THE WORLD'S GREAT SNARE. E. Phillips OppenheimЧитать онлайн книгу.
more impossible. He turned to her abruptly.
“Aren’t you just a little rough on me, Myra?” he said softly. “Don’t you see that it is for your sake I wanted to go!”
She looked at him, and his eyes fell before hers. “For my sake!” she repeated bitterly.
He began to feel absolutely conscience-stricken. After all, the reproach in her tone was just. It was as much for his own sake as hers that he had wanted to be rid of her. There was an element of Puritanism in the man which rebelled against all the irregularities of this wild western life. He liked to be his own man and live his own life! Well, he should have been consistent! Here was a harvest of his own sowing. If his heart had not been moved by the wild, beseeching pathos of this girl’s dark eyes shining at him through a cloud of thick tobacco smoke in Josi’s saloon, he would never have found himself in such a quandary. Bah! it was useless to waste time on empty regrets, to rail at the past while the girl’s heart was breaking. He got up, and bent over her.
“Look here, Myra,” lie said kindly. “I guess I’m not so sure about being right after all. I’ll think it over whilst I’m at work. See? Don’t fret! We’ll see if we can’t fix up something.”
“Very well.”
He relit his pipe, and kissed her hesitatingly upon the forehead, a salute which she accepted with perfect impassiveness. Then he strode out of the cottage, and down the gorge to the river-bed.
IV. THE LAUGH OF MR. JAMES HAMILTON
Three men, the last to leave their claims after the day’s work, climbed up the gorge in the heavy twilight. The Englishman and his partner were a little in front, Mr. James Hamilton brought up the rear.
At the parting of the ways they were separating, as usual, without a word, when the Englishman looked back over his shoulder.
“No cards to-night, you chaps—not at my shanty, anyhow!” he said briefly. “Do you hear, Jim?”
“Yes, I hear!” Mr. Hamilton repeated surlily. “You want me to sit and get the miserables in this cussed hole! I’ll see myself d—d first. If you chaps ain’t playing I’m off to Dan Cooper’s saloon. Who the hell’s that dodging about your hut?” he added, peering upwards through the brambles. “Here goes for them, at any rate! I’d shoot anything to-day, from a dog to a Christian!”
He raised his gun to his shoulder with a savage scowl. The Englishman stooped down quickly and knocked the barrel into the air, where it exploded harmlessly.
“I’ll do my own shooting, thank you, Jim!” he said carelessly. “I’ve got a stranger up there, a boy who’s found his way from San Francisco. You can go to Cooper’s store if you like, and be fleeced, and catch a fever, and get drunk on poison at a dollar a glass! It’s no business of mine, but if you take my advice, you’ll stop where you are and go to bed early for once! There’s enough blackguardism going on down there, without your being mixed up in it.”
Mr. Hamilton turned his back on them with an oath, and disappeared. The Englishman and his partner scrambled up the opposite side of the gorge, to the platform where they had built their shanties about a hundred yards apart. Arrived at the top, Pete Morrison thoughtfully hitched up his trousers, and spitting out a tobacco plug, laid his hand upon the other’s shoulder.
“Mate!” he said deliberately. “I seed that stranger.”
The Englishman turned quickly round.
“Well, what if you did?
“Not much! It ain’t a female, is it?”
The Englishman was beginning to lose his temper. He answered testily, even angrily.
“What the devil does it matter to you or to any one else, who my visitor is! I suppose I may have whom I like in my own shanty.”
Pete was quite unmoved, although his face had grown a shade more serious. He took off his cap, and began flicking away a few stray mosquitoes.
“No offence, pard. But ain’t you heard what Dan Cooper and his lot have give out?”
“No.”
“Well, they allow they’re going to run these diggin’s on a new tack. Dan was at the Black Creek lot, and I guess you know what a hell that place was turned into. Well, they allow that the first woman who shows here, out she goes and him as brought her, claim or no claim. That’s what they say down yonder,” he added, jerking his thumb downwards in the direction of the camp. “That’s what Dan Cooper and his chaps do say, and I reckon they’re strong enough to run this section.”
“That’s so!” the Englishman answered, frowning. “Thanks, Pete! I’ll take care! Better be mum about my visitor, anyway.”
He walked away up the little green path, and pushed open the door of the hut. He scarcely knew the place. It had been cleaned and swept, and his evening meal was prepared. Myra was sitting in a corner, mending some old garment of his.
He greeted her kindly, but without going over to her side.
“Well, Myra! been lonesome, eh?” he asked.
She flashed a single look up at him from her brilliant eyes, and bent again over her task.
“Sorter lonesome,” she assented. “I’ve been busy fixing up things too!”
“Looks like it,” he answered, glancing around. “Let’s have supper! We’ve had a nailing hard day’s work!”
She got up without a word, and seating herself opposite to him, poured out the tea from a tin pot. He ate and drank with characteristic appetite, and she made a show of following his example. When he had finished, she cleared away, and then came and sat down by his side.
“Have you fixed up when I am to go?” she asked quietly.
She turned a pale, anxious face towards him, and sat patiently waiting for his answer. It was long in coming. He had begun dimly to see what the end of it must be; but even at that last moment he felt a curious reluctance to re-entering into the bondage of her love for him. He leaned back on the bench, and looked at her, wondering at the peculiar inappropriateness of her rude and ill-shaped clothes with that strange, delicate beauty which was so essentially dainty and feminine. His heart beat a little faster as he looked into her soft dark eyes with their silky eyelashes, and noted, with some return of his old admiration of her, the quivering sensitive mouth, the great coils of waving glossy hair, and the perfectly graceful curve of her throat and neck, gleaming as white as marble in contrast with the low black shirt she wore. The power of her beauty had always been great over him, and he was beginning to feel a sudden and altogether undesired revival of the curious fascination which once before she had possessed for him.
“I have been inquiring about the expressman,” he answered. “Seems I was out in my reckoning. They say he’s not due for three weeks or so.”
She lifted her eyes, and watched him covertly. He had not seemed in any way disappointed or disturbed at the prospect which was before them. Perhaps, after all, he was not so very sorry. He was only human, and the fierce solitude of the long nights, with their almost brutal relaxations of cards and raw spirits, had filled him with a great intolerable weariness. In the day-time when work was possible, the life was, at any rate, bearable. But the darkness came early, and the evenings were long. He had no books, nor any inclination to read them. The man’s nature was too large for him to keep himself aloof from those others, his fellow-workers, and besides, he had not the capacity for solitude. He was one with his fellows; a man with all the instincts of a common and gregarious humanity.
Through the long day and in the intervals of his toil, he had been thinking of these things.