“Oh no – it’s home!”
“You were born here?”
“No, I was born in the East; but I’ve lived here ever since I was three years old.”
“By East you mean Kansas?”
“No, Missouri,” she laughed back at him.
She was taller than most women, and gave out an air of fine unconscious health which made her good to see, although her face was too broad to be pretty. She smiled easily, and her teeth were white and even. Her hand he noticed was as strong as steel and brown as leather. Her neck rose from her shoulders like that of an acrobat, and she walked with the sense of security which comes from self-reliant strength.
She was met at the door by old lady Yancy, who pumped her hand up and down, exclaiming: “My stars, I’m glad to see ye back! ’Pears like the country is just naturally goin’ to the dogs without you. The dance last Saturday was a frost, so I hear, no snap to the fiddlin’, no gimp to the jiggin’. It shorely was pitiful.”
Yancy himself, tall, grizzled, succinct, shook her hand in his turn. “Ma’s right, girl, the country needs ye. I’m scared every time ye go away fer fear some feller will snap ye up.”
She laughed. “No danger. Well, how are ye all, anyway?” she asked.
“All well, ‘ceptin’ me,” said the little old woman. “I’m just about able to pick at my vittles.”
“She does her share o’ the work, and half the cook’s besides,” volunteered Yancy.
“I know her,” retorted Berrie, as she laid off her hat. “It’s me for a dip. Gee, but it’s dusty on the road!”
The young tourist – he signed W. W. Norcross in Yancy’s register – watched her closely and listened to every word she spoke with an intensity of interest which led Mrs. Yancy to say, privately:
“’Pears like that young ‘lunger’ ain’t goin’ to forgit you if he can help it.”
“What makes you think he’s a ‘lunger’?”
“Don’t haf to think. One look at him is enough.”
Thereafter a softer light – the light of pity – shone in the eyes of the girl. “Poor fellow, he does look kind o’ peaked; but this climate will bring him up to the scratch,” she added, with optimistic faith in her beloved hills.
A moment later the down-coming stage pulled in, loaded to the side-lines, and everybody on it seemed to know Berea McFarlane. It was hello here and hello there, and how are ye between, with smacks from the women and open cries of “pass it around” on the part of the men, till Norcross marveled at the display.
“She seems a great favorite,” he observed to Yancy.
“Who – Berrie? She’s the whole works up at Bear Tooth. Good thing she don’t want to go to Congress – she’d lay Jim Worthy on the shelf.”
Berea’s popularity was not so remarkable as her manner of receiving it. She took it all as a sort of joke – a good, kindly joke. She shook hands with her male admirers, and smacked the cheeks of her female friends with an air of modest deprecation. “Oh, you don’t mean it,” was one of her phrases. She enjoyed this display of affection, but it seemed not to touch her deeply, and her impartial, humorous acceptance of the courtship of the men was equally charming, though this was due, according to remark, to the claims of some rancher up the line.
She continued to be the theme of conversation at the dinner-table and yet remained unembarrassed, and gave back quite as good as she received.
“If I was Cliff,” declared one lanky admirer, “I’d be shot if I let you out of my sight. It ain’t safe.”
She smiled broadly. “I don’t feel scared.”
“Oh, you’re all right! It’s the other feller – like me – that gets hurt.”
“Don’t worry, you’re old enough and tough enough to turn a steel-jacketed bullet.”
This raised a laugh, and Mrs. Yancy, who was waiting on the table, put in a word: “I’ll board ye free, Berrie, if you’ll jest naturally turn up here regular at meal-time. You do take the fellers’ appetites. It’s the only time I make a cent.”
To the Eastern man this was all very unrestrained and deeply diverting. The people seemed to know all about one another notwithstanding the fact that they came from ranches scattered up and down the stage line twenty, thirty miles apart – to be neighbors in this country means to be anywhere within a sixty-mile ride – and they gossiped of the countryside as minutely as the residents of a village in Wisconsin discuss their kind. News was scarce.
The north-bound coach got away first, and as the girl came out to take her place, Norcross said: “Won’t you have my seat with the driver?”
She dropped her voice humorously. “No, thank you, I can’t stand for Bill’s clack.”
Norcross understood. She didn’t relish the notion of being so close to the frankly amorous driver, who neglected no opportunity to be personal; therefore, he helped her to her seat inside and resumed his place in front.
Bill, now broadly communicative, minutely detailed his tastes in food, horses, liquors, and saddles in a long monologue which would have been tiresome to any one but an imaginative young Eastern student. Bill had a vast knowledge of the West, but a distressing habit of repetition. He was self-conscious, too, for the reason that he was really talking for the benefit of the girl sitting in critical silence behind him, who, though he frequently turned to her for confirmation of some of the more startling of his statements, refused to be drawn into controversy.
In this informing way some ten miles were traversed, the road climbing ever higher, and the mountains to right and left increasing in grandeur each hour, till of a sudden and in a deep valley on the bank of another swift stream, they came upon a squalid saloon and a minute post-office. This was the town of Moskow.
Bill, lumbering down over the wheel, took a bag of mail from the boot and dragged it into the cabin. The girl rose, stretched herself, and said: “This stagin’ is slow business. I’m cramped. I’m going to walk on ahead.”
“May I go with you?” asked Norcross.
“Sure thing! Come along.”
As they crossed the little pole bridge which spanned the flood, the tourist exclaimed: “What exquisite water! It’s like melted opals.”
“Comes right down from the snow,” she answered, impressed by the poetry of his simile.
He would gladly have lingered, listening to the song of the water, but as she passed on, he followed. The opposite hill was sharp and the road stony, but as they reached the top the young Easterner called out, “See the savins!”
Before them stood a grove of cedars, old, gray, and drear, as weirdly impressive as the cacti in a Mexican desert. Torn by winds, scarred by lightnings, deeply rooted, tenacious as tradition, unlovely as Egyptian mummies, fantastic, dwarfed and blackened, these unaccountable creatures clung to the ledges. The dead mingled horribly with the living, and when the wind arose – the wind that was robustly cheerful on the high hills – these hags cried out with low moans of infinite despair. It was as if they pleaded for water or for deliverance from a life that was a kind of death.
The pale young man shuddered. “What a ghostly place!” he exclaimed, in a low voice. “It seems the burial-place of a vanished race.”
Something in his face, some note in his voice profoundly moved the girl. For the first time her face showed something other than childish good nature and a sense of humor. “I don’t like these trees myself,” she answered. “They look too much like poor old squaws.”
For a few moments the man and the maid studied the forest of immemorial, gaunt, and withered trees – bright, impermanent youth confronting time-defaced and wind-torn