Where the Trail Divides | Page 4

unconscious of the presence of spectators, he glanced about the single room like a beaten rabbit with the hounds close on its trail. No avenue of hiding suggested itself, no possible hope of protection. The cold perspiration broke out afresh on his forehead, at the roots of his hair, and in absent impotency he mopped it away with the back of a fat, grimy hand.
In pity motherly Mrs. Rowland returned to her seat, indicated another vacant beside the board.
"You'd best sit down and eat a bit," she invited. "You must be hungry as a coyote."
"Eat, now?" Swiftly, almost fiercely, the old terror-restless mood returned. "God Almighty couldn't keep me here longer." He started shuffling for the door. "Stay here and be scalped, if you think I lie. We're corpses, all of us, but I'll not be caught like a beaver in a trap." Again he halted jerkily. "Which way did they go!"
Lower and lower sank Rowland's great chin onto his breast.
"They separated," impassively. "Part went south to Sioux City; part west toward Yankton." Involuntarily his lips pursed in the inevitable contempt of a strong man for one hopelessly weak. "You'd better take a lunch along. It's something of a journey to either place."
Swift as the suggestion, Mrs. Rowland, with the spontaneous hospitality of the frontier, was upon her feet. Into a quaint Indian basket of coloured rushes went a roast grouse, barely touched, from the table. A loaf of bread followed: a bottle of water from the wooden pail in the corner. "You're welcome, friend," she proffered.
Hans Mueller hesitated, accepted. A swift moisture dimmed his eyes.
"Thanks, lady," he halted. "You're good people, anyway. I'm sorry--" He lifted his battered hat, shuffled anew toward the doorway. "Good-bye."
Impassive as before, Rowland returned to his neglected dinner.
"No wonder the Sioux play us whites for cowards, and think we'll run at sight of them," he commented.
Mrs. Rowland, standing motionless in the single exit through which Mueller had gone, did not answer.
"Better come and finish, Margaret," suggested her husband.
Again there was no answer, and Rowland, after eating a few mouthfuls, pushed back his chair. Even then she did not speak, and, rising, the man made his way across the room to put an arm with rough affection around his wife's waist.
"Are you, too, scared at last?" he voiced gently.
The woman turned swiftly and, in action almost unbelievable after her former unemotional certainty, dropped her head to his shoulder.
"Yes, I think I am a bit, Sam. For baby's sake I wish we'd gone too; but now,"--her arms crept around his neck, closed,--"but now--now it's too late!"
For a long minute, and another, the man did not stir but involuntarily his arms had tightened until, had she wished, the woman could not have turned. He had been looking absently out the door, south over the rolling country leading to the deserted settlement.
In the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, Hans Mueller was still in sight, skirting the base of a sharp incline. Through the trembling heat waves he seemed a mere moving dark spot; like an ant or a spider on its zigzag journey. The grass at the base of the rise was rank and heavy, reaching almost to the waist of the moving figure. Rowland watched it all absently, meditatively; as he would have watched the movement of a coyote or a prairie owl, for the simple reason that it was the only visible object endowed with life, and instinctively life responds to life. The words of his wife just spoken, "It is too late," with the revelation they bore, were echoing in his brain. For the first time, to his mind came a vague unformed suggestion, not of fear, but near akin, as to this lonely prairie wilderness, and the red man its child. In a hazy way came the question whether after all it were not foolhardy to remain here now, to dare that invisible, intangible something before which, almost in panic, the others had fled. To be sure, precedent was with him, logic; but--of a sudden--but a minute had passed--his arms tightened; involuntarily he held his breath. Hans Mueller had been moving on and on; another half minute and he would have been behind the base of the hill out of sight; when, as from the turf at one's feet there springs a-wing a covey of prairie grouse, from the tall grass about the retreating figure there leaped forth a swarm of other similar dark figures: a dozen, a score--in front, behind, all about. Apparently from mother earth herself they had come, autochthonous. Almost unbelieving, the spectator blinked his eyes; then, as came swift understanding, instinctively he shielded the woman in his arms from the sight, from the knowledge. Not a sound came to his ears from over the prairie: not a