CHAPTER XXXIV

MORNING

“The heart of a white man is a strange thing--I, Natachee, cannot understand.”

And Hugh Edwards knew by the light that flashed in the Indian’s somber eyes--by the expression of that dark countenance, and by the proud bearing of the red man, that Natachee had put aside the teaching of the white man’s school. There was something, too, beneath the Indian’s stoical composure which told Hugh that he was under the strain of some great excitement.

Gazing at Edwards with a curious intentness, the Indian said:

“My friend has been watching his star in the Cañon of Gold.”

“Yes, Natachee, I have been up on the mountain.”

Silently the Indian gave him a letter. It was from Marta.

Hugh handled the letter, turning it over and over, as if debating with himself what he should do with it.

“Open it and read,” said the Indian, “then hear what I, Natachee, shall say.”

Edwards opened the letter and read.

It was not a long letter, but it was filled with the strongest assurances of understanding and sympathy that a woman’s loving heart could pen. Saint Jimmy had told her of the completion of the story that had been left unfinished by the Mexican, and had explained its effect on the man she loved. But it made no difference to her, that she was proved to be the daughter of George Clinton, except that she was glad for her future husband’s sake that her birth was honorable--that she was not nameless, as she had believed herself to be. For the rest, everything must go on exactly as if she were still the old prospectors’ partnership girl. Saint Jimmy had gone to complete the arrangements he had started to make when Sonora Jack carried her away. There must be no change in their plans. When they were safe out of the country, she could communicate with her father. Hugh must come for her at once. She would be waiting for him to-morrow morning.

With deliberate care, Hugh Edwards folded the letter and returned it to the envelope.

The Indian was watching him intently.

The man did not appear in any way surprised, elated or disturbed. One would have said that he had been expecting the letter--had foreseen its contents, and had already, in his mind, answered it. His manner was that of one who, having fought and lived through the crisis of a storm, methodically and wearily takes up again the routine duties of his existence.

Calmly, with a shadowy smile that would have caused Marta to think of Saint Jimmy, he spoke.

“What is it that you wish to say, Natachee?”

“I, Natachee the Indian, can now pay the debt I owe Hugh Edwards.”

“You have more than paid that debt, Natachee.”

The red man returned haughtily:

“Is the life of Natachee of such little value that it is paid for by the death of that snake, Sonora Jack, and his companion who stopped the arrow?”

“But for you, Marta would not have escaped from Sonora Jack and the other outlaws,” returned Edwards.

“But for me, no one would know the woman Hugh Edwards loves, except as the Pardners’ girl. Hugh Edwards, but for Natachee, would be free to make her his wife.”

Indicating the letter in his hand, Hugh answered:

“She says here that it need make no difference. She says for me to come, as if the Mexican had died without speaking, as if you had taken nothing from Sonora Jack.”

The Indian’s eyes blazed with triumph.

“Good! That is as I, Natachee, wanted it to be. Now the way of my friend to the great desire of his heart is clear. Listen! When you left so hurriedly, after hearing the name of the girl’s father, Doctor Burton wondered at your manner. I told him that now, when the girl was known to be the daughter of a man of wealth and honorable position, you felt you could not take her for your wife.”

“That was true enough,” returned Edwards, wondering at the excitement which the Indian, with all of his assumed composure, could not hide.

“Yes, but I did not tell any one that it was the girl’s father who sent you, my friend, to prison. No one but Hugh Edwards and Natachee knows that. No one shall know until you, Donald Payne, are revenged for all that this man Clinton has made you suffer. When you have trapped this Clinton coyote--when you have made him pay for your shame--your imprisonment--your mother’s death--when he has paid for everything your heart holds against him--then I, Natachee, will have paid my debt to you.”

Hugh Edwards gazed at the Indian, bewildered, amazed, wondering.

“What on earth do you mean, Natachee?”

“Do you not understand? Listen.”

“The girl, who does not know what her father did, will go with you. Good!--Take her. Let there be a pretense of marriage. Then, when her shame is accomplished, send her to her father. Let George Clinton, who made Donald Payne a convict, beg that convict to give his daughter a name for her children. The shame that he heaped upon your name--the dishonor that he compelled you to suffer--you will give back to him through his daughter.”

The white man exclaimed with horror:

“In God’s name stop!”

“Is not the heart of Donald Payne filled with hate for the man who has filled his life with suffering?”

“Yes, Natachee, I hate George Clinton.”

“But you will not take the revenge that I, Natachee, have planned for you?”

“No--No--No!”

“The heart of a white man is a strange thing,” returned the Indian. “I, Natachee, cannot understand.”

* * * * *

The sun was not yet above the mountains, but the sky was glorious with the beauty of the new day, when Hugh Edwards stood in the doorway of the Indian’s hut.

Against a sky of liquid gold, melting into the deeper blue above, wreaths of flaming crimson cloud mists were flung with the careless splendor of the Artist who paints with the brush of the wind and the colors of light on the canvas of the heavens. The man bared his head and, with face uplifted, watched.

He felt the soft breath of the spring on his cheek and caught the perfume of cedar and pine. He heard the birds singing among the blossoms on the mountain side. He saw the mighty peaks and crags towering high. He looked down upon the foothills and mesas and afar over the desert where gray-blue shadows drifted on a sea of color into the far purple distance. A squirrel, in a live oak near by, chattered a glad good morning. A buck stepped from the cover of a manzanita thicket and stood, for a moment, with antlered head lifted, as if he too sensed the beauty and the meaning of life. A timid doe came to stand beside her lordly mate. The man, motionless, held his breath. In a flash they were gone.

Natachee the Indian stood beside his white companion.

Hugh Edwards held out his hand to the red man.

“Good-by, Natachee.”

“You go?” asked the puzzled Indian.

“Yes, you have paid your debt, Natachee.”

The fire of savage exultation flamed in the red man’s eyes.

“Hugh Edwards will take the revenge that I, Natachee, have offered?”

“No.”

The Indian said doubtfully, as if striving for an answer to the thing which puzzled him so:

“There is something in the white man’s heart that is more than hate?”

“Yes, Natachee. Yesterday I believed that there was nothing left for me in life but hate. Then you, last night, revealed to me what hate might do, and I knew the strength of love. I must go now--to the woman who is waiting for me, down there in the Cañon of Gold.”

But Hugh Edwards, when he told Saint Jimmy that George Clinton was living, had been mistaken.

The very night that Natachee brought the girl from that place where Sonora Jack had taken her, Marta’s father died in a Los Angeles hospital. In the same hour that the Indian and the girl were stealing from the Mexican house south of the border, the man for whose crime Donald Payne was sent to prison was dictating a confession. With the last of his strength, he signed the instrument.

Natachee, when he offered to Hugh Edwards his scheme of revenge, did not know that at that very moment every newspaper in the land was heralding the innocence of the escaped convict, Donald Payne. The man who went down the mountain slopes and ridges toward the Cañon of Gold that morning did not know that he was even then a free man. The girl who waited for her lover who had never spoken to her of his love did not know. But Doctor Burton, when he went to Oracle the evening before to complete his arrangements for that wedding journey, had received the news.

It was like Saint Jimmy to meet Hugh Edwards on the mountain side that morning, and to tell him what he had learned before Hugh had come within sight of the house in the cañon. It was like Saint Jimmy, too, to suggest that perhaps now Marta need never know, at least not until after they had returned from their trip abroad.