Chapter 10

THE STRANGER AGAIN

Meantime, Helen was becoming desperate over her loss. Unwilling to accept the theory of her household, which was that Pat had been stolen by a band of organized thieves and ere this was well out of the neighborhood and probably the county, she had held firmly to her original idea, _viz._, that the horse was in the possession of his rightful owners, and so could not be far out of the community. Therefore, the morning following his disappearance, having with sober reflection lightened within her the seriousness of it all, she had set out in confident search for him, mounted on her brown saddler. But though she had combed the town and the trails around the town, quietly interviewing all such teamsters and horsemen as might by any chance know something about it, yet in answer to her persistent inquiries all she had received was a blank shake of the head or an earnest expression of willingness to assist her. So, because she had continued her search for three days without success, inquiring and peering into every nook and corner of the community, she finally had come to regard her quest as hopeless, and to become more than ever an image of despair.

The evening of the fourth day there was a dance. It was one of the regular monthly affairs, and because Helen was a member of the committee she felt it her duty to attend. One of the young men, accompanied by his mother and sister, drove out for her, but she left the house with reluctance and a marked predisposition not to enjoy herself. But she forgot this when she presently beheld the young man from the East whom she had encountered on the mesa. He was standing close beside a rather frail little woman, undoubtedly his mother, who with the matrons of the town was seated near a fireplace watching the dancers. He was introduced. Later they sat out one of his numbers alone together in a corner behind some potted palms. In the course of their conversation Helen informed him of the disappearance of her horse, and asked him, as she asked everybody she met now, if he knew anything or had heard anything concerning the loss. The young man knew nothing of the great disappearance, however, though he did offer it as his belief that a horse of Pat's obvious value could not long remain in obscurity. This was encouraging, and Helen felt herself become hopeful again. But when he offered his services in the search, as he did presently, she felt not only hopeful again, but somehow quite certain now that it would all be cleared up. For there was that in this young gentleman which caused confidence. What she told him, however, was that she was grateful for his offer, and should be greatly pleased to have him with her.

And thus it was that, on the morning of the fifth day, Helen Richards and Stephen Wainwright--the young man's name--together with two of Helen's close friends, were riding slowly across the mesa, alert for any combination in harness which might reveal the lost Pat. Helen and Stephen were well in the lead, and Helen had broken the silence by addressing Stephen as a native, recalling their first meeting. Whereupon the young man, smiling quietly, had wanted to know why; but after she had explained that it was because he had enlisted himself in the search for a horse, adding that in doing so he had conformed with one of the unwritten laws of the country, he still confessed himself in the dark. This had been but a moment before, and she now settled herself to explain more fully.

"A horse is, or was, our most valued property," she began. "I reckon the past tense is better--though we'll never quite live down our interest in horses." She smiled across at him. "Long ago," she went on, "in the days of our Judge Lynch, you know, a stolen horse meant a hanged man--or two or three--as not infrequently happened. But all that is history now. Yet the feeling remains. And whenever one of our horses disappears--it is rare now--we all take it more or less as a personal loss. In your willingness to help find Pat, therefore, you declare yourself one of us--and are gladly admitted."

He rode along in silence. "Why was the feeling so intense in the old days?" he inquired, after a time.

"It was due to physical conditions," she replied--"the geography of the country. Water-holes were few and very far apart, and to get from one to another often entailed a journey impossible to a man without a horse. To steal his horse, therefore, was to deprive him of his sole means of getting to water--practically to deprive him of his life. If he didn't die of thirst, which frequently he did, at best it was a very grave offense. It isn't considered so now--not so much so, at any rate--unless in the desert wastes to the west of us. Yet the feeling still lurks within us, and a stolen horse is a matter that concerns the whole community."

He nodded thoughtfully, but remained silent. Suddenly Helen drew rein. Before her was a horned toad, peculiarly a part of the desert, blinking up at them wickedly. He drew rein and followed her eyes.

"A horned toad, isn't it?"

Helen shook her head. "Are you interested in such things?" she inquired.

"In a way--yes," he affirmed, doubtfully. "Though I can't see good reason for their existence." His eyes twinkled. "Can you?"

Helen was thoughtful a moment. "Well, no," she admitted, finally. "Yet there must be a good reason. Reptiles must live for some good purpose. All things do--don't you think?" Then, before he could make a rejoinder, she went on: "I sometimes feel that these creatures were originally placed here to encourage other and higher forms of life to come and locate in the desert--were placed here, in other words, to prove that life is possible in all this desolation."

He glanced at her. "Certainly it has worked out that way, at any rate," he ventured. "Good old Genesis!" He smiled.

"It seems to have," she agreed, thoughtfully. "Because you and I are here. But it goes a long way back--to Genesis--yes. Following the initial placing, other and higher organisms, finding in their migratory travels this evidence of life, accepted the encouragement to remain, and did remain, feeding upon the life found here in the shape of toads and lizards--to carry the theory forward a step--even as the toads and lizards--to carry it back again--fed upon the insects which they in their turn found here. Then along came other forms of life, higher in the cosmic setting, and these, finding encouragement in the presence of the earlier arrivals, fed upon them and remained. And so on up, to the forerunners of our present-day animals--coyotes and prairie-dogs. And after these, primitive man--to find encouragement in the coyotes and prairie-dogs--and to feed upon them and remain. Then after primitive man, the second type--the brown man; and after the brown man, the red man; and after the red man, the white man--all with an eye to sustenance, and finding it, and remaining."

Stephen's eyes swept around the desert absently. He knew--this young man--that he was in the presence of a personality. For he could not help but draw comparisons between the young woman beside him and the young women of his acquaintance in the East. While he had found Eastern girls vivacious, and attractive with a kind of surface charm, never had he known one to take so quiet and unassuming an outlook upon so broad a theme. It was the desert, he told himself. Here beside him was a type unknown to him, and one so different from any he had as yet met with, he felt himself ill at ease in her presence--a thing new to him, too--and which in itself gave him cause to marvel. Yes, it was the desert. It _must_ be the desert! In this slender girl beside him he saw a person of insight and originality, a girl assuredly not more than twenty years of age, attractive, and thoroughly feminine. How ever did they do it?

He harked back in his thoughts to her theory. And he dwelt not so much upon the theory itself as upon her manner of advancing it. Running back over these things, recalling the music of her voice, together with her spoken musings, he came to understand why, with that first encounter, he had found himself almost instantly curious concerning desert folk. Not that he had known why at the time, or had given that phase of it consideration. He did remember that he had been strongly impressed by the way she had managed her bolting horse. But aside from that, there had been something in her personality, an indefinable calm and sureness, a grip upon herself, that he had felt the very first moment. Undoubtedly all this had flicked him into a novel curiosity. He pulled himself together with an effort.

"I like your theory," he answered, smiling. "And it must be true, because I am told horned toads are fast disappearing. Evidently they have served their purpose. But tell me," he concluded, "what is becoming of them? Where are they going?"

She laughed. "I can't tell you that. Perhaps they just vanish into the fourth--or maybe the fifth--dimension!"

And this was the other side of her, a side he had come to learn while with her at the dance, and which made her lovable as well as admirable. But she was speaking again, and again was serious.

"I have yet another theory," she said--"one as to why these creatures are here, you know." She smiled across at him. "It is all my very own, too! It is that in their presence among us--among mankind--they unwittingly develop us through thought. Thinking exercises the brain, we are told, and exercising the brain makes for world-advancement--we are told." Then, suddenly, "I hope you don't think me silly--Mr. Native?"

But he remained sober. "Tell me," he asked, after a time, "what it is about this country--I mean other than friendships, of course--that gets under a fellow's soul and lifts it--to the end that he wants to remain here? I know there is something, though I can't for the life of me place it. What is it, anyway?"

She turned upon him sharply. "Do you really feel that way?" she asked, evidently pleased.

"I feel that way. But why do I feel that way? What is it? You know what I mean. There is something--there must be!"

"I know what you mean--yes," she replied, thoughtfully. "Yet I doubt if I myself, even after all these years, can define it. What you 'feel' must be our atmosphere--its rarity, its power to exhilarate. Though that really doesn't explain it. I reckon it's the same thing--only much more healthful, more soulful--that one feels in large cities after nightfall. I mean, the glare of your incandescent lights. I honestly believe that that glare, more than any other single thing, holds throngs of people to an existence not only unnatural, but laden with a something that crushes as well." She was silent.

Again Stephen felt the strange pull on his interest, but he said nothing. After a time she went on.

"City-dwellers," she explained, "don't begin their day till the approach of dark. It's true of both levels of society, too--lower as well as upper. And I believe the reason for this lies, as I have said, in the atmosphere--their man-made atmosphere--just as the secret of your feeling the way you do lies in our atmosphere--God-made. Were this atmosphere suddenly to disappear, both out of your cities and out of my deserts, both your world and my own would lose all of their charm."

Stephen bestirred himself. "What psychology do you find in that?" he asked, dwelling upon the fact that she knew his East so well.

"Merely the effect of softening things--for the soul as well as the eye--through the eye, indeed, to the soul. Our atmosphere here does that--softens the houses, and the trees, and the cattle, and the mountains, and the distant reaches. It softens our nights, too. Perhaps you have noticed it? How everything appears shrouded in a kind of hazy, mellow, translucent something that somehow reacts upon you? I have. And I believe that is the secret of one's wanting to remain in the country, once he has exposed himself to it. It is a kind of spell--a hypnosis. When out of it one wants to get back into it.

"I know I felt it when I was East, attending school," she went on, quietly. "Living always in this atmosphere, I somehow had forgotten its charm--as one will forget all subtle beauty unless frequently and forcibly reminded of it. But in the East I missed it, and found myself restless and anxious to get back into it. Indeed, I felt that I must get back or die! So one day, when your Eastern spirit of sudden change was upon me, I packed and came home. It was a year short of my degree, too. But I could not remain away another day--simply had to get back--and back I came. My degree--my sheepskin"--she was smiling--"couldn't hold me!"

"Then you've spent some time in the East?" he asked, tentatively.

"Yes," she replied, "that much--three years. And I didn't like it."

"Why?" he asked, a little surprised.

She regarded him curiously. He saw a look of mild annoyance in her eyes, one that seemed to tell of her inability to understand so needless a question.

"I just didn't," she rejoined, after a moment. "I discovered that you Easterners value things which are diametrically opposite to the things we value, and that you value not at all those things which we value most of all."

He had to laugh. "What are they?" he wanted to know.

For an instant she showed shyness. "Oh, I can't say," she declared, finally. "Some day I may tell you."

Stephen realized that it must be serious. He was hesitating whether to press her further, when he saw her tighten her reins, put spurs to her horse, and go flashing off in the direction of the mountain trail. As she dashed off he heard her call out:

"Pat!" she cried. "Pat! It's Pat!" Then she glanced to the rear. "Adele! Sam! It's Pat! Come, quick!"

Stephen spurred on with the others. He galloped after this hard-riding girl--so intensely alive--a girl past his understanding. Over dunes and across flats he charged, followed closely by the others, urging his horse to his utmost. But, try as he might, he could not overtake her or even lessen the distance between them, so furious was her race for her lost horse. Finally he burst out upon the trail and drew rein beside her, standing with the others in the path of an oncoming wood-wagon, anxiously awaiting its slow approach.

It was a curious outfit. One of the team, an aged and decrepit horse, was laboring along with head drooping and hoofs scuffling the trail, while beside it, with head erect and nostrils aquiver and hoofs lifting eagerly, stepped the glorious Pat! Both horses were draped in a disreputable harness, crudely patched with makeshift string and wire, and both were covered with a fine coating of dust. Atop all this, high and mighty upon an enormous load of wood, sat a Mexican, complacently smoking a cigarette and contentedly swinging his heels, evidently elated with this prospect of parading his horse before a group of Americans. But as he drew close a look of uneasiness crept over him, and he pulled up his team and shrugged his shoulders, as a preliminary, no doubt, to disappearance behind the Mexican shield of "No sabe!"

Helen swung close to him. There was a choice between a contest and diplomatic concession. She decided to offer to purchase the horse at once, believing this to be the easiest way out of the trouble.

"_Señor_," she began in Spanish, "_deseo comprar_ _aquel caballo negro. Puedo pagar cualquire cantidad razonable por el. Se perdio y nosotros lo cuidamos, y he aprendido a quererlo mucho. Si usted quiere venderlo me haria un gran favor. Siento mucho que me lo hayan quitado._"

The Mexican looked relieved. He slowly removed his hat with true Castilian courtesy.

"_Señorita_," he replied, "_lo venderia con gusto pero pienso que me paga lo que quiero por el_."

Which delighted Helen. "_Pagare lo que sea._"

The Mexican hesitated a moment. "_¿Pagara cuarenta pesos?_" he asked, finally. "_Yo tambien quiero al caballo mucho_," he added. "_Pero por cuarenta pesos pienso--pienso que lo olvido._" And he grinned.

Helen turned to the others. For Stephen's benefit she explained what had been said, and the men promptly offered to make up the required forty dollars. Helen turned to the Mexican, accepted his price, and requested him to release Pat from the harness. Whereat the Mexican smiled broadly; shrugged his shoulders suddenly; forgot his rôle of "No sabe."

"How," he burst out--"how I'm gettin' thees wagon to town? I'm pullin' eet myself?"

The others laughed. Then Helen, deciding upon another arrangement, instructed him to drive forward. She could see her father in town, she explained to the others, and there also, after the exchange of money, the Mexican could purchase another horse. Which closed the matter. The Mexican started the team forward, while the others fell in alongside, ranging themselves on either side. Thus they journeyed into town--a strange cavalcade--Pat prancing, the mare drooping, the Mexican visibly pleased, the others gratified by their unexpected success. In town they turned into a side street, and there Helen left them, going off in the direction of her father's office. When she returned, the Judge was with her. He read the Mexican a brief but stern lecture on the law pertaining to the recovery of lost property, and closed the deal. Whereupon the wood-hauler unharnessed Pat, bestowed him smilingly upon Helen, and took himself off, evidently in quest of another horse, for he headed straight as a plumb-line for the city pound.

* * * * *

Pat was home again. He knew it from many things--the white fence, the clean stable, the Mexican hostler with broom in hand. And though he was at home where he wanted to be, yet he found himself filled with vague uneasiness. After a time he sought to relieve it. He made his way into the stable, but he found no relief there. He returned to the corral, and began slowly to circle inside the fence, but neither did this relieve him. Finally he took up his old stand in the sunlit corner, where he fell to listening with ears and eyes attentive to least sounds. But even this did not relieve him.

Nor would anything ever relieve him. Never would he find absolute solace from his inner disquiet. For what he sought and could not find, what he listened for and could not hear, was another of those sounds which had relieved the tedium of his brief stay in the mountains, the friendly nicker of the aged mare, gone to toil out her life in the racking treadmill between town and mountain.