Читать книгу Dan Barry's Daughter - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 6

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The ranch-house in which Buck Daniels and Joan lived was not old, but the parching sun of a few summers had drawn the life from the wood and warped it loose, and a score of wild sandstorms had battered and twisted it. So that a voice sounded from corner to corner of the building and a footfall started small murmurs squeaking across the house.

But when Joan arose from her bed it was like the rising of a shadow; there was not even a whispering of the covers as they were laid back. And so gingerly did she trust her weight to the floor that it gave not the slightest sound back to her. And to tell how great a need there was for caution, at that moment Buck Daniels turned in his bed and there was a grinding of the springs as plainly audible as if it had been in Joan’s own apartment.

So, for a moment, she stood quietly, thinking and planning and weighing chances, with a hand pressing a hollow into her cheek; and perhaps timidity would have conquered now as it had conquered with her before had it not been that her window opened to the east and, looking through it across the night, she saw what seemed the rising of a great fire along the black edges of the eastern mountains.

But no forest fire could spread so rapidly, and no forest fire at such a distance could throw such a glow into the upper sky. For that matter, as she very well knew, there were no trees on the mountains—nothing but a wretched scattering of sunburned brush and spine covered cactus.

Presently an orange rim pushed up, and then grew into a great half circle which framed the ragged heads of three peaks. And then the moon went up until it stood all exposed, resting only on its lower edge upon the very tip of the highest peak. It was pulled out to the sides like puffed cheeks—a blunted ellipse—and it began to gild with gold the white dunes of the desert and at the same time it seemed to pour the dark over the mountains and made them visible with blackness against the eastern sky.

And the light fell fairly through the window upon Joan so that the white of her nightgown, when she looked down, had been changed to a softly shimmering rich color. Or so it seemed to her excited fancy.

She turned her head. She could see the familiar bureau in the corner and the sheen of the glass above it. And yonder was the chair, and there was the table beside her bed, with a misshapen heap of books upon it.

A glittering point of light rested on the knob of her door; she could almost distinguish the worn and pulpy fabric of the matting upon her floor. And all the dreary sense of poverty and dullness, all the weight of monotonous years in which every day was like its fellow, rolled suddenly upon Joan and made a sigh swell in her throat.

She could not stay. Something was whipping her out. The moon was lifting momently high and higher up the sky. And now it lost all sense of weight. It was floating on nothingness and pouring down bright and brighter light.

At least, it gave her light enough for dressing. And when she was dressed—and every move now swift and noiseless—she drifted across the room to the bureau and picked up the hand mirror. When she had brought it back before the window she had to turn it to a particular angle before she could see herself.

Surely it seemed that such a change as she felt in herself must show in the face, but she found no alteration. They were the same girl features. Only her eyes were a little wider and more glistening with eagerness. And something was lacking which she felt in her heart.

She took the long, soft, thick masses of her hair, but instead of twining it swiftly into the usual braids, she began to work it high on her head. It required an infinite number of pins before it would hold, but when she looked again, Joan caught her breath.

Instinct had told her surely what to do. The change was worked and she felt that she had stepped away from an old self and into a new. She was instantly far older.

She threw the mirror on the bed and crossed to the door. A whole long minute was needed for the turning of that treacherous knob with all its squeaks. But finally the lock clicked back as softly as if muffled in cotton. She stepped into the hall, closed the door with the same caution, and then went on to the stairs.

They were the chief trial. She had never gone either up or down them before without making noise enough to arouse a sleeping regiment. But now there was a wonderful difference. She had grown lighter, so it seemed, and in her very feet there was a guiding intelligence. Without a sound she passed to the bottom and stood in the main downstairs room with a beating heart of triumph.

But still she was not outside. The old atmosphere still clung around her. The odor of Buck Daniels’ last pipe still hovering in the air, suffocatingly thick and sweet, and that worn and splintered floor which she had scrubbed so often was full of voices.

They did not waken under her now. That strange lightness of foot was still hers. And all at once it seemed to Joan that all these dead things were her inanimate allies, helping her toward freedom. But where should she go even when she was outside? The night would tell her that. That outer night would lead her!

She was under the stars at last. In the flooding moonshine they were withdrawn to small points of light, for the sky was thick with a haze of radiance. It was all new to her. She had seen it before, no doubt. But now she was looking with new eyes, and the voices of a band of wild geese, dropping in chilly harmony about her, were like so many words, each a message in a foreign tongue and yet with a meaning to be half guessed.

She went out to the barn, found her saddle in the dark, and passed on to the corral. There were a half dozen horses there, but she knew them all. Their silhouettes were as familiar as human faces, although they were crowded in a farther corner.

They snorted and broke apart when she approached them, but when she called to them they halted again. They stood shaking their heads up and down as horses do when instinct tells them that all men are terrible and reason tells them that one man, at least, is kind.

She called again, very softly so that not even the keenest ear could hear from the house, and the horses came slowly toward her, still putting back their ears and making a pretense of biting at one another, as if ashamed of any but compulsory obedience. They gathered in a thick little semicircle before her, their eyes as bright as metal, for the moon was in them.

She had a touch and a word for each of them, as though she needed to give an excuse for her choice. Pinto was lame, and Bob White was tired after a day’s gallop, and Jack had done his share this week, and poor old Mike and Brownie would never do for such work as she had in mind.

“Because where I’m going I don’t know—and when I’ll come back I don’t know—but I think it will be a longer way than I’ve ever ridden before. So you’re the one for me, Peter, dear!”

She rubbed the nose of a shining bay and he stood like a rock while she drew the saddle onto his back, and like a well mannered horse refrained from puffing out his body when she drew the cinches taut. And when the bit, that dread of range horses, appeared under his nose, he opened his teeth for it and pricked his ears as she slipped the headband over them.

One and all, they followed her to the gate. And when she opened it and led Peter out, they crowded against the bars and whinnied softly after her so that she turned her head anxiously toward the house.

Such small sounds, however, could surely never reach the ears of Buck Daniels. But when she swung into the saddle she kept the high spirits of Peter in check and made him walk the first hundred yards. It was not until she was fairly assured that the distance and the soft going would muffle the beating of his hoofs that she loosed the reins, and Peter sprang away at full speed.

Oh, the wind of that wild gallop in her face, and the fences pouring past her as she rode south, and south! It seemed to Joan for a while that this was all she wanted; when she jumped Peter over a gate and, glancing up, saw the stars blurred above her, she was doubly sure that this was goal enough for her journey.

After all, even Peter, in spite of slender legs made for speed and a great heart of courage, could not race all the night, and when she drew back to a walk, she heard them again—the far-off calling of the wild geese flying north. She stopped the good horse and listened. There was the sound of his breathing, and the faint squeaking of leather as his heaving sides pressed against the cinches; but the crying of the wild geese was very clear overhead, and the strange melancholy and the strange restlessness grew stronger than ever.

She thought back to her talk with Buck Daniels. After all, what she had been able to explain to him had been very little of what was big in her heart. It seemed to her that if her mother, who had died ten years before, had been living now it would have been easier to tell her what she meant.

But even of that she was in doubt. The more clearly she recalled the soft blue eyes and the gentle face of that mother the more certain she was that there would have been no confidant.

No, even her horse knew more. A wedge of the geese streamed black across the face of the moon, and Peter looked up to them with pricking ears. What was going on inside that wise head of his? She felt that she would have given a treasure to know.

There was a rattle of single-trees not far away, and a swift drumming of hoofs. The road was not far behind her, and on this night she wished to be far from roads. The deeper the wilderness into which she could pass, the better.

So she sent Peter away at that matchless gallop, jumped another fence, and was on the very verge of a swale which would shut out all sound from the road when she heard what had thrilled her once before that evening—the high, light laughter of a girl. It was almost inaudible, but even through the distance it trailed like a hand across her heart.

She stopped Peter with a grasping word and listened. There it came again, beautiful as music over water, and wading, fading until it went out. Something had unlocked the soul of that unknown girl and let the laughter out. But the door was still closed in Joan. Indeed, could it ever be opened?

She looked down the hollow to the twisting line of cottonwoods which ran near the dry creek. And beyond the tree tops rolled the moon-whitened dunes, crisply cut against the far shadow of the mountains. Once more the shower of melodious dissonance came drooping from the wild geese in the heart of the sky, and for a strange instant it almost seemed to Joan that the laughter of the girl was falling again, out of the deep bosom of the heavens.

Somewhere in that great world there was a secret of happiness. And those voices which she had heard traveling down the road, might not they be all bound toward it? She turned Peter and headed him back at a gallop again.