Heart's Kindred

He laughed foolishly. “Tha’s all right,” he repeated, “I can find trail, drunk or sober.”

She stood pressing her hands in and out and turning helplessly to the dark. The dark gave her back only the lights of Inch.

“There’s nothing else to do,” she said dully. “If you show me the trail, maybe I can keep you on it.”

In some indeterminate shame, he went without a word, brought his blanket, and turned again to the hut.

“I’ve got a kit,” she said. “It’s got enough to eat. Do you understand? Don’t get anything else. Oh, let’s start, let’s start!”

As he emerged, his hand had brushed the feathers of the wood duck. He took it down and slung it fumblingly to his roll of blanket. Less by taking thought than by old instinct, he remembered his cartridge belt, and found and strapped it on. Then he stood hesitating.

“Gotta tell ’em,” he suggested, looking at his father.

She had shouldered her pack and stood waiting.

“Why?” she demanded. “It’ll only be harder for him if they come. This way he won’t know, and he can tell ’em so.”

In this there was reason, but not, it seemed, enough reason. The Inger stood trying to recall something pressing on him for remembrance: if not his father, what was it that he must do or fetch, before he left. He put both hands to his head, but in there was only a current and a beating.

“There’s s’more to do,” he said indistinctly.

Lory Moor stepped toward him and laid her hand briskly on his shoulder, with a boy’s gesture of eager haste.

“The trail – the trail!” she said, with authority. “Find us the trail.”

Without a word he started, went round the end of the hut, and plunged into the wood, which ran down to the very wall. In a half dozen steps the ascent began.

Even by daylight the trail was little more than an irregular line of bent branches and blazed trunks. Since he had finished it, the Inger had taken it a dozen times by daylight with a boy’s delight in a secret way. By night he had never taken it at all. But he had the woodsman’s instinct and, now that his thoughts were stilled or lost in a maze of their own inconsequent making, this secondary consciousness was for a time paramount. He went as a man goes who treads his own ways, and though he went irregularly and sometimes staggeringly, he managed at first to keep to the course that he had taken.

Over the mountain by the trail to the railway station – that had become clear to him. When they should reach it or how the railway should serve, was not his concern at all. Meanwhile, here she was with him. He tried to get this straight, and cursed his head that only buzzed with the knowledge and whipped him with the need to keep to the trail.

“Lory Moor,” he tried to grasp it; “Jem Moor’s girl. She never married Bunchy at all. She’s here —with me. I’ve got her with me…”

The girl was not a pace behind him. She had stretched out her hand and laid it on his roll of blanket and thus, though seeing nothing, she was able to fit her steps somewhat to his, to halt when he halted, to swerve or to slow or to retrace. She was profoundly thankful for his consent to take her away, and in that consent she rested without thought or plan.

An hour passed before the Inger missed the trail. In a stretch fairly free of undergrowth, he stood still for a moment to take his bearings, and thrust out his hand against a declivity, sharp with fallen rock. To the right the wall extended to meet the abrupt shoulder of the slope; to the left it dropped away so that a stone, sent down, went crashing far below.

“Stay here,” the Inger commanded, and found his way up in a shower of falling rocks, to the summit of the obstruction. He clung to a tree, and listened. The mountain brook, which they should cross some rods ahead, was not yet audible. On the other side the rocks fell precipitately; and leaning out, he seemed to sense tree-tops.

“Look out!” he called, and clambered down again, and bade her wait while he went and came back and went and came back in vain. She heard him stumbling, no more fit to find a trail than to think his thoughts.

“I’m stumped,” he said. “We’ve got wrong somewheres.”

She answered nothing. She was sitting on the ground where he had left her. Her silence touched him somehow as a rebuke. “You think it’s because I’m drunk,” he said, in a challenge.

“I don’t think anything,” she answered. “Rest a little – then mebbe we can get right again.”

He flung himself down on his face. The scent of pine needles and dead leaves was there, waiting for him. The stillness of the wood took them both, and for a few minutes they were silent.

And as he lay there, with her sitting beside him, something of the desert, of an hour before, came running along his veins and took him, and, something, too, of the time when he had had her before him on his horse, galloping. When that time had been he could not say; but he remembered it with distinctness, and that day he had had his arms about her.

“We rode – on a horse,” he submitted, suddenly. “C’n you ’member that day?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Don’t talk,” she begged him, “just rest. I want to rest.”

The Inger was silent. His mind was busy trying to piece together what he knew of that day – of her there before him on his horse, of her face laughing at him as she ran away.

“You threw me a kiss,” he offered, after a pause.

“Don’t talk, don’t talk,” she begged him. “I can’t breathe – let me rest.”

“I wish it was that day now,” he said foolishly, and drew a deep breath, and lay quiet. But in a few minutes he roused himself, his mind struggling with a new problem. What a fool he was, wishing for that day, when here she was, just the same as then. What was the matter with this day?

“Wha’s the matter with this day?” he inquired, reasonably. Then he remembered. They were lost, of course. The trail was gone – gone clean off.

“Gone clean off,” he muttered, reproachfully. “Damn dirty trick to play.”

Then he was shot through with his dominant consciousness. Here she was, here she was – with him. There was something else, something that she had said which made a reason why he should not touch her. But what was that? It was gone – gone clean off, gone with the trail…

Back upon him came flooding the desire of the desert, as he had run with the thought of her and with the thought of battle. Then he had believed that she belonged to Bunchy. That was a lie and Bunchy was a fool. Everything was different, and now here she was and nobody knew…

He lifted himself, and scrambled forward toward her.

“We’re lost,” he said thickly. “Wha’d we care? Wha’d we care…”

He put out his arms, but they did not touch her. He swept a circle, and they did not enclose her. Alarmed, he rose and lurched forward, feeling out in all directions, an arm’s span. And she was not within his reach nor within the crazy length which he ran, with outspread hands, trying to find her.

At last his foot caught in a root and he fell, and lay there, and began quietly weeping. Now she was gone and the trail was gone. He was treated like a dog by both of them. He fumbled for his pack, but he had slipped that off when he climbed the rocks, and now that was gone too. He wept, and lay still. In a few moments he was sleeping.

IV

When he awoke, he looked into soft branches, gray in dim light. The whole mountain was lyric with birds. There was no other sound, save the lift and touch of branches, and the chatter of a squirrel, and there was as yet no sun.

He remembered. And with the memory, a rush of aching, eating shame seized on him and he closed his eyes again. Then he thought that he must have dreamed it all. And that it was impossible that such a thing should be. Yet here he was in the woods, where she had left him because he was a fool. Where had she gone? He sprang up, mad to find her, possessed by the need to make amends, and by the sheer need to find her.

As he sat up, he threw off his blanket, and he marvelled that this should have been covering him. Then he found himself looking into Lory Moor’s face.

She was sitting near him, wrapped in her own blanket, leaning against a tree. She was wide awake, and by all signs she had been so for a long time, for a great cluster of mountain violets lay on her blanket.

When she saw that he was awake, she smiled, and this seemed to the Inger the most marvellous thing that ever had befallen him: that she was there and that she smiled.

He looked at her silently, and slowly under the even brownness of his skin, the color rose from his throat to his forehead, and burned crimson. But more than this color of shame, it was his eyes that told. They were upon her, brown, deep, like the eyes of a dog that has disobeyed, and has come back. For a moment he looked at her, then he dropped his face in his hands.

She moved so quietly that he did not hear her rise. He merely felt her hand on his shoulder. And when he looked up again, she was sitting there beside him.

“Don’t,” she said.

He looked at her in amazement. Her look was gentle, her voice had been gentle.