Part 10

"Well," he answered critically and judicially, "he _does_ seem to be unusually sleepy. But whether it is from the effects of your blow or from the soporific influence of my discourse would be hard to say."

Donahue ambled on up a gently winding track--it was not quite a road--which was entirely of his own choosing.

"Jimmie."

"Yes, dear."

She nestled closer, and Jimmie waited.

"I'm afraid."

"What is it, dear?"

"You."

"Me?" Jimmie inquired blankly, wondering what he had been doing now.

"I'm afraid of the time when you get all well and yourself again. You'll want to wander."

"Like Jethniah, eh? There now, what did I tell you? That's what comes of listening to him. You think that, like him, the whole male world is uncertain, coy and hard to please."

"Please, Jimmie, don't head me off. I'm afraid. I suppose love makes cowards of us all. Do you remember a time when I said that I wouldn't want to keep even a kitten that didn't want to stay?"

"Oh, but that was before we were married!" he explained airily. "We all talk turkey at a time like that. It's the last chance we get. And we spend the rest of our lives trying to pay the bets."

"Jimmie."

"Yes, dear?"

"Do you remember the lady I saw you talking with that day in the Square?"

"Sure," said Jimmie lightly, "Jean Bradley"--They were far away now, it seemed to him, and the name meant nothing to either of them--, "what about her?"

"And the woman in the cards, do you remember?"

"You mean the one the gypsy girl wanted to claw me about? Oh yes."

"They were the same woman."

"Same woman?" asked Jimmie, mentally pawing about for firm ground.

"It was the same dark, handsome woman, in the cards, I saw her."

"Saw----?" For one rare and breathless moment Jimmie was completely dumbfounded. He could not find a word anywhere. But he reacted bravely.

"Well if you saw her," he exclaimed eagerly, "why the deuce didn't you tell her that you'd collect the money she owes us?"

"Please, Jimmie, don't joke. I'm trying to say something that's hard to say. You know when we stood before the priest I promised, in my heart, that if I ever thought you wanted to go away from me I would not only let you go but I would force you to be free, by going away and hiding myself."

Jimmie said nothing. He sat looking stupidly at Donahue's ear, his hands clutching the reins so that they were cutting into his flesh. There was nothing to be said. Better let her talk this out for herself.

"And now," she went on fearfully, "I'm afraid, afraid of that woman. And I'm going to do a cowardly thing. I'm afraid of the test, afraid of myself. Jimmie, I'm going to ask you to promise something. I know it's going back on my own heart promise, but I can't help it--I can't help it!"

Jimmie saw that she was suffering, and trembling with fear and self reproach, and he did the best he could. He said:

"Let's drive back, and I'll choke Jethniah's wife to death with the soap. She's to blame for all this."

"But will you promise, Jimmie?"

"Of course, I'll promise! What is it, dear?" He was ready to promise her the setting sun.

"Will you promise me never to have anything to do with that woman?"

"Jean Bradley? Why, yes, sure I promise, if you wish it. That's easy, and all settled. We'll probably never see her again anyway. But I do wish you had put in something about Jethniah's wife. If ever a woman deserved choking, and with soap--I insist on the soap, it is certainly that woman."

But Augusta was not to be turned aside by his diversion.

"I'm afraid," she confessed, shrinking in closer to him so that she seemed so little and so forlorn that Jimmie instinctively put his hand on hers to stop her, "afraid that I would be coward enough to want you to stay even if I knew you wanted to go. And then you'd begin to talk. And you'd be so kind and so bright and jolly that I'd begin to let myself be fooled. You know how you can talk. You can make anybody almost believe anything. Please, darling," she pleaded, "promise you won't ever use it to deceive me!"

Wardwell silently cursed the gift of his glib and ready tongue, while he tried to find the right words for this. After a little he said humbly:

"Augusta, to your knowledge I'm a good many kinds of a fool. But let me tell you something that I know about you, and me. If I should ever be that particular kind of fool, do you know what would happen? Well, in the first place, you'd know it before I knew it myself. And before I'd get around to know it, you'd snap me loose and send me spinning so fast that I'd never know just what happened."

"Oh, Jimmie, don't let me think of it! I could not bear it, and live."

"There are other, more immediate, things to be thought of. Our patient Donahue is thinking hard on some of them this minute. In the first place, he is wondering if he is expected to work nights."

Donahue, who was by now accustomed to the name which had been thrust upon him, stopped and looked around at Augusta.

"I'm sorry, Donahue," she apologized cheerfully. "I know you are hungry and so is Jimmie. And it's all my fault. But really we can't stop right here. This is just the middle of a field. We'll just go on up to the edge of that little woods. And there we'll stop all day tomorrow, if you like, and think about things."

Jimmie tightened up on the rein, and Donahue plodded on obediently.

The track which they followed came again to the edge of a brook which they had been crossing and re-crossing now for two days. And they knew from the limpid clearness of the water and the slight thread of its rapid flow that they must be near its headwaters. Across its little valley, straight in front of them, stood a thin wall of tall, handsome maple trees, which thickened and deepened into a heavy green bank of solid forest as either end of the line ran up to the enclosing heights above the valley.

The cool, sharp breath of a hidden mountain lake came down to them, and Donahue smartened up his gait.

As they came up to where they could see through the fringe of trees, Augusta looked one long moment and drew in a deep breath of delight and pure joy in beauty.

A quick grasp of her hand on Jimmie's arm made him stop the horse. But before he could say a word she was out over the wheel and running through the trees, crying:

"It's ours, Jimmie! All alone ours! Nobody told us about it! We found it all for ourselves. It is all our own!"

When Jimmie caught up to her on the bank of the little lake, she hugged him excitedly and then waved her arm out over the water.

"Oh, isn't it the darling! A beautiful white diamond lying deep in its cushion of green velvet!"

Jimmie admitted quietly that the little five-pointed lake, lying like a precious white jewel embedded in the deep green setting of the wooded hills, was the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen.

The mantle of ready speech seemed to have dropped from him. He had no words with which to answer Augusta's enthusiasm. He stood holding her arm, silent so long that Augusta wondered and looked up at him, with a question.

"This is the end," he answered quietly, "of our wanderings. Here are your Hills of Desire."

Augusta nodded, but she did not answer in words. And Wardwell, watching, saw that strange, strained, listening look come into her eyes--the look that used to frighten him in the days of her trial. The look did not trouble him now, for he could place against it the healthy, rugged browned beauty of Augusta's supple body. Her hold upon earth and the things of life did not seem at all so slender as it had in those days when he had almost feared that she would slip away from him into that strange border land into which she peered and from which she certainly brought back knowledge.

Now as he held her arm, firm and warm and strong with the weeks of sunshine and wind and freedom, he smiled at his fears of those other days and nights. But when she spoke she startled him more thoroughly with the quiet certainty of her fore-knowledge than she had ever done in those other days by her strained and timid glances into the future.

"We shall stay here through the winter," she said, in the even voice of a dream, "for I can see the snow on the hillsides and the lake lying wrapped in ice. But then we will be driven away. I do not know why."

She paused a moment, hesitating, and then hurried on desperately, as though the vision was slipping from her:

"We will both be killed, a long, long way from here. But we won't care!" A little ring, like the sound of defiant laughter, broke up through the monotone of her speech, and it alarmed Wardwell so that he took her forcibly in his arms and almost shook her, to make her stop. But she went on quickly to the end of her knowledge:

"I shall be here waiting for you, and you will come. And we will go on together into the Hills of All Desire!"

She stopped, trembling against him. Jimmie chose not to answer or to make any comment on what she had said. From experience he knew that she probably would not remember just what she had been saying. He wanted to ignore it altogether. He preferred to believe that her nerves had merely become over taut from her excitement of the afternoon and that the sudden surprise of the beautiful little mountain-locked lake had played tricks upon them. He looked about for a diversion, and found one.

Not twenty yards from where they stood, in plain view, though flanked heavily with trees on both sides, and some little distance from the water, there was a small wooden house with an open door. And before the open door sat a man calmly whittling shavings for a fire. As Jimmie stared open-mouthed--he was almost ready to take oath that neither the house nor the man had been there before, that they had both been moved into place there by some stage trick while his back had been turned--the man leaned over from the low stump on which he sat and heaped the shavings into a neat pile. Then he looked up, and though he certainly saw Wardwell standing there holding Augusta he gave no sign whatever that he was aware of them.

Good manners, anyhow! Jimmie commented to himself.

Then he turned Augusta around to see what he saw, and said quietly:

"I'm awfully sorry, dear. But it seems that someone is here ahead of us."

Augusta looked and saw. But, to Wardwell's relief, she did not seem to be disturbed or deeply disappointed.

"Well, let's talk to him anyway. Maybe he doesn't belong here," she whispered. "Maybe he just happened to stop."

He led her back to where Donahue was patiently nibbling at some sweet maple shoots and wondering when this day was going to end, and taking Donahue by the bridle and Augusta by the arm Wardwell went forward by the track which he now saw led up to the open door and presented himself and his retinue to the leisurely gentleman who seemed to be in possession.

"We didn't mean to come breaking into your camp. Fact is," Jimmie explained, "we just followed our horse. And when we saw the lake we just wanted to stay."

As they had approached the man had thrown some dry sticks on top of the shavings which he had lighted, and he now straightened and stood up regarding them whimsically.

He had seen the wagon through the trees long before they had seen him and had wondered what gypsies were doing here so far from the ways of their trade. Now he saw that they were not of any of the kinds of gypsies that he had ever known. They looked, as Mr. Gamblin had remarked, exactly like a pair of runaway children.

"I couldn't but see the two of you at the lake," he said in a rich, soft, South of Ireland brogue that made Jimmie gasp--he would as soon have expected to be stopped here among the trees by a Broadway traffic policeman as to have heard a voice like that here--"and I saw the faces of you when you saw me. You were two blessed childer runnin' to the end of your rainbow, an' when you got there, when you got there, here was an ould dodherin Dimmick sittin' with his hand already in the pot o' gold."

"But we really hadn't any right to expect to find such a beautiful place untaken," said Augusta easily.

The man nudged the sticks of the fire gently with his foot and looked down at Augusta out of a pair of great, soft blue eyes. He was an enormous man of powerfully rounded build, as tall as Wardwell but so broad and solid of stature that, at a little distance he would have seemed just a well-knit man of medium height.

Wardwell had nothing to say. That wonderful brogue had silenced him completely. And the man's face was one which would have drawn attention in any crowd or setting.

It was a large, clean, unlined face as clear and chubby as the face of a rugged healthy boy. Yet it had in it the same quiet power which the man's giant limbs and torso concealed under their perfect proportions.

Wardwell, on the instant, remembered that he had seen three faces strikingly like this. One was the face of a United States senator. Another belonged to a powerful Anglican bishop. The third was the face of a noted downtown New York politician who was said now to be confined in a madhouse. A fantastic suspicion connected with that third face flashed across Jimmie's brain and probably showed for an instant in his eyes. But he almost laughed in the big man's face at the absurdity of the idea.

This man was different. His loose gray shirt and broad overalls revealed a body that fairly pulsed with the clean health of years of out of doors, while a gentle, fine light of sadness and of wholesome humor played almost imperceptibly in the soft blue eyes. The gray hair, cut down close and crisp, told of probably sixty years lightly and soundly lived.

"I'll be moving along early in the morning," he was saying to Augusta, though he was watching Wardwell with a gleam in his eyes. He had seen the flash of a question on Jimmie's face.

"Oh, but you mustn't do anything of the kind!" Augusta objected warmly. "Why, we'd just feel that we had driven you out of your beautiful camp."

"The camp's here all the year, for anybody. 'Tis a sugar bush, don't you see. Nobody comes here only very late in the fall, to cut wood for the sugar boiling, and then again when the winter's breaking up. But for them two little times, a man might stay here the year round and nobody be a whit the wiser."

Again Wardwell's instinct for news and for mystery was roused. He set himself to watch and to listen.

"Our horse is tired," said Augusta, "and it's night now, so if you really don't mind we'll stay by the lake till tomorrow."

"You may stay on in welcome, the whole year if it suits you. The truth of the whole is, I--"

Evidently he was going to tell something of himself, but in that instant he caught Wardwell watching him and he stopped short.

He hesitated, looking sharply at Wardwell, as though wondering whether he could trust him.

"You may as well stay on," he said finally, with what seemed a sigh of tired, baffled resignation. "For I have to be moving on. The truth is, I--I'm _wanted_."

The effect of the last two words on the listeners was peculiar.

Wardwell, whose mind had been vaguely working toward some such thought as this announcement implied and who might have been expected to be somewhat prepared for it, started sharply and caught Augusta's arm.

Augusta, on the other hand, who had not anticipated the man's announcement by the smallest suspicion and who might reasonably have been expected to be shocked, spoke interestedly and as though in answer to what the big man had admitted.

And this is what she said.

"Did you ever know what it is to go six long whole weeks on stuff that's just been half stewed on a stove that doesn't hold fire enough to really cook anything? We've been doing that until there's just one conglomerate taste in our mouths and we don't know whether we're eating fish or meat. And all because I haven't learned to cook with an open fire. I'm going to borrow your fire right now and beg you to teach me."

The big blue eyes of the old Irishman beamed down upon her in wonder and appreciation. He was about to speak, but Augusta was too quick for him. She had taken her attitude--it was that they were going to consider those last two words of his as never having been spoken--and she was not to be moved from it.

"I have bacon," she rattled on, "that the storekeeper said was as staple as old cheese. No, that was the soap," she remembered, laughing, "and new potatoes, and eggs that were laid this morning, if we want them, and--Come, I'll show you what we have, and we'll make a picnic feast."

She turned away and led the big man towards the step of the wagon.

"My name is Smith," the big man asserted with an effort as he followed her.

"How stupid of me!" Augusta apologized from the step of the wagon. "But, out gypsying like this, it's so easy to get careless in one's manners. We are the Wardwells. My husband is a writer," she catalogued carefully. "And I am his wife. And our horse Donahue once lived under a lake in Ireland."

The big man turned for a look at Donahue. "Them horses was white," he argued, "I know all about them. He's a rusty red."

"Of course," said Augusta cheerfully as she dived into her stores and handed forth potatoes and bacon, "that's rust, from the dampness."

The big man exploded into a roaring laugh. "God bless the handy liar that made that up for you! I don't think you did it yourself."

"No," Augusta admitted, "it's my husband. You see, inventing is his business. I only quote. And Donahue, who is truly wise, he only listens."

Jimmie was dutifully unhitching Donahue.

"Donahue," he grumbled as he tugged at the girth buckle, "_what_ do you know about that?

"Now, not as between master and servant but as horse to man, give me your plain opinion. Are women born into the world full armed with all the weapons of diplomacy, tact and happy deceit? And if they are not so born, Donahue, I put it to you, who teaches them?

"Augusta is fully convinced that the man is a desperate criminal. And she waves the whole matter aside, as though he had merely apologized for being without a dress suit, and makes him the long lost uncle.

"I am a stupid man and you are not a particularly brilliant horse. We are stumped, and we know it.

"Come and have a drink."

He led the way down to where there was a little shingle of pebbles running from the grass bank out into the lake and Donahue walked into the water so as to cover all four feet, for he was old and road wise and he knew the comfort of a cool foot bath after a long blistering day.

"Good idea," Jimmie commented, "cool your feet and clear your mind. We need clear minds around here. Come on now, this is the only lake in the neighborhood. Don't try to drink it all. You'll spoil your appetite and ruin your digestion which is already impaired by sugar bags and other surreptitious gobblings.

"About our Mr. Smith, now," he inquired as he dragged Donahue away from the water, "what do you think? What particular branch of high crime does he favor. He is a specialist, of course. He is far too clever a man to scatter himself on general practitioning in this age of specialists. What do you suggest?

"He is a large round man with a kind eye. He could sell mining stocks. But, somehow, I rather feel that he'd be above preying on widows and school teachers and innocent clergymen. I think he'd prefer some excitement in his.

"He might be a head waiter, of course. But no law has yet been invented to make those gentlemen flee to the woods.

"I'll have to give it up, if you have nothing to suggest," he concluded lamely.

When he had filled Donahue's measure of oats he left him feeding at the wagon and came to the fire.

Augusta was hanging a pot of potatoes over the fire from a long crooked iron hook that was sunk into the ground. The big man had gone down to the brook where, it appeared, he had a string of live fish in captivity.

"Do you think we are wise?" said Jimmie cautiously. "We can't tell, you know. People might be looking for him. And suppose he had taken things and brought them here. And if we were found here," he worried on, "why, we simply haven't any credentials at all. And we're a deuce of a long ways from anybody that knows us. It might be very mean for you--these country sheriffs, you know, they might bundle the whole of us off to the nearest county jail, wherever it is."

"I don't care," said Augusta warmly, flushing over the fire. "Just look at the man. I _know_ he didn't do anything really wrong."

"That's the woman of it," Jimmie argued meanly, "just because a man looks like a well preserved and benevolent Greek god and talks with a soft brogue, then the law of the land must be wrong."

"Well, the law _is_ wrong lots of times," Augusta answered evenly. And Jimmie wondered whether women, with all the terrible discipline which nature and human society put upon them, were not essentially more lawless than men; or was it that they had gotten a larger share of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and actually did know good from evil.

He had no time for any remarks on the subject, for the big man was coming back from the brook carrying a big fish, cleaned and split, on a toaster that was fashioned out of two bent pieces of wire.

"If ye'll just rub in the salt," he said, holding out the fish to Augusta. "It'll not need a deal of it for we'll lash the bacon in with the fish."

"Our table is very little," said Augusta, regarding her folding table as she took the salt from it. "But you and Jimmie can sit and I'll wait on you like an Indian woman."

For some reason Augusta was supremely happy. It was not merely the exciting effect of the feeling that she was flouting the law. And she was deeply touched by the big man's plight as she understood it. But there was about her to-night what Jimmie sometimes called a mist of happiness, as though she trod on dew rays and moved in a cloud.

"Faith'n I know a trick worth two o' that," said the big man positively. "If you'll just turn the fish against the fire, mam--not over the fire, mind you, but just against it--I'll find a table."

He disappeared into the darkness of the little house, and presently came out carrying a good sized table.

"McQuade's a queer duck enough. But I'll say for him that he does keep his things clean."

"Who's McQuade?" Jimmie inquired with a show of interest. He was nervous. He did not like the position at all. He was, in fact, out of his element. He was a man of city streets, where certain people are paid to take care of every sort of situation. Here he would not know what to do. This man was, beyond doubt, a criminal at large. It was entirely possible that a posse was even at this moment searching the vicinity for him. He would certainly have fire arms about. Wardwell shuddered as he thought of Augusta being senselessly exposed in a desperate affair of this kind. But, since Augusta had set the tone for the party, there was nothing for him to do but to follow her lead as best he could.

"McQuade's a nut," said the big man, placing the table judiciously under a tree to windward of the fire. "He owns this place. He has a fine farm fifty miles down the Parishville road. He has plenty to do, and everything to do it with. And he has a grand energetic Yankee wife to see that he does it. But, an' there's the thrapin' contrary Irish of him, he'd far rather come up here an' sit on the step o' the door an' look out at the lake than to put in the finest harvest that ever was."

"I think he's just right," Augusta argued, glad that a neutral subject had been introduced. For even she, in the heating test of holding the baking fish to the fire and watching the boiling potatoes, was not sure how long their thoughts and conversation could be kept away from forbidden ground. There were so many things which it would be unfortunate to mention to a strayed criminal.