A Drift from Redwood Camp | Page 7

whisper.
"But if he DID hear he couldn't understand," returned the first voice. A
suppressed giggle followed.
Luckily, Elijah's natural and acquired habits of repression suited the
emergency. He did not move, although he felt the quick blood fly to his
face, and the voice of the first speaker had suffused him with a strange
and delicious anticipation. He restrained himself, though the words she
had naively dropped were filling him with new and tremulous
suggestion. He was motionless, even while he felt that the vague

longing and yearning which had possessed him hitherto was now
mysteriously taking some unknown form and action.
The murmuring ceased. The humble-bees' drone again became
ascendant--a sudden fear seized him. She was GOING; he should never
see her! While he had stood there a dolt and sluggard, she had satisfied
her curiosity and stolen away. With a sudden yielding to impulse, he
darted quickly in the direction where he had heard her voice. The
thicket moved, parted, crackled, and rustled, and then undulated thirty
feet before him in a long wave, as if from the passage of some lithe,
invisible figure. But at the same moment a little cry, half of alarm, half
of laughter, broke from his very feet, and a bent manzanito-bush,
relaxed by frightened fingers, flew back against his breast. Thrusting it
hurriedly aside, his stooping, eager face came almost in contact with
the pink, flushed cheeks and tangled curls of a woman's head. He was
so near, her moist and laughing eyes almost drowned his eager glance;
her parted lips and white teeth were so close to his that her quick breath
took away his own.
She had dropped on one knee, as her companion fled, expecting he
would overlook her as he passed, but his direct onset had extracted the
feminine outcry. Yet even then she did not seem greatly frightened.
"It's only a joke, sir," she said, coolly lifting herself to her feet by
grasping his arm. "I'm Mrs. Dall, the Indian agent's wife. They said you
wouldn't let anybody see you--and I determined I would. That's all!"
She stopped, threw back her tangled curls behind her ears, shook the
briers and thorns from her skirt, and added: "Well, I reckon you aren't
afraid of a woman, are you? So no harm's done. Good-by!"
She drew slightly back as if to retreat, but the elasticity of the
manzanito against which she was leaning threw her forward once more.
He again inhaled the perfume of her hair; he saw even the tiny freckles
that darkened her upper lip and brought out the moist, red curve below.
A sudden recollection of a playmate of his vagabond childhood flashed
across his mind; a wild inspiration of lawlessness, begotten of his past
experience, his solitude, his dictatorial power, and the beauty of the
woman before him, mounted to his brain. He threw his arms

passionately around her, pressed his lips to hers, and with a
half-hysterical laugh drew back and disappeared in the thicket.
Mrs. Dall remained for an instant dazed and stupefied. Then she lifted
her arm mechanically, and with her sleeve wiped her bruised mouth
and the ochre-stain that his paint had left, like blood, upon her cheek.
Her laughing face had become instantly grave, but not from fear; her
dark eyes had clouded, but not entirely with indignation. She suddenly
brought down her hand sharply against her side with a gesture of
discovery.
"That's no Injun!" she said, with prompt decision. The next minute she
plunged back into the trail again, and the dense foliage once more
closed around her. But as she did so the broad, vacant face and the
mutely wondering eyes of Wachita rose, like a placid moon, between
the branches of a tree where they had been hidden, and shone serenely
and impassively after her.
. . . . . .
A month elapsed. But it was a month filled with more experience to
Elijah than his past two years of exaltation. In the first few days
following his meeting with Mrs. Dall, he was possessed by terror,
mingled with flashes of desperation, at the remembrance of his rash
imprudence. His recollection of extravagant frontier chivalry to
womankind, and the swift retribution of the insulted husband or
guardian, alternately filled him with abject fear or extravagant
recklessness. At times prepared for flight, even to the desperate
abandonment of himself in a canoe to the waters of the Pacific: at times
he was on the point of inciting his braves to attack the Indian agency
and precipitate the war that he felt would be inevitable. As the days
passed, and there seemed to be no interruption to his friendly relations
with the agency, with that relief a new, subtle joy crept into Elijah's
heart. The image of the