The Barrier Page 6

  CHAPTER VI

  THE BURRELL CODE

  Not until his dying day will Burrell lose the memory of that march withNecia through the untrodden valley, and yet its incidents were neverclear-cut nor distinct when he looked back upon them, but blended intoone dreamlike procession, as if he wandered through some calenturewhere every image was delightfully distorted and each act deliriouslyunreal, yet all the sweeter from its fleeting unreality. They talkedand laughed and sang with a rush of spirits as untamed as the waters inthe course they followed. They wandered, hand-in-hand, into a land ofillusions, where there was nothing real but love and nothing tangiblebut joy. The touch of their lips had waked that delight which comes butonce in a lifetime and then to but few; it was like the moon-madness ofthe tropics or the dementia of the forest folk in spring. A gentlefrenzy possessed them, rendering them insensible to fatigue and causingthem to hurry the more breathlessly that they might sooner rest and sitbeside each other. At times they fell into sweet silences where thewaters laughed with them and the trees whispered their secret, bowingand nodding in joyous surprise at this invasion; or, again, the breezesromped with them, withdrawing now and then to rush out and greet themat the bends in boisterous pleasure.

  They held to the bed of the stream, for its volume was low and enabledthem to ford it from bar to bar. Necia had been raised in the open,with the wild places for her playground, and her muscles were likethose of a boy, hence the two swung merrily onward, as if in playfulcontest, while the youth had never occasion to wait for her or tomoderate his gait. Indeed, her footing was more sure than his, as hefound when she ventured out unhesitatingly upon felled logs that layacross swift, brawling depths. The wilderness had no mystery for her,and no terrors, so she was ever at his side, or in advance, while hereyes, schooled in the tints of the forest, and more active than thoseof a bird, saw every moving thing, from the flash of a camp-robber'swing through some hidden glade to the inquisitive nodding of a fool henwhere it perched high up against the bole of a spruce. They surprised amarten fishing in a drift-wood dam, but she would not let the soldiershoot, and made him pass it by, where it sat amazed till it realizedthat these were lovers and resumed its fishing. Gradually the streamdiminished, and its bowldered bed became more difficult to traverse,until, assuming the airs of a leader, the girl commanded him to lay offhis pack, at which he pretended to obey mutinously, though thrillingwith the keenest delight at his own submission.

  "What are you going to do?" he inquired.

  "Mind your own business, sir," she commanded, sternly.

  From her belt she drew a little hunting-knife, with which she cut andtrimmed a slender birch the thickness of his thumb, whereupon hepretended great fright, and said:

  "Please! please! What have I done?"

  "A great deal! You are a most bold and stubborn creature."

  "All pack animals are stubborn," he declared. "It's the only privilegethey have."

  "You are much too presumptuous, also, as I discovered in your quarters."

  "My only presumption is in loving you."

  "That was not presumption," she smiled; "it was pre-emption. You mustbe punished."

  "I shall run away," he threatened. "I shall gallop right off throughthe woods and--begin to eat grass. I am very wild."

  As she talked she drew from her pocket a spool of line, and took afly-hook from her hat; then, in a trice, she had rigged a fishing-rod,and, creeping out upon a ledge, she whipped the pool below of ahalf-dozen rainbow trout, which she thrust into his coat while theywere still wriggling. Then she as quickly put up her gear, and theyresumed their journey, climbing more steeply now, until, when the sunwas low, they quit the stream-bed and made through the forest towardsthe shoulder of an untimbered ridge that ran down into the valley. Andthere, high up on the edge of the spruce, they selected a mossy shelfand pitched their camp.

  They had become so intimate by now as to fall into a whimsical mode ofspeech, and Necia reverted to a childish habit in her talk that broughtmany a smile to the youth's face. It had been her fancy as a littlegirl to speak in adjectives, ignoring many of her nouns, and itsquaintness had so amused her father that on rare occasions, when thehumor was on him, he also took it up. She now addressed herself toBurrell in the same manner.

  "I think we are very smarts to come so far," she said.

  "You travel like a deer," he declared, admiringly. "Why, you have tiredme down." Removing his pack, he stretched his arms and shook out theache in his shoulders.

  "Which way does our course lie now, Pathfinder?"

  "Right up the side of this big, and then along the ridge. In two hourswe come to a gully running so"--she indicated an imaginarydirection--"which we go down till it joins another stream so, and rightthere we'll find old 'No Creek's' cabin, so! Won't they be surprised tosee us! I think we're very cunning to beat them in, don't you?" Shelaughed a glad little bubbling laugh, and he cried:

  "Oh, girl! How wonderful you are!"

  "It's getting very dark and fierce," she chided, "and all the houseworkmust be done."

  So he built a fire, then fetched a bucket of water from a rill thattrickled down among the rocks near by. He made as if to prepare theirmeal, but she would have none of it.

  "Bigs should never cook," she declared. "That work belongs to littles,"then forced him to vacate her domain and turn himself to the manlierduties of chopping wood and boughs.

  First, however, she showed him how to place two green foot-logs uponwhich the teapot and the frying-pan would sit without upsetting, andhow long she wished the sticks of cooking-wood. Then she banished him,as it were, and he built a wickiup of spruce tops, under the shelter ofwhich he piled thick, fragrant billows of "Yukon feathers."

  Once while he was busy at his task he paused to revel in the colorsthat lay against hill and valley, and to drink in the splendidisolation of it all. Below lay the bed of Black Bear Creek, silent andsombre in the creeping twilight; beyond, away beyond, across thewestward brim of the Yukon basin, the peaks were blue and ivory andgold in the last rays of the sun; while the open slopes behind and allabout wore a carpet of fragrant short-lived flowers, nodding as iftowards sleep, and over all was the hush of the lonely hills. A gustblew a whiff of the camp smoke towards him, and he turned back to watchNecia kneeling beside the fire like some graceful virgin at her altarrites, while the peculiar acrid out-door odor of burning spruce waslike an incense in his nostrils.

  He filled his chest deeply and leaned on his axe, for he found himselfshaking as if under the spell of some great expectancy.

  "Your supper is getting cold," she called to him.

  He took a seat beside her on a pile of boughs where the smoke was leasttroublesome; he had chosen a spot that was sheltered by alichen-covered ledge, and this low wall behind, with the wickiupjoining it, formed an enclosure that lent them a certain air ofprivacy. They ate ravenously, and drank deep cupfuls of the unflavoredtea. By the time they were finished the night had fallen and the airwas just cool enough to make the fire agreeable. Burrell heaped on morewood and stretched out beside her.

  "This day has been so wonderful," said the girl, "that I shall never goto sleep. I can't bear to end it."

  "But you must be weary, little maid," he said, gently; "I am."

  "Wait, let me see." She stretched her limbs and moved slightly to tryher muscles. "Yes, I am a very tired, but not the kind of tired thatmakes you want to go to bed. I want to talk, talk, talk, and not aboutourselves either, but about sensibles. Tell me about your people--yoursister."

  He had expected her to ask this, for the subject seemed to have aninexhaustible charm for her. She would sit rapt and motionless as longas he cared to talk of his sister, in her wide, meditative eyes theshadow of a great unvoiced longing. It always seemed to make her graveand thoughtful, he had noticed, so he had tried lately to avoid thetopic, and to-night in particular he wanted to do so, for this was notime for melancholy. He had not even allowed himself to think, as yet,and there were reasons why he did not wish
her to do so; thought andrealization and a readjustment of their relations would come afterto-night, but this was the hour of illusion, and it must not be broken;therefore he began to tell her of other people and of his youth, makinghis tales as fanciful as possible, choosing deliberately to foster themerry humor in which they had been all day. He told her of his father,the crotchety old soldier, whose absurd sense of duty and whoseelaborate Southern courtesy had become a byword in the South. He toldher household tales that were prized like pieces of the Burrell plate,beautiful heirlooms of sentiment that mark the honor of high-bloodedhouses; following which there was much to recount of the Meades, fromthe admiral who fought as a boy in the Bay of Tripoli down to thecousin who was at Annapolis; the while his listener hung upon his wordshungrily, her mind so quick in pursuit of his that it spurred himunconsciously, her great, dark eyes half closed in silent laughter orwide with wonder, and in them always the warmth of the leapingfirelight blended with the trust of a new-born virginal love.

  Without realizing it, the young man drifted further than he hadintended, and further than he had ever allowed himself to go before,for in him was a clean and honest pride of birth, like his mother'sglory in her forebears, the expression of which he had learned torepress, inasmuch as it was a Dixie-land conceit and had beenmisunderstood when he went North to the Academy. In some this wouldhave seemed bigoted and feminine, this immoderate admiration for hisown blood, this exaggerated appreciation of his family honor, but inthis Southern youth it was merely the unconscious commendation of anupright manliness for an upright code. When he had finished, the girlremarked, with honest approval:

  "What a fine you are. Those people of yours have all been good men andwomen, haven't they?"

  "Most of them," he admitted, "and I think the reason is that we've beensoldiers. The army discipline is good for a man. It narrows a fellow, Isuppose, but it keeps him straight."

  Then he began to laugh silently.

  "What is it?" she said, curiously.

  "Oh, nothing! I was just wondering what my strait-laced ancestors wouldsay if they could see me now."

  "What do you mean?" the girl asked, in open-eyed wonderment.

  "I don't care," he went on, unheeding her question. "They did worsethings in their time, from what I hear." He leaned forward to draw herto him.

  "Worse things? But we are doing nothing bad," said Necia, holding himoff. "There's no wrong in loving."

  "Of course not," he assured her.

  "I am proud of it," she declared. "It is the finest thing, the greatestthing that has ever come into my life. Why, I simply can't hold it; Iwant to sing it to the stars and cry it out to the whole world. Don'tyou?"

  "I hardly think we'd better advertise," he said, dryly.

  "Why not?"

  "Well, I shouldn't care to publish the tale of this excursion of ours,would you?"

  "I don't see any reason against it. I have often taken trips withPoleon, and been gone with him for days and days at a time."

  "But you were not a woman then," he said, softly.

  "No, not until to-day, that's true. Dear, dear! How I did grow all of asudden! And yet I'm just the same as I was yesterday, and I'll alwaysbe the same, just a wild little. Please don't ever let me be a bigtame. I don't want to be commonplace and ordinary. I want to benatural--and good."

  "You couldn't be like other women," he declared, and there was moretenderness than hunger in his tone now, as she looked up at himtrustingly from the shelter of his arms. "It would spoil you to growup."

  "It is so good to be alive and to love you like this!" she continued,dreamily, staring into the fire. "I seem to have come out of a gloomyhouse into the glory of a warm spring day, for my eyes are blinded andI can't see half the beautifuls I want to, there are so many about me."

  "Those are my arms," interjected the soldier, lightly, in an effort toward off her growing seriousness.

  "I've never been afraid of anything, and yet I feel so safe insidethem. Isn't it queer?"

  The young man became conscious of a vague discomfort, and realizeddimly that for hours now he had been smothering with words and caressesa something that had striven with him to be heard, a something thatinstead of dying grew stronger the more utterly this innocent maidyielded to him. It was as if he had ridden impulse with rough spurs ina fierce desire to distance certain voices, and in the first mad gallophad lost them, but now far back heard them calling again more stronglyevery moment. A man's honor, if old, may travel feebly, but its pursuitis persistent. It was the talk about his people that had raised thisdamned uneasiness and indecision, he thought. Why had he ever startedit?

  "The marvellous part of it all," continued the girl, "is that it willnever end. I know I shall love you always. Do you suppose I am reallydifferent from other girls?"

  "Everything is different to-night--the whole world," he declared,impatiently. "I thought I knew myself, but suddenly I seem strange inmy own eyes."

  "I've had a big handicap," she said, "but you must help me to overcomeit. I want to be like your sister."

  He rose and piled more wood upon the fire. What possessed the girl? Itwas as if she knew each cunning joint of his armor, as if she hadrealized her peril and had set about the awakening of his conscience,deliberately and with a cautious wisdom beyond her years. Well, she haddone it--and he swore to himself. Then he melted at the sight of her,crouched there against the shadows, following his every movement withher soul in her eyes, the tenderest trace of a smile upon her lips. Hevowed he was a reprobate to wrong her so; it was her white soul and herwoman's love that spoke.

  When she beheld him gazing at her, she tilted her head sidewisedaintily, like a little bird.

  "Oh, my! What a fierce you are all at once!"

  Her smile flashed up as if illumined by the leaping blaze, and hecrossed quickly, kneeling beside her.

  "Dear, wonderful girl," he said, "it is going to be my heart's work tosee that you never change and that you remain just what you are. Youcan't understand what this means to me, for I, too, was blinded, butthe darkness of the night has restored my vision. Now you must go tosleep; the hours are short and we must be going early."

  He piled up a great, sweet-scented couch of springy boughs, andfashioned her a pillow out of a bundle of smaller ones, around which hewrapped his khaki coat; then he removed her high-laced boots, and,taking her tiny feet, one in the palm of either hand, bowed his headover them and kissed them with a sense of her gracious purity and hisown unworthiness. He spread one of the big gray blankets over her, andtucked her in, while she sighed in delightful languor, looking up athim all the time.

  "I'll sit here beside you for a while," he said. "I want to smoke abit."

  She stole a slim, brown hand out from beneath the cover and snuggled itin his, and he leaned forward, closing her lids down with his lips. Herutter weariness was manifest, for she fell asleep almost instantly, herfingers twined about his in a childlike grip.

  At times a great desire to feel her in his arms, to have her on hisbreast, surged over him, for he had lived long apart from women, andthe solitude of the night seemed to mock him. He was a strong man, andin his veins ran the blood of wayward forebears ho were wont to possessthat which they conquered in the lists of love, mingled with which wasthe blood of spirited Southern women who had on occasion loved notwisely, according to Kentucky rumor, but only too well. Nevertheless,they were honest men and women, if over-sentimental, and hadtransmitted to him a heritage of chivalry and a high sense of honor andcourage. Strange to say, this little, simple half-breed girl hadrevived this honor and courage, even when he tried most stubbornly tosmother it. If only her love was like her blood, he might have had noscruples; or if her blood were as pure as her love--even then it wouldbe easier; but, as it was, he must give her up to-night, and for alltime. Her love had placed a barrier between them greater and moreinsurmountable than her blood.

  He sat for a long time with the dwindling firelight playing about him,his manhood and his desires locked in
a grim struggle, wondering at thehold this forest elf had gained upon him, wondering how it was that shehad stolen into his heart and head and taken such utter possession ofhim. It would be no easy task to shut her out of his mind and put heraway from him. And she...?

  He gently withdrew his fingers from her grasp, and, seeking the otherside of the wickiup, covered himself over without disturbing her, andfell asleep.

  It was early dawn when Necia crept to him.

  "I dreamed you had gone away," she said, shivering violently anddrawing close. "Oh, it was a terrible awakening--"

  "I was too tired to dream," he said.

  "So I had to come and see if you were really here."

  He quickly rekindled the fire, and they made a hasty breakfast. Beforethe warmth of the rising sun had penetrated the cold air they hadclimbed the ridge and obtained a wondrous view of broken country, thehills alight with the morning rays, the valleys misty and mystical.They made good progress on the summit, which was paved with barren rockand sparsely carpeted with short moss, while there was never a hint ofinsects to annoy them. Merrily they swung along, buoyed up by anunnatural exaltation; yet now and then, as they drew near theirdestination, the young man had a chilling premonition of evil to come,and wondered if he had not been foolhardy to undertake this rashenterprise.

  "I wish Stark was not one of Lee's party," he said once. "He maymisunderstand our being together this way."

  "But when he learns that we love each other, that will explaineverything."

  "I'm not so sure. He doesn't know you as Lee and Poleon and your fatherdo. I think we had better say nothing at all about--you and me--to anyone."

  "But why?" questioned the girl, stopping abruptly. "They will know it,anyhow, when they see us. I can't conceal it."

  "I am wiser in this than you are," the soldier insisted, "and wemustn't act like lovers; trust this to me."

  "Oh, I won't play that!" cried Necia, petulantly. "If all this is goingto end when we get to Lee's cabin, we'll stay right here forever."

  He was not sure of all the logic he advanced in convincing her, but sheyielded finally, saying:

  "Well, I suppose you know best, and, anyhow, littles should alwaysmind."

  They clung to the divide for several hours, then descended into the bedof a stream, which they followed until it joined a larger one a coupleof miles below, and there, sheltered in a grove of whispering firs,they found Lee's cabin nestling in a narrow, forked valley. Evidentlythe miner had selected a point on the main creek just below theconfluence of the feeders as a place in which to prospect, and Burrellfell to wondering which one of these smaller streams supplied the runof gold.

  "There's no one here," said Necia, gleefully. "We've beat them in!We've beat them in!"

  They had been walking rapidly since dawn, and, although Burrell's watchshowed two o'clock, she refused to halt for lunch, declaring that theothers might arrive at any moment; so down they went to the lower endof "No Creek" Lee's location, where Burrell blazed a smooth spot on thedown-stream side of a tree and wrote thereon at Necia's dictation. Whenhe had finished, she signed her name, and he witnessed it, then pacedoff four hundred and forty steps, where he squared a spruce-tree, whichshe marked: "Lower centre end stake of No. I below discovery. NeciaGale, locator." She was vastly excited and immensely elated at hergood-fortune in acquiring the claim next to Lee's, and chattered like amagpie, filling the glades with resounding echoes and dancing about inthe bright sunlight that filtered through the branches.

  "Now you stake the one below mine," she said. "It's just as good, andmaybe better--nobody can tell." But he shook his head.

  "I'm not going to stake anything," said he.

  "You must!" she cried, quickly, the sparkle dying from her eyes. "Yousaid you would, or I never would have brought you."

  "I merely said I would come with you," he corrected. "I did not promiseto take up a claim, for I don't think I ought to do so. If I were acivilian, it would be different, but this is government land, and I ama part of the government, as it were. Then, too, in addition to thequestion of my right to do it, there would be the certainty of makingenemies of your people, old "No Creek" and the rest, and I can't affordthat now. With you it is different, for you are entitled to thisground. After Lee's friends have shared in his discovery I may changemy mind."

  All arguments and pleading were in vain; he remained obdurate andinsisted on her locating two other claims for herself, one on each ofthe smaller creeks where they came together above the house.

  "But nobody ever stakes more than one claim on a gulch," objected thegirl. "It's a custom of the miners."

  "Then we'll call each one of these branches a different and separatecreek," he said. "The gold was carried down one of those smallerstreams, and we won't take any chances on which one it was. When afellow plays a big game he should play to win, and, as this means sucha great deal to you, we won't overlook any bets."

  Necia consented, and when her three claims had been properly locatedthe couple returned to the cabin to get lunch and to await with someforeboding the coming of the others and what of good or ill it mightbring.