Part 7

The fellows laughed at Billsky; but they liked him; and maybe they began to wonder. Anyway, Billsky stayed in Sageville a week, selling his pony and getting an outfit together. When they asked him what he wanted a prospectin’ outfit for, he just looked at them in a surprised, hurt sort of way, and said, “Why, to go after Rad and forgive him, of course. What’d you think?” Pretty soon, they stopped laughing. It was the look on Billsky’s face stopped them. You know how queer brown and yellow faces look to us? That’s because the expression never changes. Billsky began to look queer, like a Chink or an Indian; he’d just one expression in those days, stamped on his hairy face as if he’d been branded with it.

He got two burros and an outfit of sorts, and off he went at the end of the week, trailing Radway into the Altanero. Three days before he went, a mule wagon pulled out for Seear; it overtook Radway and his partner, and the driver told him his forgiver was following on. So, you see, Rad knew.

Have you ever seen the opening of the Altanero: the Gates of the Altanero? There’s desert, and there’s hills, and there’s cañons; and there’s the Altanero. This side the Gates, you’re still somebody, with work to do, and money to get, and girls to kiss: anything, if you go find it. Other side the Gates, you’re nobody, nothing. You just go out. Yes, you just go out. It’s like dying while you’re alive. You don’t count at all; and quite often you die dead.

Have you ever seen the Gates? You go on and on in the heat, away from Sageville, and Seear, and everything you know. They lie flat behind you, lost in the heat. You don’t see ’em if you turn and look. You don’t see anything. Even the sage thins out and goes. It’s all dust. Then ahead, ever so far, you see something gold. It rises higher, little by little,—oh so slow! and you see it’s rocks, great golden rocks. They lift, and lift, and lift. One day you find they’re behind you as well as in front: nothing but golden rocks; unless it’s red rocks or green rocks or rocks like clear black glass. I’ve known some queer moments, but there’s nothing so queer as when it first comes home to you that, for miles and miles in every direction, there’s just nothing but the rocks—like a world rough-cut from precious stones and left to die.

There’s few wells in the Altanero: few that are known. You travel by, and accordin’ to, the wells. Radway struck off into the hills from the Seaar trail, making for the first well. A week later, there was Billsky following over the same ground. Each night he’d camp by one of Radway’s cold fires; and, each night, he’d kneel in the ashes and pray. Sometimes he’d pray an hour, or two hours, or three, under the tremendous stars; but it was always that he might catch up with Rad quick, and forgive him, and get it off his mind. He wasn’t worrying. He was just eager. He knew he was bound to come across Rad sooner or later in the Altanero. Then he’d sleep, and eat, and off he’d go, singing hymns to the burros: “Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” most likely.

Once, in the dead ashes, he found a broke-off saucepan handle. He was so pleased he carted it along with him, like a mascot. It seemed to put him in touch with Radway: to bring the happy moment o’ forgiveness nearer.

And Radway? Well, there you have me.

The Altanero’s a bad country to travel in if you’ve anything on your nerves. I passed through a few miles of it once when I had something on mine: a sick child two hundred miles away; and I tell you, by the third day I was seein’ the kid everywhere. But Radway—I can’t just explain Radway. I wonder if he was seein’ the girl that started it.

Billsky made the first water-hole six days behind Rad; he’d gained a day.

Rad and company had used considerable of the water in that hole. It had shrunk, and there in the margin, baked hard and white like clay, were footprints of men and burros. Billsky picked out Rad’s footprints and patted ’em, he was so pleased. He rested by the water a few hours, and freshened up his burros. Then he went on.

Between the first water-hole and the second the country opens up. It isn’t just a huddle of rocks. It’s mesas rising from a dead level of dust like the worn foundations of towers and cathedrals and cities, banded in rose and violet and gold. You could no more climb most of ’em than you could climb the outside of a skyscraper. But Billsky found one he could climb, and up he went. He’d seen some sort of dry, grassy stuff at the top, and he wanted it for Sarah, one of the burros that was ailing. He found more than the grass on top. He found a grave. Didn’t know whose, of course; nobody knows, nor ever will. He gave the grass to Sarah; but next day she died. Billsky was terrible hurt and grieved, he was always so careful of beasts. He never realized that Sarah was just beat out: couldn’t stand the pace.

At the second water-hole he was only four days behind Rad.

He rested up a bit, being worried over his burro; and took out the lost time in prayer. Then on he went, at that terrible pace, overhauling Rad by the mile, achin’ to forgive him. It’s a long stretch to the third hole. Billsky gained two days on it. I can’t guess how. He told me he took short cuts through the cañons, and that they always turned out all right; and that he sang “Hold the Fort, for I Am Coming,” right along.

He found the third hole fouled and shrunk. In a stretch of mud, Rad had written with a stick, “If you follow me any further, I will shoot you on sight.” How did he know Billsky was so near? Maybe he’d seen his fire the night before. Billsky read the writing, and was dreadful hurt and grieved. “He doesn’t understand,” he said, “that I’m going to forgive him. It’s what I’m follerin’ him for.” He prayed half the night, and went on quicker than ever next day.

Few have ever been so far into the Altanero as the fourth hole. It’s hard to find. Long before Billsky made it, he saw a speck in the sky; it was a great bird, sailing round in little, slow circles. Under it was the fourth water-hole.

It was quite a pool when Billsky came to it. There were bushes round it, and fibrous grass. There were three burros feeding on the bushes, and a small tent pitched. A man came out of the tent, and when he saw Billsky he held up his hands.

“Don’t shoot,” he said, “I’m not Radway. You’ve no quarrel with me.”

“Nor with him,” said Billsky. “I’ve come to forgive him. Where is he?”

“Gone,” said the man, “gone mad, I guess. He’s pushed on alone. Day before yesterday I took sick. We was to rest up here, and then cast round careful, always within reach o’ this water. This morning he went out and climbed them rocks there. Then he came back, and said he must go on, he couldn’t wait. I went to stop him, and he laid me out. See here.” The man was most cryin’; he turned his face, and Billsky saw a great black swelling on his jaw. “He went on,” he said, “as if the devil was after him. And the devil’s you!”

Billsky was the meekest little hairy man; and now he too was fit to cry. “He don’t know me,” he said, very sad, “but it’ll be all right. . . . What’s on there?” he said, pointing beyond.

“God knows, who made it,” said the man, “out of hell’s leftovers. But no one else does, for no one’s ever been there.”

“It’ll be all right,” said Billsky again. “I’ll go on after him, and forgive him, and bring him back.”

He started out to do it, taking one of Rad’s burros, which were fresher than his; and bound he’d come up with Rad this time.

I don’t rightly know what happened there, beyond the last water. One thing, I never been there. I gather Billsky just pushed on as usual, following Rad’s tracks. He followed ’em easy: the only footsteps within a hundred miles or so! As he went he sang “Glory for Me,” because he was going to be able to forgive Rad at last.

The big bird in the sky, he swung off from the water-hole and followed Billsky. There was just them two moving things for him to see: Radway on ahead, mad to get away from Billsky, and old Billsky, mad to forgive him, and singing the glory song.

Billsky couldn’t tell me much about this part of it. He just went on, and on, and on. Sometimes, he said, there were stars. The place was so still he began to think he could hear ’em shine: a sort of fizzing, like an arc-light, which, of course, he knew to be foolishness. Sometimes there was just the sun, a great fire, like as if it were fastened to the earth and burning all the life out of it. There were the rocks, of course, but he didn’t remember them much: only one great black cleft, and a glimmer in the walls of it. The glimmer was gold-veined turquoise, just sticking out o’ that cliff so you could have pried it loose with a toothpick. Billsky couldn’t tell you where it was if you paid him. He wasn’t thinking of anything but forgiving Rad.

Then, with a noise, he says, like a roll of rifle-fire, that big bird dropped out of heaven like a stone, and shot past him, and settled just ahead. There was a dead burro there, and an empty water can. But Radway, he’d gone on. Billsky went after him, singing powerful; but his voice didn’t make much noise.

Then there was a little crack ahead. Something sang past Billsky, and flipped a tiny flake off of the side of the cañon. Billsky stopped and looked at the flake lying at his feet, just as pretty as a pink rose-leaf. He knew a bullet had chipped it off, and that he’d come within shooting length of Radway. He let out a yell of joy. “It’s me, Rad!” he yelled. “I’m comin’ to forgive you!” But Radway didn’t stop. He went on, as if he was mad; and behind him came the man that was killin’ him: the man that only wanted to forgive him.

There were more shots. Billsky said Rad fired at him all that afternoon, but owing to the refraction, he wasn’t hit once. Besides, Rad was breaking up. Once your nerve goes, you break up quick in the Altanero.

It was evening when Billsky came up with him.

You know evening on the Altanero? The sun’s down on the edge of things, as big as a burning house. All the rocks turn clear as glass for a minute. It’s as if the light went clean through them, and came out colored with their colors: rose, violet, gold. The air you breathe glows. The rosy-red cañon Billsky was in ended sudden in a wall that hit the sky. The sunset touched it, and it became like a veil, says Billsky, a blood-red curtain hung from earth to heaven. At the foot of it lay Bad Radway.

Billsky ran at him, trying to yell. He had his water flask ready. All day he’d been saving water to give to Radway, but he was too late. Rad just looked at him; and all that had been inside him: all the remorse, the guilt, the black fear, the unknown damage of the soul that first drove him to be scared of Billsky, came out in that look.

It struck Billsky to the heart. “Rad, Rad,” he said, “don’t you be scared o’ me! I forgive you, Rad!” he said.

But Bad Radway didn’t hear. He was dead.

Billsky had done his part, but he was all broke up. He got back to the water-hole somehow, after burying Rad at the foot of the cliff. He and the other man that had been Rad’s partner lit out for home right away. They’d had enough of the Altanero.

When I last saw Billsky, he was terrible hurt and grieved because the other man held him to blame for what had happened to Radway. “He seems to think,” said Billsky to me, “that I done something to him! Me that follered him all that way just to forgive him! He seems to think, that guy does, that I done something!”

Then, in a puzzled, exasperated kind of way, he laughed. “But come to think of it,” said Billsky, “it was funny.”

Well, as I said before, religion’s a queer thing to handle; but I don’t see anything funny in it.

_Marjorie L. C. Pickthall_.

TOLD TO PARSON

A little girl came rushing into the gate of the vicarage at Postbridge, Dartmoor, and it chanced that she met the minister himself as he bent in his garden and scattered lime around upspringing seeds.

“These slugs would try the patience of a saint,” he said, hearing footsteps, and not looking up. “They have eaten off nearly all my young larkspurs. How can one fight them?”

Then a small, breathless voice broke in upon him.

“Please, sir, mother sent me, an’ I’ve runned a’most all the way from our cottage wi’out stopping once. ’Tis old Mr. Mundy, please. He’m dying—so he told mother when her fetched him his milk this morning—an’ he says he’ve got something very special to tell anybody as’ll care to come an’ listen to it. But nobody don’t want to hear his secrets in the village; so mother said ’twas your job, please, an’ sent me for your honor.”

“My job—yes, so it is, little maid. I’ll come at once. An’ they’d better send for the doctor. It isn’t his regular visiting day until Thursday, but probably it’s his job, too.”

“Mother axed the old man that; an’ he said as he didn’t want no doctor, nor his traade [medicine] neither. He says h’m nearly a hundred years old, an’ he won’t be messed about with at his time of life, but just die easy an’ comfortable.”

In twenty minutes the clergyman had walked a mile and crossed a strip of the wilderness that stretched round about the little hamlet on Dartmoor where he labored. A single cottage separated from the rest by wide tracts of furze and heather stood here, and near it lay a neglected garden. But “Gaffer” Mundy had long ceased to fight the moor or care for his plot of land. His patch of the reclaimed earth returned fast to primitive savagery. Brake fern sprouted in the potato bed; rush, heather and briar choked the currant bushes; fearless rabbits nibbled every green thing.

“Come in, whoever you may be,” said an ancient voice. So the visitor obeyed and entered, to find the sufferer, fully dressed, sitting by a fire of peat. Noah Mundy was once very tall, but now his height had vanished and he had been long bent under his burden of years. A bald, yellow skull rose above his countenance, and infinite age marked his face. As the earth through centuries of cooling has wrinkled into mountains and flattened into ocean beds between them, so these aged features, stamped and torn with the fret and fever of long life, had become as a book whereon time had written many things for those who could read them. Very weak was the man, and very thin. He was toothless and almost hairless; the scanty beard that fell from his chin was white, while his mustache had long been dyed with snuff to a lively yellow. His eyes remained alive, though one was filmed over with an opaline haze. But from the other he saw clearly enough for all his needs. He made it a boast that he could not write, and he could not read. There was no book in his house.

“’Tis you, eh? I could have wished for a man out of your trade, but it won’t matter. I’ve got a thing worth telling; but mark this, I don’t care a button what you think of it, an’ I don’t want none of your bunkum an’ lies after I have told it. Sit down in that thicky chair an’ smoke your pipe an’ keep cool. Ban’t no use getting excited now, for what I be going to tell ’e happened more’n sixty years ago—afore you was born or thought about.”

“My smoke won’t trouble you?”

“Bah! I’ve smoked and chewed an’ snuffed for more’n half a century. I’m baccy through and through—soaked in it, as you might say. An’ as for smoke, if what you tell to church be true, I shall have smoke, an’ fire too, afore long. But hell’s only a joke to frighten females. I don’t set no store by it.”

“Better leave that, Mr. Mundy. If you really believe your end is near, let us be serious. Yes, I’ll smoke my pipe. And you must feel very, very sure, that what you tell me is absolutely sacred, unless you wish it otherwise.”

“Nought sacred about it, I reckon—all t’ other way. An’ as for telling, you can go an’ shout it from top of Bellever Tor you’m minded to. I don’t care a farden curse who knows it now. Wait till I’m out of it; then do as you please.”

He drank a little milk, remained silent a moment with his eyes upon the fire, and presently began to tell his life’s strange tale.

“Me an’ my brother was the only children our parents ever had; an’ my brother was five years older’n me. My father, Jonas Mundy, got money through a will, an’ he brought it to Dartymoor, like a fool, an’ rented a bit of moor from the Duchy of Cornwall, an’ built a farm upon it, an’ set to work to reclaim the land. At first he prospered, an’ Aller Bottom Farm, as my father called it, was a promising place, so long as sweat of man poured out there without ceasing. You can see the ruins of it yet, for when Jonas Mundy died an’ it falled to me, I left it an’ comed up here; an the chap as took it off my hands—he went bankrupt inside three year. ’Tis all falled to pieces now, for none tried again.

“But that’s to overrun the matter. When I was fifteen an’ my brother, John James, was twenty, us both failed in love with the same maid. You stare; but though fifteen in years, I was twenty-five in understanding, an’ a very oncoming youth where women were concerned. Nelly Baker had turned seventeen, an’ more than once I told her that though a boy of fifteen couldn’t wed a maid of her age without making folks laugh, even if he could get a parson to hitch them, yet a chap of three-an’-twenty might very properly take a girl of five-an’-twenty without the deed calling for any question. An’ her loved me truly enough; for though you only see a worn-out scarecrow afore you now, yet seventy year agone I filled the eye of more maidens than one, and was a bowerly youth to look upon—tall, straight, tough, wi’ hair so black as a crow.

“John James he never knowed that I cared a button for Nelly. I never showed it to a living soul but her by word or look; an’ she kept quiet—for fear of being laughed at, no doubt. Her folks were dead on the match with John James, an’ he pressed her so hard that she’d have took him but for me. He was a pretty fellow too—the Mundys were very personable as a family. Quite different, though, from me. Fair polled, wi’ flaxen hair, an terrible strong was John James, an’ the best wrastler on Dartymoor in them days.

“Me an’ her met by appointment a week afore she’d got to give him a final ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I mind it very well to this hour; an’ yet ’tis seventy-odd years agone. On Hartland Tor us sat in the heather unseen, an’ I put my arms around her an’ loved her, an’ promised to make her a happy woman. Then I told her what she’d got to do. First I made her prick her finger wi’ a thorn of the furze, an’ draw blood, an’ swear afore the Living God she’d marry me as soon as I could make her mistress of a farm.

“She was for joking about the matter at first, but I soon forced her to grow serious. She done what I told her, an’ since she believed in the Living God, I reckoned her oath would bind her fast enough. As for me, I laughed out of sight, for I never believed in nothing but myself—not even when I was a boy under twenty years old. Next I bade her fall out with John James. I put words in her mouth to say to him. ‘I know the fashion of man he be—short an’ fiery in his temper,’ I told her. ‘Be hot an’ quick with him. Tell him he’s not your sort, an’ never will be—quarrel with his color, if you like. Tell him he’m too pink an’ white for ’e. Say ’tis enough that your own eyes be blue, an’ that you’d never wed a blue-eyed man. Make him angry—you ban’t a woman if you don’t know how to do that. Then the rest be easy enough. He’ll flare an’ flae like a tar barrel on Guy Fawkes Night. But he’ll trouble you no more, for he’m so proud as Satan.’

“Nelly Baker took in all I said; an’ inside a week she’d dropped my brother. But ’twas what he done after that startled folks, for without a word to any living soul, he vanished, like the dew of the morning, four-an’-twenty hours after she’d flinged him over. I was the last that seed him. We were working together out ’pon the land; an’ he was sour an’ crusty wi’ his trouble, an’ hadn’t a word to fling at me. Dimpsy light fell, an’ I went in a tool shed to don my jacket an’ go home. ’Twas autumn, an’ us had been spreading manure upon the meadow.

“‘Be you coming, John James?’ I said.

“‘You go to hell,’ he answered. ‘I’ll come when I’ve a mind to, an’ maybe I won’t come at all!’

“So home I walked wi’out another word; an’ he never comed; an’ nobody ever heard a whisper about him again from that day to this. For a soldier he went, ’twas thought; but the after history of un never reached nobody at Postbridge; an’ whether he was shot or whether he gathered glory in foreign parts none ’pon Dartymoor can tell you.

“A nine days’ wonder it was, an’ it killed my mother; for John James was the apple of her eye. Her never cared a button for me, ’cause I was the living likeness of her brother—my uncle, Silas Bond. They sent him to Botany Bay for burning down wheat stacks. A bad lot he was, no doubt; an’ a fool to boot, which is worse. For he got catched an’ punished. An’ he deserved all he got—for letting ’em catch him.

“With John James out of the way, I comed to be a bit more important in the house, an’ when my mother died, father got to trust me with his money. I was old for my years, you see. As for Nelly, she kept so true to me as the bird to her nest—for five years; an’ then I’d got to be twenty, an’ had saved over three hundred pound for her; an’ she was twenty-two. A good many chaps wanted to marry her; but she kept our secret close, an’ said ‘nay’ to some very snug men, an’ just waited for me an’ Aller Bottom Farm.

“Then, when I’d reckoned to name the day an’ take her so soon as I comed of age, Oliver Honeywell turned up from down country an’ rented that old tenement farm what be called Merripit. So good land as any ’pon all Dartymoor goes with it. An’ he comed wi’ a flourish of trumpets an’ plenty of money. He was going to larn us all how to farm, an’ how to make money ’pon weekdays, an’ how to get to heaven Sundays.

“Rot the devil! I see him now—a smug, sleek, fat, handsome, prosperous man, with the insolence of a spoilt cat! He’d preach in the open air of a Sunday, for there was no parson nor church here in them days. Strong as a horse,—a, very practical man,—always right. Did plenty of good, as the saying goes, an’ went about like a procession, as if he expected angels from heaven to be waiting for him at every street corner with a golden crown. His right hand was generous, but he took very good care his left hand knowed it. He didn’t do his good in secret, nor yet hide his light under a bushel.

“He was a black-haired man, wi’ scholarship an’ money behind him. He knew the better-most folk. They called upon him, I believe, an’ axed him to their houses, it was said. He hunted, and paid money to help three different packs o’ hounds. An old mother kept house for him. He tried to patronize the whole of Postbridge an’ play the squire an’ vicar rolled into one. Men as owed him nought an’ thanked him for nought pulled their hair to him. But there be some fools who will always touch their hats to a pair o’ horses. There comed to be an idea in people’s minds that Honeywell was a Godsend, though if you axed them why, they generally couldn’t tell you.

“An’ my Nelly falled in love with him.