying alone in the dry bed of the _arroyo_; on the bank a horse was standing, and above him bent the dark face and darker eyes of Donna Dolores.

"Try to recover sufficient strength to mount that horse," she said, after a pause.

It was a woman before him. With that innate dread which all masculine nature has of exhibiting physical weakness before a weaker s.e.x, Arthur struggled to rise without the a.s.sistance offered by the small hand of his friend. That, however, even at that crucial moment, he so far availed himself of it, as to press it, I fear was the fact.

"You came to my a.s.sistance alone?" asked Arthur, as he struggled to his feet.

"Why not? We are equal now, Don Arturo," said Donna Dolores, with a dazzling smile. "I saw you from my window. You were rash--pardon me--foolis.h.!.+ The oldest vaquero never ventures a foot upon these plains.

But come; you shall ride with me. There was no time to saddle another horse, and I thought you would not care to let others know of your adventure. Am I right?"

There was a slight dimple of mischief in her cheek, and a quaint sparkle in her dark eye, as she turned her questioning gaze on Arthur. He caught her hand and raised it respectfully to his lips.

"You are wise as you are brave, Donna Dolores."

"We shall see. But at present you must believe that I am right, and do as I say. Mount that horse--I will help you if you are too weak--and--leave a s.p.a.ce for me behind you!"

Thus adjured, Arthur leaped into the saddle. If his bones had been broken instead of being bruised, he would still have found strength for that effort. In another instant Donna Dolores' little foot rested on his, and she lightly mounted behind him.

"Home now. Hasten; we will be there before any one will know it," she said, as she threw one arm around his waist, with superb unconsciousness.

Arthur lifted the rein and dropped his heels into the flanks of the horse. In five minutes--the briefest, as it seemed to him, he had ever pa.s.sed--they were once more within the walls of the Blessed Trinity.

BOOK IV.

_DRIFTING._

CHAPTER I.

MR. AND MRS. CONROY AT HOME.

The manner in which One Horse Gulch received the news of Gabriel Conroy's marriage was characteristic of that frank and outspoken community. Without entering upon the question of his previous shameless flirtation with Mrs. Markle--the baleful extent of which was generally unknown to the camp--the nearer objections were based upon the fact that the bride was a stranger and consequently an object of suspicion, and that Gabriel's sphere of usefulness in a public philanthropic capacity would be seriously impaired and limited. His very brief courts.h.i.+p did not excite any surprise in a climate where the harvest so promptly followed the sowing, and the fact, now generally known, that it was he who saved the woman's life after the breaking of the dam at Black Canon, was accepted as a sufficient reason for his success in that courts.h.i.+p.

It may be remarked here that a certain grim disbelief in feminine coyness obtained at One Horse Gulch. That the conditions of life there were as near the perfect and original condition of mankind as could be found anywhere, and that the hollow shams of society and weak artifices of conventionalism could not exist in that sincere atmosphere, were two beliefs that One Horse Gulch never doubted.