CHAPTER XV

MARTA’S FLIGHT

She did not know where she was going. She did not care. What did it matter where she went?

The victim of the Lizard’s unspeakable brutality was as one dazed by an unexpected blow. Coming, as the fellow’s vicious attack did, so close upon her own uneasy thoughts, it seemed to answer all her troubled questions and she accepted every cruel word as the truth.

Nugget, wondering, perhaps, why his rider remained so motionless when the other horse and rider had gone on, essayed an inquiring step or two forward. When his mistress gave no heed to his movement, he tossed his head and pulled at the slack bridle rein invitingly. “What’s the matter?” he seemed to say. “Come on--why don’t we go?” But still she gave no sign of life. Slowly, as if still wondering and a bit doubtful, the little horse moved on down the familiar way toward home. At the pasture gate, the pinto, without a sign from his rider, placed himself so that she could reach the latch. Mechanically she opened the gate and the knowing animal helped her close it from the other side.

But when Nugget would have taken the trail which goes past that white house on the mountain side by which they always went home from Oracle, Marta reined him back with a sudden start. She could not go that way now. She remembered with a wave of hot shame how she had proposed to Saint Jimmy that they be married and run away somewhere--and how she had pictured their home. She understood now why he had laughed in that queer, strained way. It would have seemed funny to any man like Doctor Burton, with such a family name and birth and breeding, that a girl like her--born as she was without a name, with no right to be born at all, even--would dare to suggest such a thing.

Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton had been good to her--yes, they would be good to any one like that. They had pitied her and had wanted to help her. But of course Saint Jimmy had laughed when she asked him to marry her. She would love those dear friends always, but at the thought of ever meeting them again she shook with terror. She felt that she would die with shame.

As she rode on, the girl gave no heed to the heavy storm clouds that were massing above the upper cañon. At any other time she would have seen and would have pushed her horse to his utmost speed in a race with the coming flood. But now she was too occupied to think of the approaching danger. In fact, her thoughts of Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton were only momentary. When her horse had turned into the direct trail to the cañon, she was fighting to keep herself from thinking of the man who lived in the cabin so close to her home. She was telling herself over and over that she must not think of him. And yet she did, and her thoughts burned like coals of fire.

Marta knew now with terrifying certainty that she loved Hugh Edwards--not, indeed, with the love that she gave Saint Jimmy and, which, until Edwards came, was the only kind of love she knew, but with that other love--the love that a woman gives to the one man she chooses above all others to be her man for all time to come, in the lives of her children--their children. Her happiness that morning had been born of the certainty that the man she had chosen wanted her. He had never spoken a word of love to her but she knew. In a thousand ways he had told her. His very efforts to keep from speaking had made her more sure in her happiness.

She had not understood. She had not even realized why she had wanted him to speak. She had only felt instinctively that she belonged to him, and that he wanted her, but that for some reason he hesitated. But now the Lizard had explained it all. She knew now that her love for Edwards was an evil love. She knew that her instinctive answer to him was a wicked thing. She knew that the emotions stirred by him were vile. She understood at last why he had not spoken the words she hungered to hear. He would never speak. He was like Saint Jimmy. The mother of Hugh Edwards’ sons must not be a nameless nobody--a creature of shameful birth and evil desires--a woman upon whom decent women turn their backs and at whom men like the Lizard laughed in scorn.

The girl was almost in sight of Hugh’s cabin when, with sudden energy, she sat erect and again checked her horse. Around that next turn in the cañon wall he would be waiting. She could not go on. A barrier, invisible but mightier than any mountain wall, had fallen across her way. She was separated--shut out. She was unclean. She must not go near the one she loved.

Wheeling her horse, the girl rode away up the cañon, straight toward the storm that was gathering in the mountains above. She did not know where she was going. She did not care. What did it matter where she went? She would go anywhere but there where he was waiting.

Blindly she rode into that stretch of the trail that lies in the channel of the creek between the sheer walls. But when, at the end of the hall-like passage, her horse would have followed the trail out of the cañon, she pulled him back. The pinto fretted and tried to turn once more toward home, but she forced him to leave the trail and go on up the creek.

For some time the little horse labored through the sand and gravel or picked his way, as a mountain horse will, around bowlders and over the rocks. So that when those first few drops of rain came pattering down, the girl was already a considerable distance up the cañon. Again Nugget protested, and again she forced him on.

She had reached a point beyond where the cañon turns back toward the south when the storm broke and the rain came swirling down the mountain in torrents. The fierce downpour, driven by the heavy gusts of wind, forced her to bend low in the saddle. On every side the dense gray curtain enveloped her. Her horse broke in open rebellion. Nugget knew, if his rider had forgotten, the grave danger of their position in the creek bed, and he proceeded to take such action as would at least insure their immediate safety.

There were a few preliminary bounds, then a scrambling rush with flying gravel and rolling rocks and tearing brush, with plunging leaps and straining heavy lifts, during which the girl rider could do little more than cling to the saddle. When her horse finally consented again to the control of the bit, and stood trembling, with heaving flanks, on the steep side of the mountain, Marta had lost all sense of direction. In the terrific downpour, she could not see a hundred yards. Wrapped in the gray folds of that wind-blown curtain, every detail of the landscape save the near-by bushes was obscured beyond recognition. No familiar peak or sky-line could be seen.

Suddenly Nugget threw up his head--his ears pointed inquiringly. The girl, too, looked and listened. Then above the hiss of the rain on the rocks and bushes, and the roar of the wind along the mountain slope, she heard the thunder of the coming flood. Nearer and louder came the sound until presently that rolling crest of the flood, freighted with crushing, grinding bowlders, swept past and the gray depths of the cañon below her horse’s feet were filled with the wild uproar.

Marta knew that to go back the way she had come was impossible. She realized dully that Nugget had saved both her life and his. It did not much matter, but she was glad that the little horse was not down there in the bed of the creek. They might as well go on somewhere, she thought; perhaps Nugget could find some place where he at least would be more comfortable.

Giving her horse the signal to start, she dropped the bridle rein on his neck, thus permitting him to choose his own course. With sure-footed care, the little horse picked his way along the mountain side, always climbing a little higher until finally they reached what the girl knew must be the top of a ridge or spur of the main range. Following this ridge, which led always upward but at an easy grade, the pinto moved with greater freedom. They came at last to a low gap through which Nugget went without a sign of hesitation, and again he was making his way along the steep side of the mountain.

It was nearly dark when the girl became aware that her horse was following a faint trail. She did not know when they had come into this trail. It was so faintly marked that it could scarcely be distinguished, if at all. But Nugget seemed perfectly content and confident, and because there was no reason for doing otherwise, and because she did not care, she let the horse go the way he had chosen.

The night came swiftly down. The gray curtain deepened to black. The girl did not even try to guess where she was except that she knew she must be somewhere on one of the mountain slopes that form the upper part of Cañada del Oro--the wildest and most remote section of the Santa Catalina range.

She was exhausted with the stress of her emotions and numb with her rain-soaked clothing in the cool air of the altitude to which they had climbed. As the light failed and the black wall of the night closed in about her, she swayed, half fainting, in her saddle. Nugget stopped and the girl slipped to the ground, clinging to the saddle for support. Peering into the gloom she could barely distinguish the mass of a mountain cedar a little farther on.

Wearily she stumbled and crept forward until she could crawl beneath the low sodden branches.

The girl felt herself sinking into a thick darkness that was not the darkness of the night.