The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado

"Greatly refreshed, thank you."

"And hungry, I suppose?"

"Very."

"I will soon remedy that. Your foot?"

"It seems much better, but I – "

The girl hesitated, blushing. "I can't get my shoe on and – "

"Shall I have another look at it?"

"No, I don't believe it will be necessary. If I may have some of that liniment, or whatever it was you put on it, and more of that bandage, I think I can attend to it myself, but you see my stocking and my boot – "

The man nodded, he seemed to understand; he went to his cracker box chiffonier and drew from it a long coarse woolen stocking.

"That is the best that I can do for you," he said, extending it toward her somewhat diffidently.

"And that will do very nicely," said the girl. "It will cover the bandage and that is the main thing."

The man laid on the table by the side of the stocking another strip of bandage torn from the same sheet; as he did so he noticed the picture. He caught it up quickly, a dark flush spreading over his face, and holding it in his hand he turned abruptly away.

"I will go and cook you some breakfast while you get yourself ready. If you have not washed, you'll find a bucket of water and a basin and towel outside the door."

He went through the inner door as suddenly as he had come through the outer one. He was a man of few words and whatever of social grace he might once have possessed and in more favorable circumstances exhibited, was not noticeable now; the tenderness with which he had cared for her the night before had also vanished.

His bearing had been cool almost harsh and forbidding and his manner was as grim as his appearance. The conversation had been a brief one and her opportunity for inspection of him consequently limited, yet she had taken him in. She saw a tall splendid man, no longer very young, perhaps, but in the prime of life and vigor. His complexion was dark and burned browner by long exposure to sun and wind, winter and summer. In spite of the brown there was a certain color, a hue of health in his cheeks. His eyes were hazel, sometimes brown, sometimes gray, and sometimes blue, she afterward learned. A short thick closely cut beard and mustache covered the lower part of his face, disguising but not hiding the squareness of his jaw and the firmness, of his lips.

He had worn his cap when he entered and when he took it off she noticed that his dark hair was tinged with white. He was dressed in a leather hunting suit, somewhat the worse for wear, but fitting him in a way to give free play to all his muscles. His movements were swift, energetic and graceful; she did not wonder that he had so easily hurled the bear to one side and had managed to carry her – no light weight, indeed! – over what she dimly recognized must have been a horrible trail, which burdened as he was would have been impossible to a man of less splendid vigor than he.

The cabin was low ceiled and as she had sat looking up at him he had towered above her until he seemed to fill it. Naturally she had scrutinized his every action, as she had hung upon his every word. His swift and somewhat startled movement, his frowning as he had seized the picture on which she had gazed with such interest aroused the liveliest surprise and curiosity in her heart.

Who was this woman? Why was he so quick to remove the picture from her gaze? Thoughts rushed tumultuously through her brain, but she realized at once that she lacked time to indulge them. She could hear him moving about in the other room, she threw aside the blanket with which she had draped herself, changed the bandage on her foot, drew on the heavy woolen stocking which of course was miles too big for her, but which easily took in her foot and ankle encumbered as they were by the rude, heavy but effective wrapping. Thereafter she hobbled to the door and stood for a moment almost aghast at the splendor and magnificence before her.

He had built his cabin on a level shelf of rock perhaps fifty by a hundred feet in area. It was backed up against an overtowering cliff, otherwise the rock fell away in every direction. She divined that the descent from the shelf into the pocket or valley spread before her was sheer, except off to the right where a somewhat gentler acclivity of huge and broken boulders gave a practicable ascent – a sort of titantic stairs – to the place perched on the mountain side. The shelf was absolutely bare save for the cabin and a few huge boulders. There were a few sparse, stunted trees further up on the mountain side above; a few hundred feet beyond them, however, came the timber line, after which there was nothing but the naked rock.

Below several hundred feet lay a clear emerald pool, whose edges were bordered by pines where it was not dominated by high cliffs. Already the lakelet was rimmed with ice on the shaded side. This enchanting little body of water was fed by the melting snow from the crest and peaks, which in the clear pure sunshine and rarefied air of the mountains seemed to rise and confront her within a stone's throw of the place where she stood.

On one side of the lake in the valley or pocket beneath there was a little grassy clearing, and there this dweller in the wilderness had built a rude corral for the burros. On a rough bench by the side of the door she saw the primitive conveniences to which he had alluded. The water was delightfully soft and as it had stood exposed to the sun's direct rays for some time, although the air was exceedingly crisp and cold, it was tempered sufficiently to be merely cool and agreeable. She luxuriated in it for a few moments and while she had her face buried in the towel, rough, coarse, but clean, she heard a step. She looked up in time to see the man lay down upon the bench a small mirror and a clean comb. He said nothing as he did so and she had no opportunity to thank him before he was gone. The thoughtfulness of the act affected her strangely and she was very glad of a chance to unbraid her hair, comb it out and plait it again. She had not a hair pin left of course, and all she could do with it was to replait it and let it hang upon her shoulders; her coiffure would have looked very strange to civilization, but out there in the mountains, it was eminently appropriate.

Without noticing details the man felt the general effect as she limped back into the room toward the table. Her breakfast was ready for her; it was a coarse fare, bacon, a baked potato hard tack crisped before the fire, coffee black and strong, with sugar but no cream. The dishes matched the fare, too, yet she noticed that the fork was of silver and by her plate there was a napkin, rough dried but of fine linen. The man had just set the brimming smoking coffee pot on the table when she appeared.

"I am sorry I have no cream," he said, and then before she could make comment or reply, he turned and walked out of the door, his purpose evidently being not to embarrass her by his presence while she ate.

Enid Maitland had grown to relish the camp fare, bringing to it the appetite of good health and exertion. She had never eaten anything that tasted so good to her as that rude meal that morning, yet she would have enjoyed it better, she thought, if he had only shared it with her, if she had not been compelled to eat it alone. She hastened her meal on that account, determined as soon as she had finished her breakfast to seek the man and have some definite understanding with him.

And after all she reflected that she was better alone than in his presence, for there would come stealing into her thoughts the distressing episode of the morning before, try as she would to put it out of her mind. Well, she was a fairly sensible girl, the matter was passed, it could not be helped now, she would forget it as much as was possible. She would recur to it with mortification later on, but the present was so full of grave problems that there was not any room for the past.

CHAPTER XIV

A TOUR OF INSPECTION

The first thing necessary, she decided, when she had satisfied her hunger and finished her meal, was to get word of her plight and her resting place to her uncle and the men of the party; and the next thing was to get away, where she would never see this man again and perhaps be able to forget what had transpired – yet there was a strange pang of pain in her heart at that thought!

No man on earth had ever so stimulated her curiosity as this one. Who was he? Why was he there? Who was the woman whose picture he had so quickly taken from her gaze? Why had so splendid a man buried himself alone in that wilderness? These reflections were presently interrupted by the reappearance of the man himself.

"Have you finished?" he asked unceremoniously, standing in the doorway as he spoke.

"Yes, thank you, and it was very good indeed."

Dismissing this politeness with a wave of his hand but taking no other notice, he spoke again.

"If you will tell me your name – "

"Maitland, Enid Maitland."

"Miss Maitland?"

The girl nodded.

"And where you came from, I will endeavor to find your party and see what can be done to restore you to them."

"We were camped down that cañon at a place where another brook, a large one, flows into it, several miles I should think below the place where – "

She was going to say "where you found me," but the thought of the way in which he had found her rushed over her again; and this time with his glance directly upon her, although it was as cold and dispassionate and indifferent as a man's look could well be, the recollection of the meeting to which she had been about to allude rushed over her with an accompanying wave of color which heightened her beauty as it covered her with shame.

She could not realize that beneath his mask of indifference so deliberately worn, the man was as agitated as she, not so much at the remembrance of anything that had transpired, but at the sight, the splendid picture, of the woman as she stood, there in the little cabin then. It seemed to him as if she gathered up in her own person all the radiance and light and beauty, all the purity and freshness and splendor of the morning, to shine and dazzle in his face. As she hesitated in confusion, perhaps comprehending its causes he helped out her lame and halting sentence.

"I know the cañon well," he said. "I think I know the place to which you refer; is it just about where the river makes an enormous bend upon itself?"

"Yes, that is it. In that clearing we have been camped for ten days. My uncle must be crazy with anxiety to know what has become of me and – "

The man interposed.

"I will go there directly," he said. "It is now half after ten. That place is about seven miles or more from here across the range, fifteen or twenty by the river; I shall be back by nightfall. The cabin is your own."

He turned away without another word.

"Wait," said the woman, "I am afraid to stay here."

She had been fearless enough before in these mountains but her recent experiences had somehow unsettled her nerves.

"There is nothing on earth to hurt you, I think," returned the man. "There isn't a human being, so far as I know, in these mountains."

"Except my uncle's party."

He nodded.