The Blazed Trail

Chapter XL

The vision was over, but the beauty remained. The spoken words of protest made her a woman. Never again would she, nor any other creature of the earth, appear to Thorpe as she had in the silver glade or the cloistered pines. He had had his moment of insight. The deeps had twice opened to permit him to look within. Now they had closed again. But out of them had fluttered a great love and the priestess of it. Always, so long as life should be with him, Thorpe was destined to see in this tall graceful girl with the red lips and the white skin and the corn-silk hair, more beauty, more of the great mysterious spiritual beauty which is eternal, than her father or her mother or her dearest and best. For to them the vision had not been vouchsafed, while he had seen her as the highest symbol of God's splendor.

Now she stood before him, her head turned half away, a faint flush still tingeing the chalk-white of her skin, watching him with a dim, half-pleading smile in expectation of his reply.

“Ah, moon of my soul! light of my life!” he cried, but he cried it within him, though it almost escaped his vigilance to his lips. What he really said sounded almost harsh in consequence.

“How did you know my name?” he asked.

She planted both elbows on the Norway and framed her little face deliciously with her long pointed hands.

“If Mr. Harry Thorpe can ask that question,” she replied, “he is not quite so impolite as I had thought him.”

“If you don't stop pouting your lips, I shall kiss them!” cried Harry—to himself.

“How is that?” he inquired breathlessly.

“Don't you know who I am?” she asked in return.

“A goddess, a beautiful woman!” he answered ridiculously enough.

She looked straight at him. This time his gaze dropped.

“I am a friend of Elizabeth Carpenter, who is Wallace Carpenter's sister, who I believe is Mr. Harry Thorpe's partner.”

She paused as though for comment. The young man opposite was occupied in many other more important directions. Some moments later the words trickled into his brain, and some moments after that he realized their meaning.

“We wrote Mr. Harry Thorpe that we were about to descend on his district with wagons and tents and Indians and things, and asked him to come and see us.”

“Ah, heart o' mine, what clear, pure eyes she has! How they look at a man to drown his soul!”

Which, even had it been spoken, was hardly the comment one would have expected.

The girl looked at him for a moment steadily, then smiled. The change of countenance brought Thorpe to himself, and at the same moment the words she had spoken reached his comprehension.

“But I never received the letter. I'm so sorry,” said he. “It must be at the mill. You see, I've been up in the woods for nearly a month.”

“Then we'll have to forgive you.”

“But I should think they would have done something for you at the mill—”

“Oh, we didn't come by way of your mill. We drove from Marquette.”

“I see,” cried Thorpe, enlightened. “But I'm sorry I didn't know. I'm sorry you didn't let me know. I suppose you thought I was still at the mill. How did you get along? Is Wallace with you?”

“No,” she replied, dropping her hands and straightening her erect figure. “It's horrid. He was coming, and then some business came up and he couldn't get away. We are having the loveliest time though. I do adore the woods. Come,” she cried impatiently, sweeping aside to leave a way clear, “you shall meet my friends.”

Thorpe imagined she referred to the rest of the tenting party. He hesitated.

“I am hardly in fit condition,” he objected.

She laughed, parting her red lips. “You are extremely picturesque just as you are,” she said with rather embarrassing directness. “I wouldn't have you any different for the world. But my friends don't mind. They are used to it.” She laughed again.

Thorpe crossed the pole trail, and for the first time found himself by her side. The warm summer odors were in the air, a dozen lively little birds sang in the brush along the rail, the sunlight danced and flickered through the openings.

Then suddenly they were among the pines, and the air was cool, the vista dim, and the bird songs inconceivably far away.

The girl walked directly to the foot of a pine three feet through, and soaring up an inconceivable distance through the still twilight.

“This is Jimmy,” said she gravely. “He is a dear good old rough bear when you don't know him, but he likes me. If you put your ear close against him,” she confided, suiting the action to the word, “you can hear him talking to himself. This little fellow is Tommy. I don't care so much for Tommy because he's sticky. Still, I like him pretty well, and here's Dick, and that's Bob, and the one just beyond is Jack.”

“Where is Harry?” asked Thorpe.

“I thought one in a woods was quite sufficient,” she replied with the least little air of impertinence.

“Why do you name them such common, everyday names?” he inquired.

“I'll tell you. It's because they are so big and grand themselves, that it did not seem to me they needed high-sounding names. What do you think?” she begged with an appearance of the utmost anxiety.

Thorpe expressed himself as in agreement. As the half-quizzical conversation progressed, he found their relations adjusting themselves with increasing rapidity. He had been successively the mystic devotee before his vision, the worshipper before his goddess; now he was unconsciously assuming the attitude of the lover before his mistress. It needs always this humanizing touch to render the greatest of all passions livable.

And as the human element developed, he proved at the same time greater and greater difficulty in repressing himself and greater and greater fear of the results in case he should not do so. He trembled with the desire to touch her long slender hand, and as soon as his imagination had permitted him that much he had already crushed her to him and had kissed passionately her starry face. Words hovered on his lips longing for flight. He withheld them by an effort that left him almost incoherent, for he feared with a deadly fear lest he lose forever what the vision had seemed to offer to his hand.

So he said little, and that lamely, for he dreaded to say too much. To her playful sallies he had no riposte. And in consequence he fell more silent with another boding—that he was losing his cause outright for lack of a ready word.

He need not have been alarmed. A woman in such a case hits as surely as a man misses. Her very daintiness and preciosity of speech indicated it. For where a man becomes stupid and silent, a woman covers her emotions with words and a clever speech. Not in vain is a proud-spirited girl stared down in such a contest of looks; brave deeds simply told by a friend are potent to win interest in advance; a straight, muscular figure, a brown skin, a clear, direct eye, a carriage of power and acknowledged authority, strike hard at a young imagination; a mighty passion sweeps aside the barriers of the heart. Such a victory, such a friend, such a passion had Thorpe.

And so the last spoken exchange between them meant nothing; but if each could have read the unsaid words that quivered on the other's heart, Thorpe would have returned to the Fighting Forty more tranquilly, while she would probably not have returned to the camping party at all for a number of hours.

“I do not think you had better come with me,” she said. “Make your call and be forgiven on your own account. I don't want to drag you in at my chariot wheels.”

“All right. I'll come this afternoon,” Thorpe had replied.

“I love her, I must have her. I must go—at once,” his soul had cried, “quick—now—before I kiss her!”

“How strong he is,” she said to herself, “how brave-looking; how honest! He is different from the other men. He is magnificent.”