Chapter 9

“When the soldiers found us we were too far gone to realize the issue that was upon us. He was the first to take it in. It was on the march home, at night, he touched me and began speaking low in our corner of the tent. 'As we came in here, so we go out again, and so we stay,' he said. I told him it could not be. To suppress what I had learned would make the whole of life a lie, a coward's lie. That knowledge belonged to my mother. I must render it up to her. To do otherwise would be to treat her like a child and to meddle with the purposes of God. 'No honest man robs another of his secrets,' he said. He was very much excited. She was the only one now to be considered--and what did I know about God's purposes? He refused to take my scruples into consideration, except such as concerned her. But, after a long argument, very painful, weak as we were and whispering in the dark, he yielded this much. If I were bent on digging up the dead, as he called it, it must be done in such a way as to leave her free. Free she was in law, and she must be given a chance to claim her freedom without talk or publicity. Absolute secrecy he demanded of me in the mean time. I begged him to see how unfair it was to her to bring her face to face with such a discovery without one word of preparation, of excuse for him. She would condemn him on the very fact of his being alive. So she would, he said, if she were going to judge him; not if she felt towards him as--as a wife feels to her husband. It was that he wanted to know. It was that or nothing he would have from her. 'Bring me face to face with her alone, and as sudden as you like. If she knows me, I am the man. And if she wants me back, she will know me--and that way I'll come and no other way.' Was not that wonderful? A gentleman could hardly have improved on that. Whatever feeling he might be supposed to have towards her in the matter we could never touch upon. But I think he had his hopes. That decision was hanging over us--and I trembled for her. Day before yesterday, was it, I persuaded her to see the sick guide. She wondered why I was faint as she kissed me good-by. I ought to have prepared her. It was a horrible snare. And yet he meant it all in delicacy, a passionate consideration for her. Poor fool. How could I prepare _him!_ How could he keep pace with the changes in her! After all, it is externals that make us,--habits, clothes. Great God! Things you could not speak of to a naked soul like him. But he would have it 'straight,' he said--and straight he got it. And he is gone; broke away like an animal out of a trap. And I am going to find him, to see at least that he has a roof over his head. God knows, he may not die for years!”

“She has got years before her too.”

“She!--What am I saying! We have plunged into those damnable inferences and I haven't given you the facts. Wait. I shall contradict all this in a moment. I thought, she must have done this for her children. She must be given another chance. And I approached the thing on my very knees--not to let her know that I knew, only to hint that I was not unprepared, had guessed--could meet it, and help her to meet the problems it would bring into our lives. Help her! She stood and faced me as if I had insulted her. 'I have been your father's widow for twenty-two years. If that fact is not sacred to you, it is to me. Never dare to speak of this to me again!'”

“Ah,” said Moya in a long-drawn sigh, “then she did not”--

“Oh, she did, explicitly! For I went on to speak of it. It was my last chance. I asked her how she--we--could possibly go through with it; how with this knowledge between us we could look each other in the face--and go on living.

“'Put this hallucination out of your mind,' she said. 'That man and I are strangers.'”

“Was that--would you call that a lie?” asked Moya fearfully.

“You can see your answer in her face. I do not say that hers was the first lie. It must always be foolish, I think, to evade the facts of life as we make them for ourselves. He refused to meet his facts, from the noblest motives;--but now I'm tangling you all up again! Rest your head here, darling. This is such a business! It is a pity I cannot tell you his whole story. Half the meaning of all this is lost. But--here is a solemn declaration in writing, signed John Hagar, in which this man we are speaking of says that Adam Bogardus was his partner, who died in the woods and was buried by his hand; that he knew his story, all the scenes and circumstances of his life in many a long talk they had together, as well as he knew his own. In his delirium he must have confused himself with his old partner, and half in dreams, he said, half in the crazy satisfaction of pretending to himself he had a son, he allowed the delusion to go on; saw it work upon me, and half feared it, half encouraged it. Afterwards he was frightened at the thought of meeting my mother, who would know him for an impostor. His seeming scruples were fear of exposure, not consideration for her. This was why he guarded their interview so carefully. 'No harm's been done,' he says, 'if you'll act now like a sensible man. I'll be disappointed in you if you make your mother any trouble about this. You've treated me as square as any man could treat another. Remember, I say so, and think as kindly as you can of a harmless, loony old impostor'--and he signs himself 'John Hagar,'--which shows again how one lie leads to another. We go to find 'John Hagar.'”

“Have you shown your mother this letter? You have not? Paul, you will not rob her of her just defense!”

“I will not heap coals of fire on her head! This letter simply completes his renunciation, and he meant it for her defense. But when a man signs himself 'John Hagar' in the handwriting of my father, it shows that somebody is not telling the truth. I used to pore over the old farm records in my father's hand at Stone Ridge in the old account books stowed away in places where a boy loves to poke and pry. I know it as well as I know yours. Do you suppose she would not know it? When a man writes as few letters as he does, the handwriting does not change.” Paul laid the letter upon the coals. “It is the only witness against her, but it loses the case.”

“She never could have loved him. I never believed she did!” said Moya.

“She thinks she can live out this deep-down, deliberate--But it will kill her, Moya. Her life is ended from this on. How could I have driven her to that excruciating choice! I ought to have listened to him altogether or not at all. There is a hell for meddlers, and the ones who meddle for conscience' sake are the deepest damned, I think.”

Moya came and wreathed her arm in his, and they paced the room in silence. At length she said, “If we go to find John Hagar, shall we not be meddling again? A man who respects a woman's freedom must love his own. It is the last thing left him. Don't hunt him down. I believe nothing could hurt him now like seeing you again.”

“He shall not see me unless he wants to, but he shall know where I stand on this question of the Impostor. It shall be managed so that even he can see I am protecting her. No, call himself what he will, the tie between him and me is another of those facts.”

“But do you love him, Paul?”

“Oh--I cannot forget him! He is--just as he used to be--'poor father out there in the cold.' We must find him and comfort him somehow.”

“For our own peace of mind? Forgive me for arguing when everything is so difficult. But he is a man--a brave man who would rather be forever out in the cold than be a burden. Do not rob him of his right to _be_ John Hagar if he wants to, for the sake of those he loves. You do not tell me it was love, but I am sure it was, in some mistaken way, that drove him into exile. Only love as pure as his can be our excuse for dragging him back. He did not want shelter and comfort from her. Only one thing. Have we got that to give him?”

“Well then, I go for my own sake--it is a physical necessity; and I go for hers. She has put it out of her own power to help him. It will ease her a little to know I am trying to reach him in his forlorn disguise.”

“But you were not going to tell her?”

“In words, no. But she will understand. There is a strange clairvoyance between us, as if we were accomplices in a crime!”

Moya reflected silently. This search which Paul had set his heart upon would equally work his own cure, she saw. Nor could she now imagine for themselves any lover's paradise inseparable from this moral tragedy, which she saw would be fibre of their fibre, life of their life. A family is an organism; one part may think to deny or defy another, but with strange pains the subtle union exerts itself; distance cannot break the thread.

They kissed each other solemnly like little children on the eve of a long journey full of awed expectancy.

Mrs. Bogardus stood holding her door ajar as Moya passed on her way downstairs. “You are very late,” she uttered hoarsely. “Is nothing settled yet?”

“Everything!” Moya hesitated and forced a smile, “everything but where we shall go. We will start--and decide afterwards.”

“You go together? That is right. Moya, you have a genius for happiness!”

“I wish I had a genius for making people sleep who lie awake hours in the night thinking about other people!”

“If you mean me, people of my age need very little sleep.”

“May I kiss you good-night, Paul's mother?”

“You may kiss me because I am Paul's mother, not because I do not sleep.”

Moya's lips touched a cheek as white and almost as cold as the frosted window-panes through which the moon was glimmering. She thought of the icy roses on her wedding dress.

Downstairs her father was smoking his bedtime cigar. Mrs. Creve, very sleepy and cosy and flushed, leaned over the smouldering bed of coals. She held out her plump, soft hand to Moya.

“Come here and be scolded! We have been scolding you steadily for the last hour.”

“If you want that young man to get his strength back, you'd better not keep him up talking half the night,” the colonel growled softly. “Do you see what time it is?”

Moya knelt and leaned her head against her father. She reached one hand to Mrs. Creve. They did not speak again till her weak moment had passed. “It will be very soon,” she said, pressing the warm hand that stroked her own. “You will help me pack, aunt Annie; and then you'll stay--with father? I know you are glad to have me out of the way at last!”

XVII

THE HIDDEN TRAIL

Because they had set forth on a grim and sorrowful quest, it need not be supposed that Paul and Moya were a pair of sorrowful pilgrims. It was their wedding journey. At the outset Moya had said: “We are doing the best we know. For what we don't know, let us leave it and not brood.”

They did not enter at once upon the more eccentric stages of the search. They went by way of the Great Northern to Portland, descending from snow to roses and drenching rains. At Pendleton, which is at the junction of three great roads, Paul sent tracers out through express agents and train officials along the remotest slender feeders of these lines. Through the same agents it was made known that for any service rendered or expense incurred on behalf of the person described, his friends would hold themselves gratefully responsible.

At Portland, Paul searched the steamer lists and left confidential orders in the different transportation offices; and Moya wrote to his mother--a woman's letter, every page shining with happiness and as free from apparent forethought as a running brook.

They returned by the Great Northern and Lake Coeur d'Alene, stopping over at Fort Sherman to visit Mrs. Creve, who was giddy with joy over the wholesome change in Paul. She, too, wrote a woman's letter concerning that visit, to the colonel, which cleared a crowd of shadows from his lonely hearth.

Thence again to Pendleton came the seekers, and Paul gathered in his lines, but found nothing; so cast them forth again. But through all these distant elaborations of the search, in his own mind he saw the old man creeping away by some near, familiar trail and lying hid in some warm valley in the hills, his prison and his home.

It was now the last week in March. The travelers' bags were in the office, the carriage at the door, when a letter--pigeon-holed and forgotten since received some three weeks before--was put into Paul's hand.

I run up against your ad. in the Silver City Times [the communication began]. If you haven't found your man yet, maybe I can put you onto the right lead. I'm driving a jerky on the road from Mountain Home to Oriana, but me and the old man we don't jibe any too well. I've got a sort of disgust on me. Think I'll quit soon and go to mining. Jimmy Breen he runs the Ferry, he can tell you all I know. Fifty miles from Mountain Home good road can make it in one day. Yours Respecfully,

J. STRATTON.

It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of enterprise.

Business at the Ferry had shrunk since the railroad went through. The house-staff consisted of Jimmy Breen, a Chinese cook of the bony, tartar breed, sundry dogs, and a large bachelor cat that mooned about the empty piazzas. In a young farming country, hungry for capital, Jimmy could not do a cash business, but everything was grist that came to his mill; and he was quick to distinguish the perennial dead beat from a genuine case of hard luck.

“That's a good axe ye have there,” pointing suggestively to a new one sticking out of the rear baggage of an emigrant outfit. “Ye better l'ave that with me for the dollar that's owing me. If ye have money to buy new axes ye can't be broke entirely.” Or: “Slip the halter on that calf behind there. The mother hasn't enough to keep it alive. There's har'ly a dollar's wort' of hide on its bones, but I'll take it to save it droppin' on the road.” Or, he would try sarcasm: “Well, we'll be shuttin' her down in the spring. Then ye can go round be Walter's Ferry and see if they'll trust ye there.” Or: “Why wasn't ye workin' on the Ditch last winter? Settin' smokin' your poipe in the tules, the wife and young ones packin' sagebrush to kape ye warm!”

On the morning after their distinguished arrival, Jimmy's guests came down late to a devastated breakfast-table. Little heaps of crumbs here and there showed where earlier appetites had had their destined hour and gone their way. At an impartial distance from the top and the foot of the table stood the familiar group of sauce and pickle bottles, every brand dear to the cowboy, including the “surrup-jug” adhering to its saucer. There was a fresh-gathered bunch of wild phlox by Moya's plate in a tumbler printed round the edge with impressions of a large moist male thumb.

“Catchee plenty,” the Chinaman grinned, pointing to the plain outside where the pale sage-brush quivered stiffly in the wind. “Bymbye plenty come. Pretty col' now.”

“You'll be getting a large hump on yourself, Han, me boy. 'T is a cash crowd we have here--and a lady, by me sowl!” Thus Jimmy exhorted his household. Times were looking up. They would be a summer resort before the Ditch went through; it should be mentioned in the Ditch company's prospectus. Jimmy had put his savings into land-office fees and had a hopeful interest in the Ditch.

A spur in the head is worth two in the heel. Without a word from “the boss” Han had found time to shave and powder and polish his brown forehead and put on his whitest raiment over his baggiest trousers. There was loud panic among the fowls in the corral. The cat had disappeared; the jealous dogs hung about the doors and were pushed out of the way by friends of other days.

Seated by the office fire, Paul was conferring with Jimmy, who was happy with a fresh pipe and a long story to tell to a patient and paying listener. He rubbed the red curls back from his shining forehead, took the pipe from his teeth, and guided a puff of smoke away from his auditor.

“I seen him settin' over there on his blankets,”--he pointed with his pipe to the opposite shore plainly visible through the office windows,--“but he niver hailed me, so I knowed he was broke. Some, whin they're broke, they holler all the louder. Ye would think they had an appointment wit' the Governor and he sint his car'iage to meet them. But he was as humble, he was, as a yaller dog.--Out! Git out from here--the pack of yez! Han, shut the dure an' drive thim bloody curs off the piazzy. They're trackin' up the whole place.--As I was sayin', sor, there he stayed hunched up in the wind, waitin' on the chanst of a team comin', and I seen he was an ould daddy. I stud the sight of him as long as I cud, me comin' and goin'. He fair wore me out. So I tuk the boat over for 'im. One of his arrums he couldn't lift from the shoulder, and I give him a h'ist wit' his bundle. Faith, it was light! 'Twinty years a-getherin',' he cackles, slappin' it. 'Ye've had harrud luck,' I says. ''T is not much of a sheaf ye are packin' home.' 'That's as ye look at it,' he says.

“I axed him what way was he goin'. He was thinking to get a lift as far as Oriana, if the stages was runnin' on that road. 'Then ye 'll have to bide here till morning,' I says, 'for ye must have met the stage goin' the other way.' 'I met nothing,' says he; 'I come be way of the bluffs,'--which is a strange way for one man travelin' afoot.

“The grub was on the table, and I says, 'Sit by and fill yourself up.' His cheeks was fallin' in wit' the hunger. With that his poor ould eye begun to water. 'Twas one weak eye he had that was weepin' all the time. 'I've got out of the habit of reg'lar aitin',' he says. 'It don't take much to kape me goin'.' 'Niver desave yourself, sor! 'T is betther feed three hungry men than wan “no occasion.”' His appetite it grew on him wit' every mouthful. There was a boundless emptiness to him. He lay there on the bench and slep' the rest of the evening, and I left him there wit' a big fire at night. And the next day at noon we h'isted him up beside of Joe Stratton. A rip-snorter of a wind was blowin' off the Silver City peaks. His face was drawed like a winter apple, but he wint off happy. I think he was warm inside of himself.”

“Did you ask him his name?”

“Sure. Why not? John Treagar he called himself.”

“Treagar? Hagar, you mean!”

“It was Treagar he said.”

“John Hagar is the man I am looking for.”

“Treagar--Hagar? 'T is comin' pretty close to it.”

“About what height and build was he?”

“He was not to say a tall man; and he wasn't so turrible short neither. His back was as round as a Bible. A kind of pepper and saltish beard he had, and his hair was blacker than his beard but white in streaks.”

“A _dark_ man, was he?”

“He would be a _dark_ man if he was younger.”

“The man I want is blue-eyed.”

“His eyes was blue--a kind of washed-out gray that maybe was blue wanst; and one of them always weepin' wit' the cold.”

“And light brown hair mixed with gray, like sand and ashes--mostly ashes; and a thin straggling beard, thinner on the cheeks? A high head and a tall stooping figure--six feet at least; hands with large joints and a habit of picking at them when”--

“Ye are goin' too fast for me now, sor. He was not that description of a man, nayther the height nor the hair of him. Sure't is a pity for ye comin' this far, and him not the man at all. Faith, I wish I was the man meself! I wonder at Joe Stratton anyhow! He's a very hasty man, is Joe. He jumps in wit' both feet, so he does. I could have told ye that.”

* * * * *

Moya, always helplessly natural, and now very tired as well, when Paul described with his usual gravity this anti-climax, fell below all the dignities at once in a burst of childish giggling. Paul looked on with an embarrassed smile, like a puzzled affectionate dog at the incomprehensible mirth of humans. Paul was certainly deficient in humor and therefore in breadth. But what woman ever loved her lover the less for having discovered his limitations? Humor runs in families of the intenser cultivation. The son of the soil remains serious in the face of life's and nature's ironies.

XVIII

THE STAR IN THE EAST

So the search paused, while the searchers rested and revised their plans. Spring opened in the valley as if for them alone. There were mornings “proud and sweet,” when the humblest imagination could have pictured Aurora and her train in the jocund clouds that trooped along the sky,--wind-built processions which the wind dispersed. Wild flowers spread so fast they might have been spilled from the rainbow scarf of Iris fleeting overhead. The river was in flood, digging its elbows into its muddy banks. The willow and wild-rose thickets stooped and washed their spring garments in its tide.

Primeval life and love were all around them. Meadow larks flung their brief jets of song into the sunlight; the copses rustled with wings; wood-doves cooed from the warm sunny hollows, and the soft booming of their throaty call was like a beating in the air,--the pulse of spring. They had found their Garden. Humanity in the valley passed before them in forms as interesting and as alien as the brother beasts to Adam: the handsome driver of the jerky, Joe Stratton's successor, who sat at dinner opposite and combed his flowing mustache with his fork in a lazy, dandified way; the darkened faces of sheep-herders enameled by sun and wind, their hair like the winter coats of animals; the slow-eyed farmers with the appetites of horses; the spring recruits for the ranks of labor footing it to distant ranches, each with his back-load of bedding, and the dust of three counties on his garments.

The sweet forces of Nature shut out, for a season, Paul's _cri du coeur_. One may keep a chamber sacred to one's sadder obligations and yet the house be filled with joy. Further ramifications of the search were mapped out with Jimmy's indifferent assistance. For good reasons of his own, Jimmy did little to encourage an early start. He would explain that his maps were of ancient date and full of misinformation as to stage routes. “See that now! The stages was pulled off that line five year ago, on account of the railroad cuttin' in on them. Ye couldn't make it wid'out ye took a camp outfit. There's ne'er a station left, and when ye come to it, it's ruins ye'll find. A chimbly and a few rails, if the mule-skinners hasn't burned them. 'Tis a country very devoid of fuel; sagebrush and grease-wood, and a wind, bedad! that blows the grass-seeds into the next county.”

When these camping-trips were proposed to Moya, she hesitated and responded languidly; but when Paul suggested leaving her even for a day, her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely he felt that she was unlike herself--less buoyant, though often restless; and sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her sun-burned color like that of rose-hips in October. Various causes kept him inert, while strength mounted in his veins, and life seemed made for the pure joy of living.

The moon of May in that valley is the moon of roses, for the heats once due come on apace. The young people gave up their all-day horseback rides and took morning walks instead, following the shore-paths lazily to shaded coverts dedicated to those happy silences which it takes two to make. Or, they climbed the bluffs and gazed at the impenetrable vast horizon, and thought perhaps of their errand with that pang of self-reproach which, when shared, becomes a subtler form of self-indulgence.