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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Garden of Eden, by Max Brand


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Title: The Garden of Eden


Author: Max Brand



Release Date: July 3, 2010  [eBook #33066]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


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THE GARDEN OF EDEN

by

MAX BRAND







Dodd, Mead & Company
New York

Copyright 1922 by Popular Publications, Inc.
Copyright renewed 1950 by Dorothy Faust
All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher

First published in book form October, 1963

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-20473

Printed in the United States of America
by Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, N.Y.


     The characters, places, incidents, and situations in this book
     are imaginary and have no relation to any person, place, or
     actual happening.




_CHAPTER ONE_


By careful tailoring the broad shoulders of Ben Connor were made to
appear fashionably slender, and he disguised the depth of his chest by a
stoop whose model slouched along Broadway somewhere between sunset and
dawn. He wore, moreover, the first or second pair of spats that had ever
stepped off the train at Lukin Junction, a glowing Scotch tweed, and a
Panama hat of the color and weave of fine old linen. There was a
skeleton at this Feast of Fashion, however, for only tight gloves could
make the stubby fingers and broad palms of Connor presentable. At
ninety-five in the shade gloves were out of the question, so he held a
pair of yellow chamois in one hand and in the other an amber-headed
cane. This was the end of the little spur-line, and while the train
backed off down the track, staggering across the switch, Ben Connor
looked after it, leaning upon his cane just forcibly enough to feel the
flection of the wood. This was one of his attitudes of elegance, and
when the train was out of sight, and only the puffs of white vapor
rolled around the shoulder of the hill, he turned to look the town over,
having already given Lukin Junction ample time to look over Ben Connor.

The little crowd was not through with its survey, but the eye of the
imposing stranger abashed it. He had one of those long somber faces
which Scotchmen call "dour." The complexion was sallow, heavy pouches of
sleeplessness lay beneath his eyes, and there were ridges beside the
corners of his mouth which came from an habitual compression of the
lips. Looked at in profile he seemed to be smiling broadly so that the
gravity of the full face was always surprising. It was this that made
the townsfolk look down. After a moment, they glanced back at him
hastily. Somewhere about the corners of his lips or his eyes there was a
glint of interest, a touch of amusement--they could not tell which, but
from that moment they were willing to forget the clothes and look at the
man.

While Ben Connor was still enjoying the situation, a rotund fellow bore
down on him.

"You're Mr. Connor, ain't you? You wired for a room in the hotel? Come
on, then. My rig is over here. These your grips?"

He picked up the suit case and the soft leather traveling bag, and led
the way to a buckboard at which stood two downheaded ponies.

"Can't we walk?" suggested Ben Connor, looking up and down the street at
the dozen sprawling frame houses; but the fat man stared at him with
calm pity. He was so fat and so good-natured that even Ben Connor did
not impress him greatly.

"Maybe you think this is Lukin?" he asked.

When the other raised his heavy black eyebrows he explained: "This ain't
nothing but Lukin Junction. Lukin is clear round the hill. Climb in, Mr.
Connor."

Connor laid one hand on the back of the seat, and with a surge of his
strong shoulders leaped easily into his place; the fat man noted this
with a roll of his little eyes, and then took his own place, the old
wagon careening toward him as he mounted the step. He sat with his right
foot dangling over the side of the buckboard, and a plump shoulder
turned fairly upon his passenger so that when he spoke he had to throw
his head and jerk out the words; but this was apparently his
time-honored position in the wagon, and he did not care to vary it for
the sake of conversation. A flap of the loose reins set the horses
jog-trotting out of Lukin Junction down a gulch which aimed at the side
of an enormous mountain, naked, with no sign of a village or even a
single shack among its rocks. Other peaks crowded close on the right and
left, with a loftier range behind, running up to scattered summits white
with snow and blue with distance. The shadows of the late afternoon were
thick as fog in the gulch, and all the lower mountains were already dim
so that the snow-peaks in the distance seemed as detached, and high as
clouds. Ben Connor sat with his cane between his knees and his hands
draped over its amber head and watched those shining places until the
fat man heaved his head over his shoulder.

"Most like somebody told you about Townsend's Hotel?"

His passenger moved his attention from the mountain to his companion. He
was so leisurely about it that it seemed he had not heard.

"Yes," he said, "I was told of the place."

"Who?" said the other expectantly.

"A friend of mine."

The fat man grunted and worked his head around so far that a great
wrinkle rolled up his neck close to his ear. He looked into the eye of
the stranger.

"Me being Jack Townsend, I'm sort of interested to know things like
that; the ones that like my place and them that don't."

Connor nodded, but since he showed no inclination to name his friend,
Jack Townsend swung on a new tack to come to the windward of this
uncommunicative guest. Lukin was a fairly inquisitive town, and the
hotel proprietor usually contributed his due portion and more to the
gossips.

"Some comes for one reason and some for another," went on Townsend,
"which generally it's to hunt and fish. That ain't funny come to think
of it, because outside of liars nobody ever hooked finer trout than what
comes out of the Big Sandy. Some of 'em comes for the mining--they was a
strike over to South Point last week--and some for the cows, but mostly
it's the fishing and the hunting."

He paused, but having waited in vain he said directly: "I can show you
the best holes in the Big Sandy."

There was another of those little waits with which, it seemed, the
stranger met every remark; not a thoughtful pause, but rather as though
he wondered if it were worth while to make any answer.

"I've come here for the silence," he said.

"Silence," repeated Townsend, nodding in the manner of one who does not
understand.

Then he flipped the roan with the butt of his lines and squinted down
the gulch, for he felt there might be a double meaning in the last
remark. Filled with the gloomy conviction that he was bringing a silent
man to his hotel, he gloomily surveyed the mountain sides. There was
nothing about them to cheer him. The trees were lost in shadows and all
the slopes seemed quite barren of life. He vented a little burst of
anger by yanking at the rein of the off horse, a dirty gray.

"Giddap, Kitty, damn your eyes!"

The mare jumped, struck a stone with a fore foot, and stumbled heavily.
Townsend straightened her out again with an expert hand and cursed.

"Of all the no-good hosses I ever see," he said, inviting the stranger
to share in his just wrath, "this Kitty is the outbeatingest, no good
rascal. Git on, fool."

He clapped the reins along her back, and puffed his disgust.

"And yet she has points. Now, I ask you, did you ever see a truer
Steeldust? Look at that high croup and that straight rump. Look at them
hips, I say, and a chest to match 'em. But they ain't any heart in her.
Take a hoss through and through," he went on oracularly, "they're pretty
much like men, mostly, and if a man ain't got the heart inside, it don't
make no difference how big around the chest he measures."

Ben Connor had leaned forward, studying the mare.

"Your horse would be all right in her place," he said. "Of course, she
won't do up here in the mountains."

Like any true Westerner of the mountain-desert, Jack Townsend would far
rather have been discovered with his hand in the pocket of another man
than be observed registering surprise. He looked carefully ahead until
his face was straight again. Then he turned.

"Where d'you make out her place to be?" he asked carelessly.

"Down below," said the other without hesitation, and he waved his arm.
"Down in soft, sandy irrigation country she'd be a fine animal."

Jack Townsend blinked. "You know her?" he asked.

The other shook his head.

"Well, damn my soul!" breathed the hotel proprietor. "This beats me.
Maybe you read a hoss's mind, partner?"

Connor shrugged his shoulders, but Townsend no longer took offense at
the taciturnity of his companion; he spoke now in a lower confiding
voice which indicated an admission of equality.

"You're right. They said she was good, and she was good! I seen her run;
I saddled her up and rode her thirty miles through sand that would of
broke the heart of anything but a Steeldust, and she come through
without battin' an eye. But when I got her up here she didn't do no
good. But"--he reverted suddenly to his original surprise--"how'd you
know her? Recognize the brand, maybe?"

"By her trot," said the other, and he looked across the hills.

They had turned an angle of the gulch, and on a shelf of level ground,
dishing out from the side of the mountain, stretched the town.

"Isn't it rather odd," said Connor, "for people to build a town over
here when they could have it on the railroad?"

"Maybe it looks queer to some," nodded Townsend.

He closed his lips firmly, determined to imitate the terseness of his
guest; but when he observed with a side-glance that Connor would not
press the inquiry, talk suddenly overflowed. Indeed, Townsend was a
running well of good nature, continually washing all bad temper over the
brim.

"I'll show you how it was," he went on. "You see that shoulder of the
mountain away off up there? If the light was clearer you'd be able to
make out some old shacks up there, half standin' up and half fallin'
down. That's where Lukin used to be. Well, the railroad come along and
says: 'We're goin' to run a spur into the valley, here. You move down
and build your town at the end of the track and we'll give you a hand
bringing up new timber for the houses.' That's the way with railroads;
they want to dictate; they're too used to handlin' folks back East
that'll let capital walk right over their backs."

Here Townsend sent a glance at Connor to see if he stirred under the
spur, but there was no sign of irritation.

"Out here we're different; nobody can't step in here and run us unless
he's asked. See? We said, you build the railroad halfway and we'll come
the other half, but we won't come clear down into the valley."

"Why?" asked Connor. "Isn't Lukin Junction a good place for a village?"

"Fine. None better. But it's the principle of the thing, you see? Them
railroad magnates says to us: 'Come all the way.' 'Go to the devil,'
says we. And so we come halfway to the new railroad and built our town;
it'd be a pile more agreeable to have Lukin over where the railroad
ends--look at the way I have to drive back and forth for my trade? But
just the same, we showed that railroad that it couldn't talk us down."

He struck his horses savagely with the lines; they sprang from the
jog-trot into a canter, and the buckboard went bumping down the main
street of Lukin.




_CHAPTER TWO_


Ben Connor sat in his room overlooking the crossing of the streets. It
was by no means the ramshackle huddle of lean-to's that he had expected,
for Lukin was built to withstand a siege of January snows and
storm-winds which were scooped by the mountains into a funnel that
focused straight on the village. Besides, Lukin was no accidental,
crossroads town, but the bank, store, and amusement center of a big
country. The timber was being swept from the Black Mountain; there were
fairly prosperous mines in the vicinity; and cattlemen were ranging
their cows over the plateaus more and more during the spring and summer.
Therefore, Lukin boasted two parallel main streets, and a cross street,
looking forward to the day when it should be incorporated and have a
mayor of its own. At present it had a moving-picture house and a dance
hall where a hundred and fifty couples could take the floor at once;
above all, it had Jack Townsend's hotel. This was a stout, timber
building of two stories, the lower portion of which was occupied by the
restaurant, the drug store, the former saloon now transformed into an
ice-cream parlor, and other public places.

It was dark, but the night winds had not yet commenced, and Lukin
sweltered with a heat more unbearable than full noon.

It was nothing to Ben Connor, however, for he was fresh from the choking
summer nights of Manhattan, and in Lukin, no matter how hot it became,
the eye could always find a cool prospect. It had been unpleasant
enough when the light was burning, for the room was done in a hot,
orange-colored paper, but when he blew out the lamp and sat down before
the window he forgot the room and let his glance go out among the
mountains. A young moon drifted across the corner of his window, a
sickle of light with a dim, phosphorescent line around the rest of the
circle. It was bright enough to throw the peaks into strong relief, and
dull enough to let the stars live.

His upward vision had as a rule been limited by the higher stories of
some skyscraper, and now his eye wandered with a pleasant sense of
freedom over the snow summits where he could imagine a cold wind blowing
through reach after reach of the blue-gray sky. It pleased and troubled
Ben Connor very much as one is pleased and troubled by the first study
of a foreign language, with new prospects opening, strange turns of
thought, and great unknown names like stars. But after a time Ben Connor
relaxed. The first cool puff moved across his forehead and carried him
halfway to a dreamless sleep.

Here a chorus of mirth burst up at him from the street, men's voices
pitched high and wild, the almost hysterical laughter of people who are
much alone. In Manhattan only drunken men laughed like this. Among the
mountains it did not irritate Ben Connor; in tune with the rest, it was
full of freedom. He looked down to the street, and seeing half a dozen
bearded fellows frolic in the shaft of light from a window, he decided
that people kept their youth longer in Lukin.

All things seemed in order to Connor, this night. He rolled his sleeves
higher to let all the air that stirred get at his bulky forearms, and
then lighted a cigar. It was a dark, oily Havana--it had cost him a
great deal in money and nerves to acquire that habit--and he breathed
the scent deep while he waited for the steady wind which Jack Townsend
had promised. There was just enough noise to give the silence that
waiting quality which cannot be described; below him voices murmured,
and lifted now and then, rhythmically. Ben Connor thought the sounds
strangely musical, and he began to brim with the same good nature which
puffed the cheeks of Jack Townsend. There was a substantial basis for
that content in the broiled trout which he had had for dinner. It was
while his thoughts drifted back to those browned fish that the first
wind struck him. Dust with an acrid scent whirled up from the
street--then a steady stream of air swept his face and arms.

It was almost as if another personality had stepped into the room. The
sounds from the street fell away, and there was the rustling of cloth
somewhere, the cool lifting of hair from his forehead, and an odd sense
of motion--as if the wind were blowing through him. But something else
came with the breeze, and though he noted it at first with only a
subconscious discontent, it beat gradually into his mind, a light
ticking, very rapid, and faint, and sounding in an irregular rhythm. He
wanted to straighten out that rhythm and make the flutter of tapping
regular. Then it began to take on a meaning; it framed words.

"Philip Lord, jailed for embezzlement."

"Hell!" burst out Ben Connor. "The telegraph!"

He started up from his chair, feeling betrayed, for that light,
irregular tapping was the voice of the world from which he had fled. A
hard, cool mind worked behind the gray eyes of Ben Connor, but as he
fingered the cigar his brain was fumbling at a large idea. Forty-Second
and Broadway was calling him back.

When he looked out the window, now, the mountains were flat shapes
against a flat sky, with no more meaning than a picture.

The sounder was chattering: "Kid Lane wins title in eighth round. Lucky
punch dethrones lightweight champion." Ben Connor swallowed hard and
found that his throat was dry. He was afraid of himself--afraid that he
would go back. He was recalled from his ugly musing by the odor of the
cigar, which had burned out and was filling the room with a rank smell;
he tossed the crumbled remnants through the window, crushed his hat upon
his head, and went down, collarless, coatless, to get on the street in
the sound of men's voices. If he had been in Manhattan he would have
called up a pal; they would have planned an evening together; but in
Lukin--

At the door below he glared up and down the street. There was nothing to
see but a light buggy which rolled noiselessly through the dust. A dog
detached itself from behind the vehicle and came to bark furiously at
his feet. The kicking muscles in Connor's leg began to twitch, but a
voice shouted and the mongrel trotted away, growling a challenge over
its shoulder. The silence fell once more. He turned and strode back to
the desk of the hotel, behind which Jack Townsend sat tilted back in his
chair reading a newspaper.

"What's doing in this town of yours to-night?" he asked.

The proprietor moistened a fat thumb to turn the page and looked over
his glasses at Connor.

"Appears to me there ain't much stirrin' about," he said. "Except for
the movies down the street. You see, everybody's there."

"Movies," muttered Connor under his breath, and looked savagely around
him.

What his eyes fell on was a picture of an old, old man on the wall, and
the rusted stove which stood in the center of the room with a pipe
zigzagging uncertainly toward the ceiling. Everything was out of order,
broken down--like himself.

"Looks to me like you're kind of off your feet," said Jack Townsend, and
he laid down his paper and looked wistfully at his guest. He made up his
mind. "If you're kind of dry for a drink," he said, "I might rustle you
a flask of red-eye--"

"Whisky?" echoed Connor, and moistened his lips. Then he shook his head.
"Not that."

He went back to the door with steps so long and heavy that Jack Townsend
rose from his chair, and spreading his hands on the desk, peered after
the muscular figure.

"That gent is a bad hombre," pronounced Jack to himself. He sat down
again with a sigh, and added: "Maybe."

At the door Connor was snarling: "Quiet? Sure; like a grave!"

The wind freshened, fell away, and the light, swift ticking sounded
again more clearly. It mingled with the alkali scent of the
dust--Manhattan and the desert together. He felt a sense of persecuted
virtue. But one of his maxims was: "If anything bothers you, go and find
out about it."

Ben Connor largely used maxims and epigrams; he met crises by
remembering what some one else had said. The ticking of the sounder was
making him homesick and dangerously nervous, so he went to find the
telegrapher and see the sounder which brought the voice of the world
into Lukin.

A few steps carried him to a screen door through which he looked upon a
long, narrow office.

In a corner, an electric fan swung back and forth through a hurried arc
and fluttered papers here and there. Its whining almost drowned the
ticking of the sounder, and Ben Connor wondered with dull irritation how
a tapping which was hardly audible at the door of the office could carry
to his room in the hotel. He opened the door and entered.




_CHAPTER THREE_


It was a room not more than eight feet wide, very long, with the floor,
walls, and ceiling of the same narrow, unpainted pine boards; the
flooring was worn ragged and the ceiling warped into waves. Across the
room a wide plank with a trapdoor at one end served as a counter, and
now it was littered with yellow telegraph blanks, and others, crumpled
up, were scattered about Connor's feet. No sooner had the screen door
squeaked behind him and shut him fairly into the place than the staccato
rattling of the sounder multiplied, and seemed to chatter from the wall
behind him. It left an echoing in the ear of Ben Connor which formed
into the words of his resolution, "I've made my stake and I'm going to
beat it. I'm going to get away where I can forget the worries. To-day I
beat 'em. Tomorrow the worries will beat me."

That was why he was in Lukin--to forget. And here the world had sneaked
up on him and whispered in his ear. Was it fair?

It was a woman who "jerked lightning" for Lukin. With that small finger
on the key she took the pulse of the world.

"Belmont returns--" chattered the sounder.

Connor instinctively covered his ears. Then, feeling that he was acting
like a silly child, he lowered his hands.

Another idea had come to him that this was fate--luck--his luck. Why not
take another chance?

He wavered a moment, fighting the temptation and gloomily studying the
back of the operator. The cheapness of her white cotton dress fairly
shouted at him. Also her hair straggled somewhat about the nape of her
neck. All this irritated Connor absurdly.

"Fifth race," said the sounder: "Lady Beck, first; Conqueror, second--"

Certainly this was fate tempting tune.

Connor snatched a telegraph blank and scribbled a message to Harry
Slocum, his betting commissioner during this unhappy vacation.

"Send dope on Murray handicaps time--trials of Trickster and Caledonian.
Hotel Townsend."

This done, having tapped sharply on the counter to call the operator's
attention, he dropped his elbows on the plank and scowled downward in
profound reverie. They were pouring out of Belmont Park, now, many a
grim face and many a joyous face. Money had come easy and gone easy. Ah,
the reckless bonhomie of that crowd, living for to-day only, because
"to-morrow the ponies may have it!" A good day for the bookies if that
old cripple, Lady Beck, had found her running legs. What a trimming they
must have given the wise ones!

At this point another hand came into the circle of his vision and turned
the telegram about. A pencil flicked across the words, checking them
swiftly. Connor was fascinated by that hand, it was so cool, so slender
and deft. He glanced up to her face and saw a resolute chin, a smiling
mouth which was truly lovely, and direct eyes as dark as his own. She
carried her head buoyantly, in a way that made Connor think, with a
tingle, of some clean-blooded filly at the post.

The girl made his change, and shoving it across, she bent her head
toward the sounder. The characters came through too swiftly for even Ben
Connor's sharp ear, but the girl, listening, smiled slowly.

"Something about soft pine?" queried Connor.

She brightened at this unexpected meeting-point. Her eyes widened as she
studied him and listened to the message at the same time, and she
accomplished this double purpose with such calm that Connor felt a
trifle abashed. Then the shadow of listening vanished, and she
concentrated on Connor.

"Soft pine is up," she nodded. "I knew it would climb as soon as old
Lucas bought in."

"Speculator in Lukin, is he?"

"No. California. The one whose yacht burned at Honolulu last year. Sold
pine like wild fire two months ago; down goes the price. Then he bought
a little while ago, and now the pine skyrockets. He can buy a new yacht
with what he makes, I suppose!"

The shade of listening darkened her eyes again. "Listen!" She raised a
hushing forefinger that seemed tremulous in rhythm with the ticking.

"Wide brims are in again," exclaimed the operator, "and wide hats are
awful on me; isn't that the luck?"

She went back to her key with the message in her hand, and Connor,
dropping his elbows on the counter, watched her send it with swift
almost imperceptible flections of her wrist.

Then she sat again with her hands folded in her lap, listening. Connor
turned his head and glanced through the door; by squinting he could look
over the roof just across the street and see the shadowy mountains
beyond; then he looked back again and watched the girl listening to the
voice of the outer world. The shock of the contrast soothed. He began to
forget about Ben Connor and think of her.

The girl turned in her chair and directly faced him, and he saw that she
moved her whole body just as she moved her hand, swiftly, but without a
jerk; she considered him gravely.

"Lonely?" she inquired. "Or worried?"

She spoke with such a commonplace intonation that one might have thought
it her business to attend to loneliness and worries.

"As a matter of fact," answered Ben Connor, instinctively dodging the
direct query, "I've been wondering how they happened to stick a
number-one artist on this wire.

"I'm not kidding," he explained hastily. "You see, I used to jerk
lightning myself."

For the first time she really smiled, and he discovered what a rare
thing a smile may be. Up to that point he had thought she lacked
something, just as the white dress lacked a touch of color.

"Oh," she nodded. "Been off the wire long?"

Ben Connor grinned. It began with his lips; last of all the dull gray
eyes lighted.

"Ever since a hot day in July at Aqueduct. The Lorrimer Handicap on the
11th of July, to be exact. I tossed up my job the next day."

"I see," she said, becoming aware of him again. "You played Tip-Top
Second."

"The deuce! Were you at Aqueduct that day?"

"I was here--on the wire." He restrained himself with an effort, for a
series of questions was Connor's idea of a dull conversation. He merely
rubbed his knuckles against his chin and looked at her wistfully.

"He nipped King Charles and Miss Lazy at the wire and squeezed home by a
nose--paid a fat price, I remember," went on the girl. "I suppose you
had something down on him?"

"Did a friend of yours play that race?"

"Oh, no; but I was new to the wire, then, and I used to cut in and
listen to everything that came by."

"I know. It's like having some one whisper secrets in your ear, at
first, isn't it? But you remember the Lorrimer, eh? That was a race!"

The sounder stopped chattering, and by an alternation in her eyes he
knew that up to that moment she had been giving two-thirds of her
attention to the voice of the wire and the other fraction to him; but
now she centered upon him, and he wanted to talk. As if, mysteriously,
he could share some of the burden of his unrest with the girl. Most of
all he wished to talk because this office had lifted him back to the old
days of "lightning jerking," when he worked for a weekly pay-check. The
same nervous eagerness which had been his in that time was now in this
girl, and he responded to it like a call of blood to blood.

"A couple of wise ones took me out to Aqueduct that day: I had all that
was coming to me for a month in my pocket, and I kept saying to myself:
'They think I'll fall for this game and drop my wad; here's where I fool
'em!'"

He chuckled as he remembered.

"Go on," said the girl. "You make me feel as if I were about to make a
clean-up!"

"Really interested?"

She fixed an eager glance on him, as though she were judging how far she
might let herself go. Suddenly she leaned closer to Connor.

"Interested? I've been taking the world off the wire for six years--and
you've been where things happen."

"That's the way I felt at Aqueduct when I saw the ponies parade past the
grand stand the first time," he nodded. "They came dancing on the bitt,
and even I could see that they weren't made for use; legs that never
pulled a wagon, and backs that couldn't weight. Just toys; speed
machines; all heart and fire and springy muscles. It made my pulse jump
to the fever point to watch them light-foot it along the rail with the
groom in front on a clod of a horse. I felt that I'd lived the way that
horse walked--downheaded, and I decided to change."

He stopped short and locked his stubby fingers together, frowning at her
so that the lines beside his mouth deepened.

"I seem to be telling you the story of my life," he said. Then he saw
that she was studying him, not with idle curiosity, but rather as one
turns the pages of an absorbing book, never knowing what the next moment
will reveal or where the characters will be taken.

"You want to talk; I want to hear you," she said gravely. "Go ahead.
Besides--I don't chatter afterward. They paraded past the grand stand,
then what?"

Ben Connor sighed.

"I watched four races. The wise guys with me were betting ten bucks on
every race and losing on red-hot tips; and every time I picked out the
horse that looked good to me, that horse ran in the money. Then they
came out for the Lorrimer. One of my friends was betting on King Charles
and the other on Miss Lazy. Both of them couldn't win, and the chance
was that neither of them would. So I looked over the line as it went by
the stand. King Charles was a little chestnut, one of those long fellows
that stretch like rubber when they commence running; Miss Lazy was a
gangling bay. Yes, they were both good horses, but I looked over the
rest, and pretty soon I saw a rangy chestnut with a white foreleg and a
midget of a boy up in the saddle. 'No. 7--Tip-Top Second,' said the wise
guy on my right when I asked him; 'a lame one.' Come to look at him
again, he was doing a catch step with his front feet, but I had an idea
that when he got going he'd forget all about that catch and run like the
wind. Understand?"

"Just a hunch," said the girl. "Yes!"

She stepped closer to the counter and leaned across it. Her eyes were
bright. Connor knew that she was seeing that picture of the hot day, the
crowd of straw hats stirring wildly, the murmur and cry that went up as
the string of racers jogged past.

"They went to the post," said Connor, "and I got down my bet--a hundred
dollars, my whole wad--on Tip-Top Second. The bookie looked just once at
me, and I'll never forget how his eyebrows went together. I went back to
my seat."

"You were shaking all over, I guess," suggested the girl, and her hands
were quivering.

"I was not," said Ben Connor, "I was cold through and through, and never
moved my eyes off Tip-Top Second. His jockey had a green jacket with two
stripes through it, and the green was easy to watch. I saw the crowd go
off, and I saw Tip-Top left flat-footed at the post."

The girl drew a breath. Connor smiled at her. The hot evening had
flushed his face, but now a small spot of white appeared in either
cheek, and his dull eyes had grown expressionless. She knew what he
meant when he said that he was cold when he saw the string go to the
post.

"It--it must have made you sick!" said the girl.

"Not a bit. I knew the green jacket was going to finish ahead of the
rest as well as I knew that my name was Ben Connor. I said he was left
at the post. Well, it wasn't exactly that, but when the bunch came
streaking out of the shoot, he was half a dozen lengths behind. It was a
mile and an eighth race. They went down the back stretch, eight horses
all bunched together, and the green jacket drifting that half dozen
lengths to the rear. The wise guys turned and grinned at me; then they
forgot all about me and began to yell for King Charles and Miss Lazy.

"The bunch were going around the turn and the two favorites were
fighting it out together. But I had an eye for the green jacket, and
halfway around the turn I saw him move up."

The girl sighed.

"No," Connor continues, "he hadn't won the race yet. And he never should
have won it at all, but King Charles was carrying a hundred and
thirty-eight pounds, and Miss Lazy a hundred and thirty-three, while
Tip-Top Second came in as a fly-weight eighty-seven pounds! No horse in
the world could give that much to him when he was right, but who guessed
that then?

"They swung around the turn and hit the stretch. Tip-Top took the curve
like a cart horse. Then the bunch straightened out, with King Charles
and Miss Lazy fighting each other in front and the rest streaking out
behind like the tail of a flag. They did that first mile in 1.38, but
they broke their hearts doing it, with that weight up.

"They had an eighth to go--one little measly furlong, with Tip-Top in
the ruck, and the crowd screaming for King Charles and Miss Lazy; but
just exactly at the mile post the leaders flattened. I didn't know it,
but the man in front of me dropped his glasses and his head. 'Blown!' he
said, and that was all. It seemed to me that the two in front were
running as strongly as ever, but Tip-Top was running better. He came
streaking, with the boy flattening out along his neck and the whip going
up and down. But I didn't stir. I couldn't; my blood was turned to ice
water.

"Tip-Top walked by the ruck and got his nose on the hip of King Charles.
Somebody was yelling behind me in a squeaky voice: 'There is something
wrong! There's something wrong!' There was, too, and it was the
eighty-seven pounds that a fool handicapper had put on Tip-Top. At the
sixteenth Miss Lazy threw up her head like a swimmer going down and
dropped back, and Tip-Top was on the King's shoulder. Fifty yards to the
finish; twenty-five--then the King staggered as if he'd been hit between
the ears, and Tip-Top jumped out to win by a neck.

"There was one big breath of silence in the grand stand--then a groan. I
turned my head and saw the two wise guys looking at me with sick grins.
Afterward I collected two thousand bucks from a sicker looking bookie."

He paused and smiled at the girl.

"That was the 11th of July. First real day of my life."

She gathered her mind out of that scene.

"You stepped out of a telegraph office, with your finger on the key all
day, every day, and you jumped into two thousand dollars?"

After she had stopped speaking her thoughts went on, written in her
eyes.

"You'd like to try it, eh?" said Ben Connor.

"Haven't you had years of happiness out of it?"

He looked at her with a grimace.

"Happiness?" he echoed. "Happiness?"

She stepped back so that she put his deeply-marked face in a better
light.

"You're a queer one for a winner."

"Sure, the turf is crowded with queer ones like me."

"Winners, all of 'em?"

His eye had been gradually brightening while he talked to her. He felt
that the girl rang true, as men ring true, yet there was nothing
masculine about her.

"You've heard racing called the sport of kings? That's because only
kings can afford to follow the ponies. Kings and Wall Street. But a
fellow can't squeeze in without capital. I've made a go of it for a
while; pretty soon we all go smash. Sooner or later I'll do what
everybody else does--put up my cash on a sure thing and see my money go
up in smoke."

"Then why don't you pull out with what you have?"

"Why does the earth keep running around the sun? Because there's a pull.
Once you've followed the ponies you'll keep on following 'em. No hope
for it. Oh, I've seen the boys come up one after another, make their
killings, hit a streak of bad luck, plunge, and then watch their
sure-thing throw up its tail in the stretch and fade into the ruck."

He was growing excited as he talked; he was beginning to realize that he
must make his break from the turf now or never. And he spoke more to
himself than to the girl.

"We all hang on. We play the game till it breaks us and still we stay
with it. Here I am, two thousand miles away from the tracks--and sending
for dope to make a play! Can you beat that? Well, so-long."

He turned away gloomily.

"Good night, Mr. Connor."

He turned sharply.

"Where'd you get that name?" he asked with a trace of suspicion.

"Off the telegram."

He nodded, but said: "I've an idea I've been chattering to much."

"My name is Ruth Manning," answered the girl. "I don't think you've said
too much."

He kept his eyes steadily on her while he shook hands.

"I'm glad I know some one in Lukin," said Connor. "Good night, again."




_CHAPTER FOUR_


When Connor wakened the next morning, after his first impression of
blinding light, he closed his eyes and waited for the sense of unhappy
doom which usually comes to men of tense nerves and active life after
sleep; but, with slow and pleasant wonder, he realized that the old
numbness of brain and fever of pulse was gone. Then he looked up and
lazily watched the shadow of the vine at his window move across the
ceiling, a dim-bordered shadow continually changing as the wind gathered
the leaves in solid masses and shook them out again. He pored upon this
for a time, and next he watched a spider spinning a web in the corner;
she worked in a draft which repeatedly lifted her from her place before
she had fastened her thread, and dropped her a foot or more into space.
Connor sat up to admire the artisan's skill and courage. Compared to men
and insects, the spider really worked over an abyss two hundred feet
deep, suspended by a silken thread. Connor slipped out of bed and stood
beneath the growing web while the main cross threads were being
fastened. He had been there for some time when, turning away to rub the
ache out of the back of his neck, he again met the contrast between the
man of this morning and the man of other days.

This time it was his image in the mirror, meeting him as he turned. That
deep wrinkle in the middle of the forehead was half erased. The lips
were neither compressed nor loose and shaking, and the eye was calm--it
rested him to meet that glance in the mirror.

A mood of idle content always brings one to the window: Connor looked
out on the street. A horseman hopped past like a day shadow, the
hoofbeats muffled by thick sand, and the wind, moving at an exactly
equal pace, carried a mist of dust just behind the horse's tail.
Otherwise there was neither life nor color in the street of
weather-beaten, low buildings, and the eye of Connor went beyond the
roofs and began to climb the mountains. Here was a bald bright cliff,
there a drift of trees, and again a surface of raw clay from which the
upper soil had recently slipped; but these were not stopping
points--they were rather the steps which led the glance to a sky of pale
and transparent blue, and Connor felt a great desire to have that sky
over him in place of a ceiling.

He splashed through a hasty bath, dressed, and ran down the stairs,
humming. Jack Townsend stood on a box in the corner of the room, probing
at a spider web in the corner.

"Too late for breakfast?" asked Connor.

The fat shoulders of the proprietor quivered, but he did not turn.

"Too late," he snapped. "Breakfast over at nine. No favorites up here."

Connor waited for the wave of irritation to rise in him, but to his own
surprise he found himself saying:

"All right; you can't throw a good horse off his feed by cutting out one
meal."

Jack Townsend faced his guest, rubbing his many-folded chin.

"Don't take long for this mountain air to brace up a gent, does it?" he
asked rather pointedly.

"I'll tell you what," said Connor. "It isn't the air so much; it's the
people that do a fellow good."

"Well," admitted the proprietor modestly, "they may be something in
that. Kind of heartier out here, ain't they? More than in the city, I
guess. I'll tell you what," he added. "I'll go out and speak to the
missus about a snack for you. It's late, but we like to be obligin'."

He climbed carefully down from the box and started away.

"That girl again," thought Connor, and snapped his fingers. His spirits
continued to rise, if that were possible, during the breakfast of ham
and eggs, and coffee of a taste so metallic that only a copious use of
cream made it drinkable. Jack Townsend, recovering to the full his
customary good nature, joined his guest in a huge piece of toast with a
layer of ham on it--simply to keep a stranger from eating alone, he
said--and while he ate he talked about the race. Connor had noticed that
the lobby was almost empty.

"They're over lookin' at the hosses," said Townsend, "and gettin' their
bets down."

Connor laid down knife and fork, and resumed them hastily, but
thereafter his interest in his food was entirely perfunctory. From the
corner of his eye a gleam kept steadily upon the face of Townsend, who
continued:

"Speaking personal, Mr. Connor, I'd like to have you look over them
hosses yourself."

Connor, on the verge of speech, checked himself with a quick effort.

"Because," continued Townsend, "if I had your advice I might get down a
little stake on one of 'em. You see?"

Ben Connor paused with a morsel of ham halfway toward his lips.

"Who told you I know anything about horses?" he asked.

"You told me yourself," grinned the proprietor, "and I'd like to figure
how you knew the mare come from the Ballor Valley."

"From which?"

"From the Ballor Valley. You even named the irrigation and sand and all
that. But you'd seen her brand before, I s'pose?"

"Hoofs like hers never came out of these mountains," smiled Ben Connor.
"See the way she throws them and how flat they are."

"Well, that's true," nodded Jack Townsend. "It seems simple, now you say
what it was, but it had me beat up to now. That is the way with most
things. Take a fine hand with a rope. He daubs it on a cow so dead easy
any fool thinks he can do the same. No, Mr. Connor, I'd still like to
have you come out and take a look at them hosses. Besides"--he lowered
his voice--"you might pick up a bit of loose change yourself. They's a
plenty rolling round to-day."

Connor laughed, but there was excitement behind his mirth.

"The fact is, Townsend," he said, "I'm not interested in racing now. I'm
up here for the air."

"Sure--sure," said the hotel man. "I know all that. Well, if you're dead
set it ain't hardly Christian to lure you into betting on a hoss race, I
suppose."

He munched at his sandwich in savage silence, while Connor looked out
the window and began to whistle.

"They race very often up here?" he asked carelessly.

"Once in a while."

"A pleasant sport," sighed Connor.

"Ain't it, now?" argued Townsend. "But these gents around here take it
so serious that it don't last long."

"That so?"

"Yep. They bet every last dollar they can rake up, and about the second
or third race in the year the money's all pooled in two or three
pockets. Then the rest go gunnin' for trouble, and most generally find a
plenty. Any six races that's got up around here is good for three
shooting scrapes, and each shooting's equal to one corpse and half a
dozen put away for repairs." He touched his forehead, marked with a
white line. "I used to be considerable," he said.

"H-m," murmured Connor, grown absentminded again.

"Yes, sir," went on the other. "I've seen the boys come in from the
mines with enough dust to choke a mule, and slap it all down on the
hoss. I've seen twenty thousand cold bucks lost and won on a dinky
little pinto that wasn't worth twenty dollars hardly. That's how crazy
they get."

Connor wiped his forehead.

"Where do they race?" he asked.

"Right down Washington Avenue. That is the main street, y'see. Gives 'em
about half a mile of runnin'."

A cigarette appeared with magic speed between the fingers of Connor, and
he began to smoke, with deep inhalations, expelling his breath so
strongly that the mist shot almost to the ceiling before it flattened
into a leisurely spreading cloud. Townsend, fascinated, seemed to have
forgotten all about the horse race, but there was in Connor a suggestion
of new interest, a certain businesslike coldness.

"Suppose we step over and give the ponies a glance?" he queried.

"That's the talk!" exclaimed Townsend. "And I'll take any tip you have!"

This made Connor look at his host narrowly, but, dismissing a suspicion
from his mind, he shrugged his shoulders, and they went out together.

The conclave of riders and the betting public had gathered at the
farther end of the street, and it included the majority of Lukin. Only
the center of the street was left religiously clear, and in this space
half a dozen men led horses up and down with ostentatious indifference,
stopping often to look after cinches which they had already tested many
times. As Connor came up he saw a group of boys place their wagers with
a stakeholder--knives, watches, nickels and dimes. That was a fair token
of the spirit of the crowd. Wherever Connor looked he saw hands raised,
brandishing greenbacks, and for every raised hand there were half a
dozen clamorous voices.

"Quite a bit of sporting blood in Lukin, eh?" suggested Townsend.

"Sure," sighed Connor. He looked at the brandished money. "A field of
wheat," he murmured, "waiting for the reaper. That's me."

He turned to see his companion pull out a fat wallet.

"Which one?" gasped Townsend. "We ain't got hardly any time."

Connor observed him with a smile that tucked up the corners of his
mouth.

"Wait a while, friend. Plenty of time to get stung where the ponies are
concerned. We'll look them over."

Townsend began to chatter in his ear: "It's between Charlie Haig's roan
and Cliff Jones's Lightning--You see that bay? Man, he can surely get
across the ground. But the roan ain't so bad. Oh, no!"

"Sure they are."

The gambler frowned. "I was about to say that there was only one horse
in the race, but--" He shook his head despairingly as he looked over the
riders. He was hunting automatically for the fleshless face and angular
body of a jockey; among them all Charlie Haig came the closest to this
light ideal. He was a sun-dried fellow, but even Charlie must have
weighed well over a hundred and forty pounds; the others made no
pretensions toward small poundage, and Cliff Jones must have scaled two
hundred.

"Which was the one hoss in your eyes?" asked the hotel man eagerly.

"The gray. But with that weight up the little fellow will be anchored."

He pointed to a gray gelding which nosed confidently at the back hip
pockets of his master.

"Less than fifteen hands," continued Connor, "and a hundred and eighty
pounds to break his back. It isn't a race; it's murder to enter a horse
handicapped like that."

"The gray?" repeated Jack Townsend, and he glanced from the corner of
his eyes at his companion, as though he suspected mockery. "I never seen
the gray before," he went on. "Looks sort of underfed, eh?"

Connor apparently did not hear. He had raised his head and his nostrils
trembled, so that Townsend did not know whether the queer fellow was
about to break into laughter or a trade.

"Yet," muttered Connor, "he might carry it. God, what a horse!"

He still looked at the gelding, and Townsend rubbed his eyes and stared
to make sure that he had not overlooked some possibilities in the
gelding. But he saw again only a lean-ribbed pony with a long neck and a
high croup. The horse wheeled, stepping as clumsily as a gangling
yearling. Townsend's amazement changed to suspicion and then to
indifference.

"Well," he said, smiling covertly, "are you going to bet on that?"

Connor made no answer. He stepped up to the owner of the gray, a swarthy
man of Indian blood. His half sleepy, half sullen expression cleared
when Connor shook hands and introduced himself as a lover of fast
horse-flesh.

He even congratulated the Indian on owning so fine a specimen, at which
apparently subtle mockery Townsend, in the rear, set his teeth to keep
from smiling; and the big Indian also frowned, to see if there were any
hidden insult. But Connor had stepped back and was looking at the
forelegs of the gelding.

"There's bone for you," he said exultantly. "More than eight inches,
eh--that Cannon?"

"Huh," grunted the owner, "I dunno."

But his last shred of suspicion disappeared as Connor, working his
fingers along the shoulder muscles of the animal, smiled with pleasure
and admiration.

"My name's Bert Sims," said the Indian, "and I'm glad to know you. Most
of the boys in Lukin think my hoss ain't got a chance in this race."

"I think they're right," answered Connor without hesitation.

The eyes of the Indian flashed.

"I think you're putting fifty pounds too much weight on him," explained
Connor.

"Yeh?"

"Can't another man ride your horse?"

"Anybody can ride him."

"Then let that fellow yonder--that youngster--have the mount. I'll back
the gray to the bottom of my pocket if you do."

"I wouldn't feel hardly natural seeing another man on him," said the
Indian. "If he's rode I'll do the riding. I've done it for fifteen
years."

"What?"

"Fifteen years."

"Is that horse fifteen years old?" asked Connor, prepared to smile.

"He is eighteen," answered Bert Sims quietly.

The gambler cast a quick glance at Sims and a longer one at the gray. He
parted the lips of the horse, and then cursed softly.

"You're right," said Connor. "He is eighteen."

He was frowning in deadly earnestness now.

"Accident, I suppose?"

The Indian merely stared at him.

"Is the horse a strain of blood or an accident? What's his breed?"

"He's an Eden gray."

"Are there more like him?"

"The valley's full of 'em, they say," answered Bert Sims.

"What valley?" snapped the gambler.

"I ain't been in it. If I was I wouldn't talk."

"Why not?"

In reply Sims rolled the yellow-stained whites of his eyes slowly toward
his interlocutor. He did not turn his head, but a smile gradually began
on his lips and spread to a sinister hint at mirth. It put a grim end to
the conversation, and Connor turned reluctantly to Townsend. The latter
was clamoring.

"They're getting ready for the start. Are you betting on that runt of a
gray?"




_CHAPTER FIVE_


Conner shook his head almost sadly. "A horse that stands not a hair more
than fourteen-three, eighteen years old, with a hundred and eighty
pounds up--No, I'm not a fool."

"Which is it--the roan or the bay?" gasped Townsend. "Which d'you say?
I'll tell you about the valley after the race. Which hoss, Mr. Connor?"

Thus appealed to, the gambler straightened and clasped his hands behind
his back. He looked coldly at the horses.

"How old is that brown yonder--the one the boy is just mounting?"

"Three. But what's he got to do with the race?"

"He's a shade too young, or he'd win it. That's what he has to do with
it. Back Haig's horse, then. The roan is the best bet."

"Have you had a good look at Lightnin'?"

"He won't last in this going with that weight up."

"You're right," panted Townsend. "And I'm going to risk a hundred on
him. Hey, Joe, how d'you bet on Charlie Haig?"

"Two to one."

"Take you for a hundred. Joe, meet Mr. Connor."

"A hundred it is, Jack. Can I do anything for you, Mr. Connor?"

"I'll go a hundred on the roan, sir."

"Have I done it right?" asked Townsend fiercely, a little later. "I
wonder do you know?"

"Ask that after the race is over," smiled Connor. "After all, you have
only one horse to be afraid of."

"Sure; Lightnin'--but he's enough."

"Not Lightning, I tell you. The gray is the only horse to be afraid of
though the brown stallion might do if he has enough seasoning."

For a moment panic brightened the eyes of Townsend, and then he shook
the fear away.

"I've done it now," he said huskily, "and they's no use talking. Let's
get down to the finish."

The crowd was streaming away from the start, and headed toward the
finish half a mile down the street beyond the farther end of Lukin. Most
of this distance Townsend kept his companion close to a run; then he
suddenly appealed for a slower pace.

"It's my heart," he explained. "Nothin' else bothers it, but during a
hoss race it sure stands on end. I get to thinkin' of what my wife will
say if I lose; and that always plumb upsets me."

He was, in fact, spotted white and purple when they joined the mob which
packed both sides of the street at the finish posts; already the choice
positions were taken.

"We won't get a look," groaned Townsend.

But Connor chuckled: "You tie on to me and we'll get to the front in a
squeeze." And he ejected himself into the mob. How it was done Townsend
could never understand. They oozed through the thickest of the crowd,
and when roughly pressed men ahead of them turned around, ready to
fight, Connor was always looking back, apparently forced along by the
pressure from the rear. He seemed, indeed, to be struggling to keep his
footing, but in a few minutes Townsend found himself in the front rank.
He mopped his brow and smiled up into the cool face of Connor, but there
was no time for comments. Eight horses fretted in a ragged line far down
the street, and as they frisked here and there the brims of the
sombreros of the riders flapped up and down; only the Eden gray stood
with downward head, dreaming.

"No heart," said Townsend, "in that gray hoss. Look at him!"

"Plenty of head, though," replied Connor; "here they go!"

His voice was lost in a yell that went up wailing, shook into a roar,
and then died off, as though a gust of wind had cut the sounds away. A
murmur of voices followed, and then an almost womanish yell, for
Lightning, the favorite, was out in front, and his rider leaned in the
saddle with arm suspended and a quirt which never fell. The rest were a
close group where whips worked ceaselessly, except that in the rear of
all the rest the little gray horse ran without urge, smoothly, as if his
rider had given up all hope of winning and merely allowed his horse to
canter through.

"D'you see?" screamed Townsend. "Is that what you know about hosses, Mr.
Connor? Look at Cliff Jones's Lightning! What do you--"

He cut his upbraidings short, for Connor's was a grisly face, white
about the mouth and with gathered brows, as though, with intense effort,
he strove to throw the influence of his will into that mass of
horse-flesh. The hotel-keeper turned in time to see Lightning, already
buckling under the strain, throw up his head.

The heavy burdens, the deep, soft going, and the fact that none of the
horses were really trained to sprint, made the half-mile course a very
real test, and now the big leader perceptibly weakened. Out of the pack
shot a slender brown body, and came to the girth--to the neck of the
bay.

"The stallion!" shouted Townsend. "By God, you do know hosses! Who'd of
thought that skinny fellow had it in him?"

"He'll die," said Connor calmly.

The bay and the brown went back into the pack together, even as Connor
spoke, though the riders were flogging hard, and now the roan drew to
the front. It was plain to see that he had the foot of the rest, for he
came away from the crowd with every leap.

"Look! Look! Look!" moaned Townsend. "Two for one! Look!" He choked with
pleasure and gripped Connor's arm in both his hands in token of
gratitude.

Now the race bore swiftly down the finish, the horses looming bigger;
their eyes could be seen, and their straining nostrils now, and the
desperate face of each rider, trying to lift his horse into a great
burst.

"He's got it," sobbed Townsend, hysterical. "Nothin' can catch him now."

But his companion, in place of answer, stiffened and pointed. His voice
was a tone of horror, almost, as he said: "I knew, by God, I knew all
the time and wouldn't believe my eyes."

For far from the left, rounding the pack, came a streak of gray. It
caught the brown horse and passed him in two leaps; it shot by the
laboring bay; and only the roan of Charlie Haig remained in front. That
rider, confident of victory, had slipped his quirt over his wrist and
was hand-riding his horse when a brief, deep yell of dismay from the
crowd made him jerk a glance over his shoulder. He cut the quirt into
the flank of the roan, but it was too late. Five lengths from the finish
the little gray shoved his nose in front; and from that point, settling
toward the earth, as he stretched into a longer and longer stride, every
jump increased his margin. The nose of the roan was hardly on the rump
of the gelding at the finish.

A bedlam roar came from the crowd. Townsend was cursing and beating time
to his oaths with a fat fist. Townsend found so many companion losers
that his feelings were readily salved, and he turned to Connor, smiling
wryly.

"We can't win every day," he declared, "but I'll tell you this, partner;
of all the men I ever seen, you get the medal for judgin' a hoss. You
can pick my string any day."

"Eighteen years old," Connor was saying in the monotonous tone of one
hypnotized.

"Hey, there," protested Townsend, perceiving that he was on the verge of
being ignored.

"A hundred and eighty pounds," sighed the big man.

Townsend saw for the first time that a stop-watch was in the hand of his
companion, and now, as Connor began to pace off the distance, the hotel
proprietor tagged behind, curious. Twenty steps from the starting point
the larger man stopped abruptly, shook his head, and then went on. When
he came to the start he paused again, and Townsend found him staring
with dull eyes at the face of the watch.

"What'd they make it in?" asked the little man.

The other did not hear.

"They ran from this line?" he queried in a husky voice.

"Sure. Line between them posts."

"Fifty-nine seconds!" he kept repeating. "Fifty-nine seconds!
Fifty-nine!"

"What about the fifty-nine seconds?" asked Townsend, and receiving no
answer he murmured to himself: "The heat has got to his head."

Connor asked quietly: "Know anything about these gray horses and where
they came from?"

"Sure. As much as anybody. Come from yonder in the mountains. A Negro
raises 'em. A deaf mute. Ain't ever been heard to say a word."

"And he raises horses like that?"

"Sure."

"And nobody's been up there to try to buy 'em?"

"Too far to go, you see? Long ride and a hard trail. Besides, they's
plenty of good hoss-flesh right around Lukin, here."

"Of course," nodded Connor genially. "Of course there is."

"Besides, them grays is too small. Personally, I don't hanker after a
runt of a hoss. I look like a fool on one of em."

The voice of Connor was full of hearty agreement.

"So do I. Yes, they're small, if they're all like that one. Too small.
Much too small."

He looked narrowly at Townsend from the corner of his eyes to make sure
that the hotel proprietor suspected nothing.

"This deaf-mute sells some, now and then?"

"Yep. He comes down once in a while and sells a hoss to the first gent
he meets--and then walks back to the garden. Always geldings that he
sells, I understand. Stand up under work pretty well, those little
hosses. Harry Macklin has got one. Harry lives at Fort Andrew. There's a
funny yarn out about how Harry--"

"What price does the mute ask?"

"Thinking of getting one of 'em?"

"Me? Of course not! What do I want with a runt of a horse like that? But
I was wondering what they pay around here for little horses."

"I dunno."

"What's that story you were going to tell me about Harry Macklin?"

"You see, it was this way--"

And he poured forth the stale anecdote while they strolled back to the
hotel. Connor smiled and nodded at appropriate places, but his absent
eyes were seeing, once more, the low-running form of the little gray
gelding coming away from the rest of the pack.




_CHAPTER SIX_


When he arrived at the hotel Ben Connor found the following telegram
awaiting him:

     Lady Fay in with ninety-eight Trickster did mile and furlong in
     one fifty-four with one hundred twenty Caledonian stale mile in
     one thirty-nine Billy Jones looks good track fast.

     HARRY SLOCUM.

That message blotted all other thoughts from the mind of Connor. From
his traveling bag he brought out a portfolio full of wrinkled papers and
pamphlets crowded with lists of names and figures; there followed a time
of close work. Page after page of calculations scribbled with a soft
pencil and in a large, sprawling hand, were torn from a pad, fluttered
through the air and lay where they fell. When the hour was ended he
pushed away the pamphlets of "dope" and picked up his notes. After that
he sat in deep thought and drove puff after puff of cigarette-smoke at
the ceiling.

As his brown study progressed, he began crumpling the slips in his moist
fingers until only two remained. These he balanced on his finger-tips as
though their weight might speak to his finely attuned nerves. At length,
one hand closed slowly over the paper it held and crushed it to a ball.
He flicked this away with his thumb and rose. On the remaining paper was
written "Trickster." Connor had made his choice.

That done, his expression softened as men relax after a day of mental
strain and he loitered down the stairs and into the street. Passing
through the lobby he heard the voice of Jack Townsend raised obviously
to attract his attention.

"There he goes now. And nothing but the weight kept him from bettin' on
the gray."

Connor heard sounds, not words, for his mind was already far away in a
club house, waiting for the "ponies" to file past. On the way to the
telegraph office he saw neither street nor building nor face, until he
had written on one of the yellow blanks, "A thousand on Trickster," and
addressed it to Harry Slocum. Not until he shoved the telegram across
the counter did he see Ruth Manning.

She was half-turned from the key, but her head was canted toward the
chattering sounder with a blank, inward look.

"Do you hear?" she cried happily. "Bjornsen is back!"

"Who?" asked Connor.

"Sveynrod Bjornsen. Lost three men out of eight, but he got within a
hundred and fifty miles of the pole. Found new land, too."

"Lucky devil, eh?"

But the girl frowned at him.

"Lucky, nothing! Bjornsen is a fighter; he lost his father and his older
brother up there three years ago and then he went back to make up for
their deaths. Luck?"

Connor, wondering, nodded. "Slipped my mind, that story of Bjornsen. Any
other news?"

She made a little gesture, palms up, as though she gathered something
from the air.

"News? The old wire has been pouring it at me all morning. Henry
Levateur went up thirty-two thousand feet yesterday and the Admiral Barr
was launched."

Connor kept fairly abreast of the times, but now he was at sea.

"That's the new liner, isn't it?"

"Thirty thousand tons of liner at that. She took the water like a duck.
Well, that's the stuff for Uncle Sam to give them; a few more like the
Admiral Barr and we'll have the old colors in every port that calls
itself a town. Europe will have to wake up."

She counted the telegram with a sweep of her pencil and flipped the
change to Connor out of the coin-box. The rattle of the sounder meant
new things to Connor; the edges of the world crowded close, for when the
noise stopped, in the thick silence he watched her features relax and
the light go out of her eyes. It enabled him to glance into her life in
Lukin, with only the chattering wire for a companion. A moment before
she had been radiant--now she was a tired girl with purple shadows
beneath her eyes making them look ghostly large.

"Oh, Bobby," she called. A tall youth came out of an inner room. "Take
the key, please; I'm going out for lunch."

"Come to the hotel with me," suggested Connor.

"Lunch at Townsend's?" She laughed with a touch of excitement. "That's a
treat."

Already she gained color and her eyes brightened. She was like a motor,
Connor decided, nothing in itself, but responding to every electric
current.

"This lunch is on me, by the way," she added.

"Why is that?"

"Because I like to pay on my winning days. I cashed in on the Indian's
horse this morning."

In Connor's own parlance--it brought him up standing.

"_You_ bet on it? You know horse-flesh, then. I like the little fellow,
but the weight stopped me."

He smiled at her with a new friendliness.

"Don't pin any flowers on me," she answered. "Oh, I know enough about
horses to look at their hocks and see how they stand; and I don't
suppose I'd buy in on a pony that points the toe of a fore-foot--but I'm
no judge. I bet on the gray because I know the blood."

She had stopped at the door of the hotel and she did not see the change
in Connor's face as they entered.

"Queer thing about horses," she continued. "They show their strain,
though the finest man that ever stepped might have a son that's a
quitter. Not that way with horses. Why, any scrubby pinto that has a
drop of Eden Gray blood in him will run till his heart breaks. You can
bet on that."

Lunch at Townsend's, Connor saw, must be the fashionable thing in Lukin.
The "masses" of those who came to town for the day ate at the
lunch-counters in the old saloons while the select went to the hotel.
Mrs. Townsend, billowing about the room in a dress of blue with white
polka-dots, when she was not making hurried trips into the kitchen, cast
one glance of approval at Ben Connor and another of surprise at the
girl. Other glances followed, for the room was fairly well filled, and a
whisper went trailing about them, before and behind.

It was easy to see that Ruth Manning was being accused of "scraping"
acquaintance with the stranger, but she bore up beautifully, and Connor
gauging her with an accurate eye, admired and wondered where she had
learned. Yet when they found a table and he drew out a chair for her, he
could tell from the manner in which she lowered herself into it that she
was not used to being seated. That observation gave him a feeling of
power over her.

"You liked the gray, too?" she was saying, as he took his place.

"I lost a hundred betting against him," said the gambler quietly. "I
hope you made a killing."

He saw by the slight widening of her eyes that a hundred dollars was a
good deal of money to her; and she flushed as she answered:

"I got down a bet with Jud Alison; it was only five dollars, but I had
odds of ten to one. Fifty dollars looks pretty big to me," she added,
and he liked her frankness.

"But does everybody know about these grays?"

"Not so many. They only come from one outfit, you see. Dad knew horses,
and he told me an Eden Gray was worth any man's money. Poor Dad!"

Connor watched her eyes turn dark and dull, but he tossed sympathy aside
and stepped forward in the business.

"I've been interested since I saw that little streak of gray shoot over
the finish. Eighteen years old. Did you know that?"

"Really? Well, Dad said an Eden Gray was good to twenty-five."

"What else did he say?"

"He didn't know a great deal about them, after all, but he said that now
and then a deaf and dumb Negro comes. He's a regular giant. Whenever he
meets a man he gets off the horse and puts a paper into the hand of the
other. On the paper it says: Fifty dollars in gold coin! Always that."

It was like a fairy tale to Connor.

"Jude Harper of Collinsville met him once. He had only ten dollars in
gold, but he had three hundred in paper. He offered the whole three
hundred and ten to the deaf-mute but he only shook his head."

"How often does he come out of the valley?"

"Once a year--once in two years--nobody knows how often. Of course it
doesn't take him long to find a man who'll buy a horse like one of the
grays for fifty dollars. The minute the horse is sold he turns around
and starts walking back. Pete Ricks tried to follow him. He turned back
on Pete, jumped on him from behind a rock, and jerked him off his horse.
Then he got him by the hair and bent his head back. Pete says he
expected to have his neck broken--he was like a child in the arms of
that giant. But it seemed that the mute was only telling him in
deaf-and-dumb talk that he mustn't follow. After he'd frightened the
life out of Pete the big mute went away again, and Pete came home as
fast as his horse could carry him."

Connor swallowed. "Where do they get the name Eden Gray?"

"I don't know. Dad said that three things were true about every gray.
It's always a gelding; it's always one price, and it always has a flaw.
I looked the one over that ran to-day and couldn't see anything wrong,
though."

"Cow-hocked," said Connor, breathing hard. "Go on!"

"Dad made up his mind that the reason they didn't sell more horses was
because the owner only sold to weed out his stock."

"Wait," said Connor, tapping on the table to make his point. "Do I
gather that the only Eden Grays that are sold are the poorest of the
lot?"

"That was Dad's idea."

"Go on," said Connor.

"You're excited?"

But he answered quickly: "Well, one of those grays beat me out of a
hundred dollars. I can't help being interested."

He detached his watch-charm from its catch and began to finger it
carelessly; it was the head of an ape carved in ivory yellowed with age.

The girl watched, fascinated, but she made no mention of it, for the jaw
of the gambler was set in a hard line, and she felt, subconsciously, a
widening distance between them.

"Does the deaf-mute own the horses?" he was asking.

"I suppose so."

"This sounds like a regular catechism, doesn't it?"

"I don't mind. Come to think of it, everything about the grays is queer.
Well, I've never seen this man, but do you know what I think? That he
lives off there in the mountains by himself because he's a sort of
religious fanatic."

"Religion? Crazy, maybe."

"Maybe."

"What's his religion?"

"I don't know," said the girl coldly. "After you jerk lightning for a
while, you aren't interested much in religion."

He nodded, not quite sure of her position, but now her face darkened and
she went on, gathering interest in the subject.

"Oh, I've heard 'em rave about the God that made the earth and the stars
and all that stuff; the mountains, too. I've heard 'em die asking for
mercy and praising God. That's the way Dad went. It was drink that got
him. But I'm for facts only. Far as I can see, when people come up
against a thing they can't understand they just close their eyes and
say, God! And when they're due to die, sometimes they're afraid and they
say, God--because they think they're going out like a snuffed lantern
and never will be lighted again."

The gambler sat with his chin buried in his palm, and from beneath a
heavy frown he studied the girl.

"I don't hold malice more than the next one," said the girl, "but I saw
Dad; and I've been sick of religion ever since. Besides, how do you
explain the rotten things that happen in the world? Look at yesterday!
The King of the Sea goes down with all on board. Were they all crooks?
Were they all ready to die? They can tell me about God, but I say, 'Give
me the proofs!'"

She looked at Connor defiantly. "There's just one thing I believe in,"
she said, "that's luck!"

He did not stir, but still studied her, and she flushed under the
scrutiny.

"Not that I've had enough luck to make me fond of it. I've been stuck up
here on the edge of the world all my life. And how I've wanted to get
away! How I've wanted it! I've begged for a chance--to cut out the work.
If it doesn't make callouses on a girl's hands it will make them on her
heart. I've been waiting all my life for a chance, and the chance has
never come." Something flared in her.

"Sometimes I think," she whispered, "that I can't stand it! That I'd do
anything! Anything--just to get away."

She stopped, and as her passion ebbed she was afraid she had said too
much.

"Shake," he said, stretching his hand across the table, "I'm with you.
Luck! That's all there is running things!"

His fingers closed hard over hers and she winced, for he had forgotten
to remove the ivory image from his hand, and the ape-head cut into her
flesh.




_CHAPTER SEVEN_


That evening Ruth sent a boy over to the hotel with a telegram for
Connor. It announced that Trickster, at six to one, came home a winner
in the Murray. But Connor had time for only a grunt and a nod; he was
too busy composing a letter to Harry Slocum, which read as follows:

     DEAR HARRY:

     I'm about to put my head in the lion's mouth; and in case you
     don't hear from me again, say within three months, this is to
     ask you to look for my bones. I'm starting out to nail a
     thousand-to-one shot. Working a hunch for the biggest clean-up
     we ever made. I'm going into the mountains to find a deaf mute
     Negro who raises the finest horses I've ever seen. Do you get
     that? No white man has gone into that valley; at least, no one
     has come out talking. But I'm going to bring something with me.
     If I don't come out it'll be because I've been knocked on the
     head inside the valley. I'm not telling any one around here
     where I'm bound, but I've made inquiries, and this is what I
     gather: No one is interested in the mute's valley simply
     because it's so far away. The mute doesn't bother them and they
     won't bother him. That's the main reason for letting him alone.
     The other reasons are that he's suspected of being a bad actor.

     But the distance is the chief thing that fences people away.
     The straight cut is bad going. The better way around is a slow
     journey. It leads west out of Lukin and down into the valley of
     the Girard River; then along the Girard to its headwaters. Then
     through the mountains again to the only entrance to the valley.
     I'm telling you all this so that you'll know what you may have
     ahead of you. If I'm mum for three months come straight for
     Lukin; go to a telegraph operator named Ruth Manning, and tell
     her that you've come to get track of me. She'll give you the
     names of the best dozen men in Lukin, and you start for the
     valley with the posse.

     Around Lukin they have a sort of foggy fear of the valley, bad
     medicine, they call it.

     I have a hard game ahead of me and I'm going to stack the
     cards. I've got to get into the Garden by a trick and get out
     again the same way. I start this afternoon.

     I've got a horse and a pack mule, and I'm going to try my hand
     at camping out. If I come back it will be on something that
     will carry both the pack and me, I think, and it won't take
     long to make the trip. Our days of being rich for ten days and
     poor for thirty will be over.

     Hold yourself ready; sharp at the end of ninety days, come West
     if I'm still silent.

     As ever,

     BEN.

Before the mail took that letter eastward, Ben Connor received his final
advice from Jack Townsend. It was under the hotel man's supervision that
he selected his outfit of soft felt hat, flannel shirts, heavy socks,
and Napatan boots; Townsend, too, went with him to pick out the pack
mule and all the elements of the pack, from salt to canned tomatoes.

As for the horse, Townsend merely stood by to admire while Ben Connor
went through a dozen possibilities and picked a solidly built chestnut
with legs enough for speed in a pinch, and a flexible fetlock--joints
that promised an easy gait.

"You won't have no trouble," said Townsend, as Connor sat the saddle,
working the stirrups back and forth and frowning at the creaking new
leather. "Wherever you go you'll find gents ready to give you a hand on
your way."

"Why's that? Don't I look like an old hand at this game?"

"Not with that complexion; it talks city a mile off. If you'd tell me
where you're bound for--"

"But I'm not bound anywhere," answered Connor. "I'm out to follow my
nose."

"With that gun you ought to get some game."

Connor laid his hand on the butt of the rifle which was slung in a case
under his leg. He had little experience with a gun, but he said
nothing.

"All trim," continued Townsend, stepping back to look. "Not a flaw in
the mule; no sign of ringbone or spavin, and when a mule ain't got them,
he's got nothin' wrong. Don't treat him too well. When you feel like
pattin' him, cuss him instead. It's mule nature to like a beatin' once
in a while; they spoil without it, like kids. He'll hang back for two
days, but the third day he'll walk all over your hoss; never was a hoss
that could walk with a mule on a long trip. Well, Mr. Connor, I guess
you're all fixed, but I'd like to send a boy along to see you get
started right."

"Don't worry," smiled Connor. "I've written down all your suggestions."

"Here's what you want to tie on to special," said the fat man. "Don't
move your camp on Fridays or the thirteenth; if you come nigh a town and
a black cat crosses your trail, you camp right there and don't move on
to that town till the next morning. And wait a minute--if you start out
and find you've left something in camp, make a cross in the trail before
you go back."

He frowned to collect his thoughts.

"Well, if you don't do none of them three things, you can't come out far
wrong. S'long, and good luck, Mr. Connor."

Connor waved his hand, touched the chestnut with his heel and the horse
broke into a trot, while the rope, coming taut, first stretched the neck
of the mule and then tugged him into a dragging amble. In this manner
Connor went out of Lukin. He smiled to himself, as he thought
confidently of the far different fashion in which he would return.

The first day gave Connor a raw nose, a sunburned neck and wrists, and
his supper was charred bacon and tasteless coffee; but the next morning
he came out of the choppy mountains and went down a long, easy slope
into the valley of the Girard. There was always water here, and fine
grass for the horse and mule, with a cool wind off the snows coming down
the ravine. By the third day he was broken into the routine of his work
and knew the most vulnerable spot on the ribs of the mule, and had a pet
name for the chestnut. Thereafter the camping trip was pleasant enough.
It took him longer than he had expected, for he would not press the
horse as the pitch of the ravine grew steeper; later he saw his wisdom
in keeping the chestnut fresh for the final burst, for when he reached
the head-spring of the Girard, he faced a confusion of difficult, naked
mountains. He was daunted but determined, and the next morning he filled
his canteens and struck into the last stage of his journey.

Luck gave him cool weather, with high moving clouds, which curtained the
sun during the middle of the day, but even then it was hard work. He had
not the vestige of a trail to follow; the mountain sides were bare rock.
A scattering of shrubs and dwarfed trees found rooting in crevices, but
on the whole Connor was journeying through a sea of stone, and
sometimes, when the sun glinted on smooth surface, the reflection
blinded him. By noon the chestnut was hobbling, and before nightfall
even the mule showed signs of distress. And though Connor traveled now
by compass, he was haunted by a continual fear that he might have
mistaken his way, or that the directions he had picked up at Lukin might
be entirely wrong. Evening was already coming over the mountains when he
rounded a slope of black rock and found below him a picture that tallied
in every detail with all he had heard of the valley.

The first look was like a glance into a deep well of stone with a flash
of water in the bottom; afterward he sat on a boulder and arranged the
details of that big vista. Nothing led up to the Garden from any
direction; it was a freak of nature. Some convulsion of the earth, when
these mountains were first rising, perhaps, had split the rocks, or as
the surface strata rolled up, they parted over the central lift and left
this ragged fissure. Through the valley ran a river, but water could
never have cut those saw-tooth cliffs; and Connor noted this strange
thing: that the valley came to abrupt ends both north and south. By the
slant sunlight, and at that distance--for he judged the place to be some
ten or fifteen miles in length--it seemed as if the cliff fronts to the
north and south were as solid and lofty as a portion of the sides; yet
this could not be unless the river actually disappeared under the face
of the wall. Still, he could not make out details from the distance,
only the main outline of the place, the sheen of growing things, whether
trees or grass, and the glitter of the river which swelled toward the
center of the valley into a lake. He could discover only one natural
entrance; in the nearest cliff wall appeared a deep, narrow cleft, which
ran to the very floor of the valley, and the only approach was through a
difficult ravine. The sore-footed chestnut had caught the flash of
green, and now he pricked his ears and whinnied as if he saw home.
Connor started down the rocks toward the entrance, leading the horse,
while the mule trailed wearily behind. As he turned, the wind blew to
him out of the valley a faint rhythmical chiming. When he paused to
listen the sound disappeared.

He dipped out of the brighter level into a premature night below;
evening was gathering quickly, and with each step Connor felt the misty
darkness closing above his head. He was stumbling over the boulders,
downheaded, hardly able to see the ground at his feet, yet when he
reached the bottom of the little ravine which ran toward the entrance,
he looked up to a red sky, and the higher mountains rolled off in waves
of light. Distances were magnified; he seemed to look from the bottom of
the world to the top of it; he turned, a little dizzy, and between the
edges of the cleft that rose straight as Doric pillars, he saw a fire
burning at the entrance to the Garden of Eden. The sunset was above
them, but the fire sent a long ray through the night of the lower
valley. Connor pointed it out to his horse, and the little cavalcade
went slowly forward.




_CHAPTER EIGHT_


With every step that he took into the darkness the feeling of awe
deepened upon Connor, until he went frowning toward the fire as though
it were an eye that watched his coming. He was quite close when the
chestnut threw up its head with a snort and stopped, listening; Connor
listened as well, and he heard a music of men's voices singing together,
faint with distance; the sound traveled so far that he caught the pulse
of the rhythm and the fiber of the voices rather than the tune itself,
yet the awe which had been growing in Connor gathered suddenly in his
throat. He had to close his hands hard to keep from being afraid.

As though the chestnut felt the strangeness also, he neighed suddenly;
the rock walls of the ravine caught up the sound and trumpeted it back.
Connor, recovering from the shock, buried his fingers in the nostrils of
the horse and choked the sound away; but the echo still went faintly
before them and behind. The alarm had been given. The fire winked once
and went out. Connor was left without a light to guide him; he looked up
and saw that the sunset flush had fallen away to a dead gray.

He looked ahead to where the fire had been. Just then the horse jerked
his nose away and gasped in a new breath. Even that slight sound
flurried Connor, for it might guide the unknown danger to him. Connor
remembered that after all he was not a bandit stealing upon a peaceful
town; he composed his mind and his nerves with an effort, and was about
to step forward again when he saw in the night just before him a deeper
shade among the shadows. Peering, he discovered the dim outlines of a
man.

Ben Connor was not a coward, but he was daunted by this apparition. His
first impulse was to flee; his second was to leap at the other's throat.
It spoke much for his steadiness in a crisis that he did neither, but
called instead: "Who's there?"

Metal gritted on metal, and a shaft of light poured into Connor's face
so unexpectedly that he shrank. The chestnut reared, and turning to
control the horse, Connor saw his eyes and the eyes of the mule shining
like phosphorus. When he had quieted the gelding he saw that it was a
hooded lantern which had been uncovered. Not a ray fell on the bearer of
the light.

"I saw a light down here," said Connor, after he had tried in vain to
make out the features of the other. "It looked like a fire, and I
started for it; I've lost my bearing in these mountains."

Without answering, the bearer of the lantern kept the shaft staring into
Connor's face for another moment; then it was as suddenly hooded and
welcome darkness covered the gambler. With a gesture which he barely
could make out, the silent man waved him forward down the ravine. It
angered Connor, this mummery of speechlessness, but with his anger was
an odd feeling of helplessness as though the other had a loaded gun at
his head.

The man walked behind him as they went forward, and presently the fire
shone out at them from the entrance to the valley; thus Connor saw the
blanket which had screened the fire removed, and caught a glimpse of a
second form.

Even the zenith was dark now, and it was double night in the ravine.
With the chestnut stumbling behind him, Connor entered the circle of the
fire and was stopped by the raised hand of the second man.

"Why are you here?" said the guard.

The voice was thin, but the articulation thick and soft, and as the
questioner stepped into the full glow of the fire, Connor saw a Negro
whose head was covered by white curls. He was very old; it seemed as
though time had faded his black pigment, and now his skin, a dark
bronze, was puckered at the corners of his mouth, about his eyes, and in
the center of his forehead, seeming to have dried in wrinkles like
parchment. While he talked his expression never varied from the weary
frown; yet years had not bowed him, for he stood straight as a youth,
and though his neck was dried away until it was no thicker than a strong
man's forearm, he kept his head high and looked at Connor.

The man who had gone out to stop Connor now answered for him, and
turning to the voice the gambler saw that this fellow was a Negro
likewise; as erect as the one by the fire, but hardly less ancient.

"He is lost in the mountains, and he saw the fire at the gate, Ephraim."

Ephraim considered Connor wistfully.

"This way is closed," he said; "you cannot pass through the gate."

The gambler looked up; a wall of rock on either side rose so high that
the firelight failed to carry all the distance, and the darkness arched
solidly above him. The calm dignity of the men stripped him of an
advantage which he felt should be his, but he determined to appear at
ease.

"Your best way," continued Ephraim, "is toward that largest mountain.
You see where its top is still lighted in the west, while the rest of
the range is black.

"Jacob can take you up from the ravine and show you the beginning of the
way. But do not pass beyond the sight of the fire, Jacob."

"Good advice," nodded Connor, forcing himself to smile, "if it weren't
that my horse is too sore-footed to carry me. Even the mule can hardly
walk--you see."

He waved his hand and the chestnut threw up its head and took one or two
halting steps to the side.

"In the meantime, I suppose you've no objection if I sit down here for a
moment or two?"

Ephraim, bowing as though he ushered the other into an apartment of
state, waved to a smooth-topped boulder comfortably near the fire.

"I wish to serve you," he went on, "in anything I can do without leaving
the valley. We have a tank just inside the gate, and Jacob will fill
your canteen and water the horse and mule as well."

"Kind of you," said Connor. "Cigarette?"

The proffered smoke brought a wrinkling of amazed delight into the face
of Ephraim and his withered hand stretched tentatively forth. Jacob
forestalled him with a cry and snatched the cigarette from the open palm
of Connor. He held it in both his cupped hands.

"Tobacco--again!" He turned to Ephraim. "I have not forgotten!"

Ephraim had folded his arms with dignity, and now he turned a reproving
glance upon his companion.

"Is it permitted?" he asked coldly.

The joy went out of the face of Jacob.

"What harm?"

"Is it permitted?" insisted Ephraim.

"He will not ask," argued Jacob dubiously.

"He knows without asking."

At this, very slowly and unwillingly, Jacob put the cigarette back into
the hand of Ben Connor. A dozen curious questions came into the mind of
the gambler, but he decided wisely to change the subject.

"The boss gives you orders not to leave, eh?" he went on. "Not a step
outside the gate? What's the idea?"

"This thing was true in the time of the old masters. Only Joseph can
leave the valley," Ephraim answered.

"And you don't know why no one is allowed inside the valley?"

"I have never asked," said Ephraim.

Connor smoked fiercely, peering into the fire.

"Well," he said at length, "you see my troubles? I can't get into the
valley to rest up. I have to turn around and try to cross those
mountains."

"Yes," nodded Ephraim.

"But the horse and mule will never make it over the rocks. I'll have to
leave them behind or stay and starve with them."

"That is true."

"Rather than do that," said Connor, fencing for an opening, "I'd leave
the poor devils here to live in the valley."

"That cannot be. No animals are allowed to enter."

"What? You'd allow this pair to die at the gate of the valley?"

"No; I should lead them first into the mountains."

"This is incredible! But I tell you, this horse is my friend--I can't
desert him!"

He fumbled in his coat pocket and then stretched out his hand toward the
chestnut; the horse hobbled a few steps nearer and nosed the palm of it
expectantly.

"So!" muttered Ephraim, and shaded his eyes with his hand to look. He
settled back and said in a different voice: "The horse loves you; it is
said."

"I put the matter squarely up to you," said Connor. "You see how I
stand. Give me your advice!"

Ephraim protested. "No, no! I cannot advise you. I know nothing of what
goes on out yonder. Nevertheless--"

He broke off, for Connor was lighting another cigarette from the butt of
the first one, and Ephraim paused to watch, nodding with a sort of
vicarious pleasure as he saw Connor inhale deeply and then blow out a
thin drift of smoke.

"You were about to say something else when I lighted this."

"Yes, I was about to say that I could not advise you, but I can send to
Joseph. He is near us now."

"By all means send to Joseph."

"Jacob," ordered the keeper of the gate, "go to Joseph and tell him what
has happened."

The other nodded, and then whistled a long note that drifted up the
ravine. Afterward there was no answer, but Jacob remained facing
expectantly toward the inside of the valley and presently Connor heard a
sound that made his heart leap, the rhythmic hoofbeats of a galloping
horse; and even in the darkness the long interval between impacts told
him something of the animal's gait. Then into the circle of the
firelight broke a gray horse with his tail high, his mane fluttering. He
brought his gallop to a mincing trot and came straight toward Jacob, but
a yard away he stopped and leaped catlike to one side; with head tossed
high he stared at Connor.

Cold sweat stood on the forehead of the gambler, for it was like
something he had seen, something he remembered; all his dreams of what a
horse should be, come true.

Ephraim was saying sternly:

"In my household the colts are taught better manners, Jacob."

And Jacob answered, greatly perturbed: "There is a wild spirit in all
the sons of Harith."

"It is Cassim, is it not?" asked Ephraim.

"Peace, fool!" said Jacob to the stallion, and the horse came and stood
behind him, still watching the stranger over the shoulder of his master.

"Years dim your eyes, Ephraim," he continued. "This is not Cassim and he
is not the height of Cassim by an inch. No, it is Abra, the son of Hira,
who was the daughter of Harith."

He smiled complacently upon Ephraim, nodding his ancient head, and
Ephraim frowned.

"It is true that my eyes are not as young as yours, Jacob; but the
horses of my household are taught to stand when they are spoken to and
not dance like foolish children."

This last reproof was called forth by the continual weaving back and
forth of the stallion as he looked at Connor, first from one side of
Jacob and then from the other. The old man now turned with a raised
hand.

"Stand!" he ordered.

The stallion jerked up his head and became rigid.

"A sharp temper makes a horse without heart," said the oracular Ephraim.

Jacob scowled, and rolling his eyes angrily, searched for a reply; but
he found none. Ephraim clasped one knee tightly in both hands, and
weaving his head a little from side to side, delighted in his triumph.

"And the hand which is raised," went on the tormentor, "should always
fall."

He was apparently quoting from an authority against which there was no
appeal; now he concluded:

"Threats are for children, and yearlings; but a grown horse is above
them."

"The spirit of Harith has returned in Abra," said Jacob gloomily. "From
that month of April when he was foaled he has been a trial and a burden;
yes, if even a cloud blows over the moon he comes to my window and calls
me. There was never such a horse since Harith. However, he shall make
amends. Abra!"

The stallion stepped nearer and halted, alert.

"Go to him, fool. Go to the stranger and give him your head. Quick!"

The gray horse turned, hesitated, and then came straight to Connor, very
slowly; there he bowed his head and dropped his muzzle on the knee of
the white man, but all the while his eyes flared at the strange face in
terror. Jacob turned a proud smile upon Ephraim, and the latter nodded.

"It is a good colt," he admitted. "His heart is right, and in time he
may grow to some worth."

Once more Connor fumbled in his pocket.

"Steady," he said, looking squarely into the great, bright eyes.
"Steady, boy."

He put his hand under the nose of the stallion.

"It's a new smell, but little different."

Abra snorted softly, but though he shook he dared not move. The gambler,
with a side glance, saw the two men watching intently.

"Ah," said Connor, "you have pulled against a headstall here, eh?"

He touched an old scar on the cheek of the horse, and Abra closed his
eyes, but opened them again when he discovered that no harm was done to
him by the tips of those gentle fingers.

"You may let him have his head again," said Connor. "He will not leave
me now until he is ordered."

"So?" exclaimed Jacob. "We shall see! Enough Abra!"

The gray tossed up his head at that word, but after he had taken one
step he returned and touched the back of the white man's hand, snuffed
at his shoulder and at his hat and then stood with pricking ears. A soft
exclamation came in unison from Jacob and Ephraim.

"I have never seen it before," muttered Jacob. "To see it, one would say
he was a son of Julanda."

"It is my teaching and not the blood of Julanda that gives my horses
manners," corrected Ephraim. "However, if I might look in the hand of
the stranger--"

"There is nothing in it," answered Connor, smiling, and he held out both
empty palms. "All horses are like this with me."

"Is it true?" they murmured together.

"Yes; I don't know why. But you were going to bring Joseph."

"Ah," said Ephraim, shaking his head. "I had almost forgotten. Hurry,
Jacob; but if you will take my advice in the matter you will teach your
colts fewer tricks and more sound sense."

The other grunted, and putting his hand on the withers of Abra, he
leaped to the back with the lightness of a strong youth. A motion of his
hand sent the gray into a gallop that shot them through the gate into
darkness.




_CHAPTER NINE_


That faint and rhythmic chiming which Connor had heard from the mountain
when he first saw the valley now came again through the gate, more
clearly. There was something familiar about the sound--yet Connor could
not place it.

"Did you mark?" said Ephraim, shaking his head. "Did you see the colt
shy at the white rock as he ran? In my household that could never
happen; and yet Jacob does well enough, for the blood of Harith is as
stubborn as old oak and wild as a wolf. But your gift, sir"--and here he
turned with much respect toward Connor--"is a great one. I have never
seen Harith's sons come to a man as Abra came to you."

He was surprised to see the stranger staring toward the gate as if he
watched a ghost.

"He did not gallop," said Connor presently, and his voice faltered. "He
flowed. He poured himself through the air."

He swept a hand across his forehead and with great effort calmed the
muscles of his face.

"Are there more horses like that in the valley?"

Ephraim hesitated, for there was such a glittering hunger in the eyes of
this stranger that it abashed him. Vanity, however, brushed scruple
away.

"More like Abra in the valley? So!"

He seemed to hunt for superlatives with which to overwhelm his
questioner.

"The worst in my household is Tabari, the daughter of Numan, and she was
foaled lame in the left foreleg. But if ten like Abra were placed in
one corral and Tabari in the other, a wise man would give the ten and
take the one and render thanks that such good fortune had come his way."

"Is it possible?" exclaimed Connor in that same, small, choked voice.

"I speak calmly," said Ephraim gravely. He added with some hesitation:
"But if I must tell the whole truth, I shall admit that my household is
not like the household of the blood of Rustir. Just as she was the queen
of horses, so those of her blood are above other horses as the master is
above me. Yet, if ten like Tabari were placed in one corral and the
stallion Glani were placed in another, I suppose that a wise man would
give the ten for the one."

He added with a sigh: "But I should not have such wisdom."

Connor smiled.

"And at that rate it would require a hundred like Abra to buy Glani?" he
asked.

"A thousand," said the old man instantly, "and then the full price would
not be paid. I have already asked the master to cross him with Hira. He
will answer me soon; one touch of Glani's blood will lift the strain in
my household. My colts are good mettle--but the fire, the soul of
Glani!"

He bowed his head.

"Ah, they are coming, Jacob and Joseph."

His keen ear heard a sound which was not audible to Connor for several
moments; then two gray horses swept into the circle of the firelight,
and from the mare which led Abra by several yards, a huge Negro
dismounted.

"If you are Joseph," the gambler said, "I suppose Jacob has already told
you about me. My name is Connor. I've been hunting up the Girard River,
struck across the mountains yonder, and here I've brought up with a lame
mule and a lamer horse. The point is that I want to rest up in your
valley until my animals can go on. Is it possible?"

While he spoke the giant watched him with eyes which squinted in their
intensity, but when he ended Joseph answered not a word. Connor
remembered now what he had heard of the deaf mute who alone went back
and forth from the Garden of Eden, and his heart fell. It was talking to
a face of stone.

In the meantime Joseph continued to examine the stranger. From head to
foot the little, bright eyes moved, leisurely, and Connor grew hot as he
endured it. When the survey was completed to his own satisfaction,
Joseph went first to the mule and next to the horse, lifting their feet
one by one, then running his hands over their legs. After this he turned
to Jacob and his great fingers glided through the characters of the
language of the mute, bunching, knotting, darting out in a fluid
swiftness.

"Joseph says," translated Ephraim, "that your horse is lame, but that he
can climb the hills if you go on foot; the mule is not lame at all, but
is pretending, because he is tired."

An oath rose up in the throat of Connor, but he checked it against his
teeth and smiled at Joseph. The big man hissed through his teeth and his
mare sprang to his side. She was not more than fourteen two, and
slenderly made compared with Abra, yet she had borne the great bulk of
Joseph with ease before, and now she was apparently ready to carry him
again. He dropped his hand upon her withers, and facing Connor, swept
his arm out in a broad gesture of dismissal. Vaguely the gambler noticed
this, but his real interest centered on the form of the mare. He was
seeing her not with that unwieldy bulk crushing her back, but with a
fly-weight jockey mounted on a racing pad riding her past the grand
stand. He was hearing the odds which the bookies offered; he was
watching those odds drop by leaps and bounds as he hammered away at
them, betting in lumps of hundreds and five hundreds, staking his
fortune on his first "sure thing." Even as she stood passive, tossing
her nose, he knew her speed, and it took his breath. Abra himself would
walk away from ordinary company, but this gray mare--slowly Connor
looked back to the face of Joseph and saw that the giant was waiting to
see his command obeyed. For the first time he noted the cartridge belt
strung across the fellow's gaunt middle and the holster in which pulled
the weight of a forty-five. In case of doubt, here was a cogent reason
to hurry a loiterer. To persuade the giant would never have been easy,
but to persuade him through an interpreter made the affair impossible.
Struggling for a loophole of escape, he absentmindedly unsnapped from
his watch chain the little ivory talisman, the ape head, and commenced
to finger it. It had been his constant companion for years and in a
measure he connected his luck with it.

"My friend," said Connor to Ephraim, "you see my position? But if I
can't do better is there any objection to my using this fire of yours
for cooking? The fire, at least, is outside the valley."

Even this question Ephraim apparently did not feel qualified to answer.
He turned first to the gigantic mute and conversed with him at some
length; his own fluent signals were answered by single movements on the
part of Joseph, and Connor recognized the signs of dissent.

"I have told him everything," said Ephraim, turning again to Connor and
shaking his head in sympathy. "And how Abra came to you, but though the
horse trusted you, Joseph does not wish you to stay. I am sorry."

Connor looked through the gate into the darkness of the Garden of Eden;
at the entrance to his promised land he was to be turned back. In his
despair he opened his palm and looked down absently at the little
grinning ape head of ivory. Even while he was deep in thought he felt
the silence which settled over the three men, and when he looked up he
saw the glittering eyes of Joseph fixed upon the trinket. That instant
new hope came to Connor; he closed his hand over the ape head, and
turning to Ephraim he said:

"Very well. If there's nothing else for me to do, I'll take the chance
of getting through the mountains with my lame nags."

As he spoke he threw the reins over the neck of the chestnut; but before
he could put his foot in the stirrup Joseph was beside him and touched
his shoulder.

"Wait!" said he, and the gambler paused with astonishment. The mask of
the mute which he had hitherto kept on his face now fell from it.

"Let me see," the giant was saying, and held out his hand for the ivory
image.

The pulse of Connor doubled its beat--but with his fingers still closed
he said:

"The ivory head is an old companion of mine and has brought me a great
deal of luck."

The torchlight changed in the eyes of Joseph as the sun glints and
glimmers on watered silk.

"I would not hurt it," he said, and made a gingerly motion to show how
light and deft his fingers could be.

"Very well," said Connor, "but I rarely let it out of my hand."

He stepped closer to the firelight and exposed the little carving again.
It was a curious bit of work, with every detail nicely executed;
pinpoint emeralds were inset for eyes, the lips grinned back from tiny
fangs of gold, and the swelling neck suggested the powerful ape body of
the model. In the firelight the teeth and eyes flashed.

Joseph grinned in sympathy. Ephraim and Jacob also had drawn close, and
the white man saw in the three faces one expression: they had become
children before a master, and when Connor placed the trinket in the
great paw of Joseph the other two flashed at him glances of envy. As for
the big man, he was transformed.

"Speak truth," he said suddenly. "Why do you wish to enter the Garden?"

"I've already told you, I think," said Connor. "It's to rest up until
the horse and mule are well again."

The glance of the huge man, which had hitherto wandered from the trinket
to Connor's face, now steadied brightly upon the latter.

"There must be another reason."

Connor felt himself pressed to the wall.

"Look at the thing you have in your hand, Joseph. You are asking
yourself: 'What is it? Who made it? See how the firelight glitters on
it--perhaps there is life in it!'"

"Ah!" sighed the three in one breath.

"Perhaps there is power in it. I have used it well and it has brought me
a great deal of good luck. But you would like to know all those things,
Joseph. Now look at the gate to the Garden!"

He waved to the lofty and dark cleft before them.

"It is like a face to me. People live behind it. Who are they? Who is
the master? What does he do? What is his power? That is another reason
why I wish to go in; and why should you fear me? I am alone; I am
unarmed."

It seemed that Joseph learned more from Connor's expression than from
his words.

"The law is the will of David."

The Garden became to Connor as the forbidden room to Bluebeard's wife;
it tempted him as a high cliff tempts the climber toward a fall. He
mustered a calm air and voice.

"That is a matter I can arrange with your master. He may have laws to
keep out thieves, but certainly he has nothing against honest men."

Joseph shrugged his big shoulders, but Ephraim answered: "The will of
David never changes. I am no longer young, but since I have been old
enough to remember, I have never seen a man either come into the valley
or leave it except Joseph."

The solemnity of the old man staggered Connor. He felt his resolution to
enter at any cost waver, and then Abra, the young stallion, came to his
side and looked in his face.

It was the decisive touch. The life which the devotee would risk for his
God, or the patriot for his country, the gambler was willing to venture
for the sake of a "sure thing."

"Let us exchange gifts," said Connor; "I give you the ivory head. It may
bring you good luck. You give me the right to enter the valley and I
accept any good or evil that comes to me."

The huge fingers of Joseph curled softly over the image.

"Beware of the law!" cried Ephraim. "And the hand of the master!"

The giant shrank, but he looked at Ephraim with sullen defiance.

"Come," he said to Connor. "This is on your own head."




_CHAPTER TEN_


"It is a long ride to the house of David," said Jacob. "Your horse is
footsore; take Abra."

But Ephraim broke in: "If you care for speed and wise feet beneath you,
Tabari herself is there."

He whistled as Jacob had done before, but with another grace-note at the
end.

"Those of my household answer when they are called," continued the old
man proudly. "Listen!"

A soft whinny out of the darkness, and Tabari galloped into the
firelight, and stopped at the side of her master motionless.

"Choose," said Ephraim.

He smiled at Jacob, who in return was darkly silent.

The mare tugged at the heartstrings of Connor, but he answered, slipping
carefully into the formal language which apparently was approved most in
the valley.

"She is worthy of a king, but Abra was offered to me first. But will he
carry a saddle?"

"He will carry anything but a whip," said Jacob, casting a glance of
triumph at Ephraim. "You will see!" He was already busy at the knot
under the flap of Connor's saddle, and presently he slipped the saddle
from the back of the chestnut. "Come!" he called.

Abra came, but he came like a fighter into the ring, dancing, ready for
trouble.

"Fool!" shouted Jacob, stamping. "Fool, and grandson of a fool, stand!"

The ears of Abra flicked back along his neck and he trembled as the
saddle was swung over him. Under its impact he crouched and shuddered,
but the outbreak of bucking for which Connor waited did not come. The
jerk on the cinch brought a snort from him, but that was all.

"We may not put iron in his mouth," said Jacob, as Connor came up with
the bridle, "but a touch on this will turn him or stop him, as you
wish."

As he spoke he picked up a small rope, which he knotted around the neck
of Abra close to the ears, and handed the end to Connor.

"Look!" he said to the horse, pointing to Connor. "This is your master
to-night. Bear him as you would bear me, Abra, without leaping or
stumbling, smoothly, as son of Khalissa should do. And hark," he added
in the ear of the young stallion; "if the mare of Joseph outruns you,
you are no horse of my household, but a mongrel, a bloodless knave."

Joseph was already trotting through the gate and growing dim beyond, so
Connor put his foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle. He landed
as upon springs, all the lithe body of the stallion giving under the
shock; and Connor felt a quivering power beneath him like the vibration
of a racing motor. Abra's eyes glinted as he threw his head high to take
stock of the new master.

"Go," commanded Jacob; "and remember your speed, for the honor of him
who trained you!"

The last words were whipped away from the ear of Connor and trailed into
a murmur behind him, for without a preliminary step Abra sprang from a
stand into a full gallop. That forward lurch swayed Connor far back; he
lost touch with his stirrups, but, clinging desperately with his knees,
he was presently able to right himself. There was hard gravel beneath
them, but the gait was as soft as if Abra ran in deep sand without
labor; there was no more wrench and shock than the ghost of a man
riding a ghost of a horse.

A column of black shot by on either hand; Connor was through the gate to
the Garden of Eden and rushing down the slope beyond. He knew this
dimly, but chiefly he was aware only of the whipping of the wind.
Something Ephraim had said came into his memory: "If there were ten like
Abra in one corral, and one like Tabari in another, a wise man--" But,
no doubt, Ephraim had jested.

For, glancing up, he saw the tops of tall trees rushing past him against
the sky, and for the first time he knew the speed of that gallop. In his
exultation he threw up his hand, and his shout rang before him and
behind. That taught him a lesson he would never forget when he sat the
saddle on an Eden Gray; for Abra lurched into a run with a suddenness
that swayed Connor against the cantle again.

He steadied himself quickly and called to Abra; the first word cut down
that racing gait to the long, free stride, but the brief rush had taken
the breath of the rider, and now he looked about him.

He had been in California years before, and now he recognized the
peculiar, clean perfume of the trees which lined the road; they were the
eucalyptus, and they fenced the way with a gigantic hedge several rows
deep. It was a winding road that they followed, dipping over a rolling
ground and swinging leisurely from side to side to avoid high places, so
that the vista of the trees was continually in motion, twisting back and
forth; or when he looked straight up he saw the slender tree-points
brushing past the stars. So he galloped into a long, straight stretch
with a pale gleam of water beyond it; and between he saw Joseph.

It was strange that in spite of the speed of Abra, Joseph's mare had not
been overtaken; for no matter what quality the mare might have, she
carried in the gigantic Negro an impost of some two hundred and fifty
pounds. A suspicion of discourtesy on his part must have come to Joseph,
for now he brought his horse back to a canter that allowed Connor to
come close, so close indeed that he saw Joseph laughing in a horrible
soundless way and beckoning him on, very much as though he challenged
Abra. Surely the fellow must know that no horse could concede such
weight to Abra, but Connor waved his arm to signify that he accepted the
challenge, and called on Abra.

There followed the breathless lunge forward, the sinking of the body as
the stride lengthened, the whir of wind against his face; Connor sat the
saddle erect, smiling, and waited for Joseph to come back to him.

But Joseph did not come, and as the mare reached the river and her hoofs
rang on the bridge Connor saw with unspeakable wonder that he had
actually lost ground. Once more he called on Abra, and as they struck
the bridge in turn the young stallion was fully extended, while Connor
swung forward in the saddle to throw more weight on the withers and take
the strain from the long back muscles. Leaning close to the neck of
Abra, with the mane whipping his face, he squinted down the road at
Joseph, and growled with savage satisfaction as he saw the mare drift
back to him. If he could reach her with a sprint she was beaten, for she
bore the extra burden. Once more he called on Abra, and heard a slight
grunt as the stallion gave the last burst of his strength; the hoofs of
the two roared on the hard road, and Joseph came back hand over hand.
Connor, laughing exultantly, squinted into the wind.

"Good boy!" he muttered. "Good old Abra! If he had Salvator under him
we'd get him at this rate. We're on his hip--Now!"

He was indeed in touch with the flying mare, and, looking through the
dimness, he marveled at her long, free swing, the level drive of the
croup, and--he saw with astonishment--her pricking ears! Not as if she
were racing, but merely galloping. He flattened himself along the neck
of Abra and called on him again, slapped his shoulder with the flat of
his hand, flicked him along the flank with the butt of the rope; but the
mare held him invincibly; he could not gain the breadth of a hair, and
by the pounding of Abra's forefeet he knew that the stallion was running
himself out. At that moment, to crown his bewilderment, Joseph turned,
laughing again in that soundless way. Only for a moment; then he turned,
and, leaning over the withers of his mount, the mare lengthened, it
seemed to Connor, and moved away.

Her hips went past him, then her tail, flying out straight behind, a
streak of silver; and last of all, there was the hiss of derision from
Joseph whistling back to him.

Connor threw himself back into the saddle and brought the stallion down
to a moderate pace. One hand was clutched at his throat, for it seemed
to him that his heart was beating there. Before him raced a vision of
Ben Connor, king of the racetracks of the world, with horses no
handicapper could measure.




_CHAPTER ELEVEN_


A Second thought made him lean a little, listening closely, and then he
discovered that after this terrific trial Abra was breathing deep and
free. Connor sat straight again and smiled. They must be close to the
lake he had seen from the mountain, for among the trees to his left was
a faint gleam of water. A moment later this glimmer went out, and the
hoofbeats of Abra were muffled on turf. They had left the road and
headed for a scattering of lights. Joseph had drawn the mare back to a
hand-gallop, and Abra followed the example; at this rocking gait they
swept through the grove between two long, low buildings, always
climbing, and came suddenly upon a larger house. On three sides Connor
looked down upon water; the building was behind him. Not a light showed
in it, but he made out the low, single story, the sense of weight, and
crude arches of the Mission style. Through an opening in the center of
the facade he looked into darkness which he knew must be the patio.

Following the example of Joseph, he dismounted, and while the big man,
with his waddling, difficult walk, disappeared into the court, Connor
stepped back and looked over Abra. Starlight was enough to see him by,
for he glimmered with running sweat even in the semidarkness, but it was
plain from his high head and inquisitive muzzle that he was neither
winded nor down-hearted. He followed Connor like a dog when the gambler
went in turn to the mare. She turned about nervously to watch the
newcomer. Not until Abra had touched noses with her and perhaps spoken
to her the dumb horse-talk would she allow Connor to come close, and
even then he could not see her as clearly as the stallion. By running
his finger-tips over her he discovered the reason--only on the flanks
and across the breast was she wet with perspiration, and barely moist on
the thighs and belly. The race had winded her no more than a six-furlong
canter.

He was still marveling at this discovery when Joseph appeared under the
arch carrying a lantern and beckoned him in, leading the way to a large
patio, surrounded by a continuous arcade. In the center a fountain was
alternately silver and shadow in the swinging lantern light. The floor
of the patio was close-shaven turf.

Joseph hung the lantern on the inside of one of the arches and turned to
Connor, apparently to invite him to take one of the chairs under the
arcade. Instead, he raised his hand to impose silence. Connor heard,
from some distance, a harsh sound of breathing of inconceivable
strength. For though it was plainly not close to them, he could mark
each intake and expulsion of breath. And the noise created for him the
picture of a monster.

"Let us go to the master," said Joseph, and turned straight across the
patio in the direction of that sonorous breathing.

Connor followed, by no means at ease. From the withered old men to huge
Joseph had been a long step. How far would be the reach between Joseph
himself and the omnipotent master?

He passed in the track of Joseph toward the rear of the patio. Presently
the big man halted, removed his hat, and faced a door beneath the
arcade. It was only a momentary interruption. He went on again at once,
replacing his hat, but the thrill of apprehension was still tingling in
the blood of the gambler. Now they went under the arcade, through an
open door, and issued in the rear of the house, Connor's imaginary
"monster" dissolved.

For they stood in front of a blacksmith shop, the side toward them being
entirely open so that Connor could see the whole of the interior. Two
sooty lanterns hung from the rafters, the light tangling among wreaths
of smoke above and showing below a man whose back was turned toward them
as he worked a great snoring bellows with one hand.

That bellows was the source of the mysterious breathing. Connor
chuckled; all mysteries dissolved as this had done the moment one
confronted them. He left off chuckling to admire the ease with which the
blacksmith handled the bellows. A massive angle of iron was buried in
the forge, the white flames spurting around it as the bellows blew,
casting the smith into high relief at every pulse of the fire. Sometimes
it ran on the great muscles of the arm that kept the bellows in play;
sometimes it ran a dazzling outline around his entire body, showing the
leather apron and the black hair which flooded down about his shoulders.

"Who--" began Connor.

"Hush," cautioned Joseph in a whisper. "David speaks when he
chooses--not sooner."

Here the smith laid hold on the iron with long pincers, and, raising it
from the coals, at once the shop burst with white light as David placed
the iron on the anvil and caught up a short-handled sledge. He whirled
it and brought it down with a clangor. The sparks spurted into the
night, dropping to the ground and turning red at the very feet of
Connor. Slowly David turned the iron, the steady shower of blows bending
it, changing it, molding it under the eye of the gambler. This was that
clangor which had floated through the clear mountain air to him when he
first gazed down on the valley; this was the bell-like murmur which had
washed down to him through the gates of the valley.

At least it was easy to understand why the servants feared him. A full
fourteen pounds was in the head of that sledge, Connor guessed, yet
David whirled it with a light and deft precision. Only the shuddering of
the anvil told the weight of those blows. Meantime, with every leap of
the spark-showers the gambler studied the face of the master. They were
features of strength rather than beauty from the frowning forehead to
the craggy jaw. A sort of fierce happiness lived in that face now, the
thought of the craftsman and the joy of the laborer in his strength.

As the white heat passed from the iron and it no longer flowed into a
shape so readily under the hammer of the smith, a change came in him.
Connor knew nothing of ironcraft, but he guessed shrewdly that another
man would have softened the metal with fire again at this point.
Instead, David chose to soften it with strength. The steady patter of
blows increased to a thundering rain as the iron turned a dark and
darker red.

The rhythm of the worker grew swifter, did not break, and Connor watched
with a keen eye of appreciation. Just as a great thoroughbred makes its
supreme effort in the stretch by a lengthening and slight quickening of
stride, but never a dropping into the choppy pace of unskilled labor at
speed, so the man at the anvil was now rocking steadily back and forth
from heel to toe, the knees unflexing a little as he struck and
stiffening as he swung up the hammer. The greater effort was told only
by the greater ring of the hammer face on the hardening iron--by that
and by the shudder of the arm of the smith as the fourteen pounds went
clanging home to the stroke.

And now the iron was quite dark--the smith stood with the ponderous
sledge poised above his head and turned the bar swiftly, with study, to
see that the angle was exactly what he wished. The hammer did not
descend again on the iron; the smith was content, and plunging the big
angle iron into the tempering tub, his burly shoulders were obscured for
a moment by a rising cloud of steam.

He stepped out of this and came directly to them. Now the lantern was
behind him, he was silhouetted in black, a mighty figure. He was panting
from his labor, and the heavy sound of his breathing disturbed the
gambler. He had expected to find a wise and simple old man in David.
Instead, he was face to face with a Hercules.

His attention was directed entirely to Joseph.

"I come from my work unclean," he said. "Joseph, take the stranger
within and wait."

Joseph led back into the patio to a plain wooden table beside which
Connor, at the gesture of invitation, sat down. Here Joseph left him
hurriedly, and the gambler looked about. The arcade was lightened by a
flagging of crystalline white stone, and the ceiling was inlaid with the
same material. But the arches and the wall of the building were of
common dobe, massive, but roughly built.

Beyond the fountain nodded like a ghost in the patio, and now and then,
when the lantern was swayed by the wind, the pool glinted and was black
again. The silence was beginning to make him feel more than ever like an
unwelcome guest when another old Negro came, and Connor noted with
growing wonder the third of these ancients. Each of them must have been
in youth a fine specimen of manhood. Even in white-headed age they
retained some of that noble countenance which remains to those who have
once been strong. This fellow bore a tray upon his arm, and in the free
hand carried a large yellow cloth of a coarse weave.

He placed on the table a wooden trencher with a great loaf of white
bread, a cone of clear honey, and an earthen pitcher of milk. Next he
put a wooden bowl on a chair beside Connor, and when the latter
obediently extended his hands, the old man poured warm water over them
and dried them with a napkin.

There was a ceremony about this that fitted perfectly with the
surroundings, and Connor became thoughtful. He was to tempt the master
with the wealth of the world, but what could he give the man to replace
his Homeric comfort?

In the midst of these reflections soft steps approached him, and he saw
the brown-faced David coming in a shapeless blouse and trousers of rough
cloth, with moccasins on his feet. Rising to meet his host, he was
surprised to find that David had no advantage in height and a small one
in breadth of shoulder; in the blacksmith shop he had seemed a giant.
The brown man stopped beside the table. He seemed to be around thirty,
but because of the unwrinkled forehead Connor decided that he was
probably five years older.

"I am David," he said, without offering his hand.

"I," said the gambler, "am Benjamin."

There was a flash that might have been either pleasure or suspicion in
the face of David.

"Joseph has told me what has passed between you," he said.

"I hope he's broken no law by letting me come in."

"My will is the law; in disregarding me he has broken a law."

He made a sign above his shoulder that brought Joseph hurrying out of
the gloom, his keen little eyes fastened upon the face of the master
with intolerable anxiety. There was another sign from David, and Joseph,
without a glance at Connor, snatched the ivory head out of his pocket,
thrust it upon the table, and stood back, watching the brown man with
fascination.

"You see," went on David, "that he returns to you the price which you
paid him. Therefore you have no longer a right to remain in the Garden
of Eden."

Connor flushed. "If this were a price," he answered, clinging as closely
as he could to language as simple and direct as that of David, "it could
be returned to me. But it is not a price. It is a gift, and gifts cannot
be returned."

He held out the ape-head, and when Joseph could see nothing save the
face of David, he pushed the trinket back toward the huge man.

"Then," said the brown man, "the fault which was small before is now
grown large."

He looked calmly upon Joseph, and the giant quailed. By the table hung a
gong on which the master tapped; one of the ancient servants appeared
instantly.

"Go to my room," said David, "and bring me the largest nugget from the
chest."

The old man disappeared, and while they waited for his return the little
bright eyes of Joseph went to and fro on the face of the master; but
David was staring into the darkness of the patio. The servant brought a
nugget of gold, as large as the doubled fist of a child, and the master
rolled it across the table to Connor.

A tenseness about his mouth told the gambler that much was staked on
this acceptance. He turned the nugget in his hand, noting the
discoloration of the ore from which it had been taken.

"It is a fine specimen," he said.

"You will see," said David, "both its size and weight."

And Connor knew; it was an exchange for the ivory head. He laid the
nugget carelessly back upon the table, thankful that the gift had been
offered with such suspicious bluntness.

"It is a fine specimen," he repeated, "but I am not collecting."

There was a heavy cloud on the face of David as he took up the nugget
and passed it into the hand of the waiting servant; but his glance was
for Joseph, not Connor.

Joseph burst into speech for the first time, and the words tumbled out.

"I do not want it. I shall not keep it. See, David; I give it up to
him!" He made a gesture with both hands as though he would push away the
ape-head forever.

The master looked earnestly at Connor.

"You hear?"

The latter shrugged his shoulders, saying: "I've never taken back a
gift, and I can't begin now."

Connor's heart was beating rapidly, from the excitement of the strange
interview and the sense of his narrow escape from banishment. Because he
had made the gift to Joseph he had an inalienable right, it seemed, to
expect some return from Joseph's master--even permission to stay in the
valley, if he insisted.

There was another of those uncomfortable pauses, with the master looking
sternly into the night.

"Zacharias," he said.

The servant stepped beside him.

"Bring the whip--and the cup."

The eyes of Zacharias rolled once toward Joseph and then he was gone,
running; he returned almost instantly with a seven foot blacksnake,
oiled until it glistened. He put it in the hand of David, but only when
Joseph stepped back, shuddering, and then turned and kneeled before
David, the significance of that whip came home to Connor, sickening him.
The whites of Joseph's eyes rolled at him and Connor stepped between
Joseph and the whip.

"Do you mean this?" he gasped. "Do you mean to say that you are going to
flog that poor fellow because he took a gift from me?"

"From you it was a gift," answered the master, perfectly calm, "but to
him it was a price. And to me it is a great trouble."

"God!" murmured Connor.

"Do you call on him?" asked the brown man severely. "He is only here in
so far as I am the agent of his justice. Yet I trust it is not more His
will than it is the will of David. Also, the heart of Joseph is stubborn
and must be humbled. Tears are the sign of contrition, and the whip
shall not cease to fall until Joseph weeps."

His glance pushed Connor back; the gambler saw the lash whirled, and he
turned his back sharply before it fell. Even so, the impact of the lash
on flesh cut into Connor, for he had only to take back the gift to end
the flogging. He set his teeth. Could he give up his only hold on David
and the Eden Grays? By the whizzing of the lash he knew that it was laid
on with the full strength of that muscular arm. Now a horrible murmur
from the throat of Joseph forced him to turn against his will.

The face of David was filled, not with anger, but with cruel disdain;
under his flying lash the welts leaped up on the back of Joseph, but he,
with his eyes shut and his head strained far back, endured. Only through
his teeth, each time he drew breath, came that stifled moan, and he
shuddered at each impact of the whip. Now his eyes opened, and through
the mist of pain a brutal hatred glimmered at Connor. That flare of rage
seemed to sap the last of his strength, for now his face convulsed,
tears flooded down, and his head dropped. Instantly the hand of David
paused.

Something had snapped in Connor at the same time that the head of Joseph
fell, and while he wiped the wet from his face he only vaguely saw
Joseph hurry down the corridor, with Zacharias carrying the whip behind.

But the master? There was neither cruelty nor anger in his face as he
turned to the table and filled with milk the wooden cup which Zacharias
had brought.

"This is my prayer," he said quietly, "that in the justice of David
there may never be the poison of David's wrath." 79

He drained the cup, broke a morsel of bread from the loaf and ate it.
Next he filled the second cup and handed it to the gambler.

"Drink."

Automatically Connor obeyed.

"Eat."

In turn he tasted the bread.

"And now," said the master, in the deep, calm voice, "you have drunk
with David in his house, and he has broken bread with you. Hereafter may
there be peace and good will between us. You have given a free gift to
one of my people, and he who gives clothes to David's people keeps David
from the shame of nakedness; and he who puts bread in the mouths of
David's servants feeds David himself. Stay with me, therefore, Benjamin,
until you find in the Garden the thing you desire, then take it and go
your way. But until that time, what is David's is Benjamin's; your will
be my will, and my way be your way."

He paused.

"And now, Benjamin, you are weary?"

"Very tired."

"Follow me."

It seemed well to Connor to remove himself from the eye of the master as
soon as possible. Not that the host showed signs of anger, but just as
one looks at a clear sky and forebodes hard weather because of misty
horizons, so the gambler guessed the frown behind David's eyes. He was
glad to turn into the door which was opened for him. But even though he
guessed the danger, Connor could not refrain from tempting Providence
with a speech of double meaning.

"You are very kind," he said. "Good night, David."

"May God keep you until the morning, Benjamin."




_CHAPTER TWELVE_


From the house of David, Joseph skulked down the terraces until he came
to the two long buildings and entered the smaller of these. He crossed a
patio, smaller than the court of David's house; but there, too, was the
fountain in the center and the cool flooring of turf. Across this, and
running under the dimly lighted arcade, Joseph reached a door which he
tore open, slammed behind him again, and with his great head fallen upon
his chest, stared at a little withered Negro who sat on a stool opposite
the door. It was rather a low bench of wood than a stool; for it stood
not more than six inches above the level of the floor. His shoes off,
and his bare feet tucked under his legs, he sat tailorwise and peered up
at the giant. The sudden opening of the door had set his loose blouse
fluttering about the old man's skeleton body. The sleeves fell back from
bony forearms with puckered skin. He was less a man than a receptacle of
time. His temples sank in like the temples of a very old horse; his
toothless mouth was crushed together by the pressure of the long bony
jaw, below which the skin hung in a flap. But the fire still glimmered
in the hollows of his eyes. A cheerful spirit lived in the grasshopper
body. He was knitting with a pair of slender needles, never looking at
his work, nor during the interview with Joseph did he once slacken his
pace. The needles clicked with such swift precision that the work grew
perceptibly, flowing slowly under his hands.

Meanwhile this death's head looked at the giant so steadily that Joseph
seemed to regret his unceremonious entrance. He stood back against the
door, fumbling its knob for a moment, but then his rage mastered him
once more, and he burst into the tale of Connor's coming and the ivory
head. He brought his story to an end by depositing the trinket before
the ancient man and then stood back, his face still working, and waited
with every show of confident curiosity.

As for the antique, his knitting needles continued to fly, but to view
the little carving more closely he craned his skinny neck. At that
moment, with his fallen features, his fleshless nose, he was a grinning
mummy head. He remained gloating over the little image so long that
Joseph stirred uneasily; but finally the grotesque lifted his head. It
at once fell far back, the neck muscles apparently unable to support its
weight. He looked more at the ceiling than at Joseph. His speech was a
writhing of the lips and the voice a hollow murmur.

"This," he said, "is the face of a great suhman. It is the face of the
great suhman, Haneemar. It was many years ago that I knew him. It was a
time so long ago that I do not know how to tell you. It was before your
birth and the birth of your father. It was when I lived in a green
country where the air is thick and sweet and the sun burns. There I knew
Haneemar. He is a strong suhman. You see, his eyes are green; that is
because he has the strength of the great snake that ties its tail around
a branch and hangs down with its head as high as the breast of a man.
Those snakes kill an antelope and eat it at a mouthful. Their eyes are
green and so are the eyes of Haneemar. And you see that Haneemar has
golden teeth. That is because he has eaten wisdom. He knows the meat of
all things like a nut he can crack between his teeth. He is as strong as
the snake which eats monkeys, and he is as wise as the monkeys that run
from the snake and throw sticks from the tops of the trees. That is
Haneemar.

"There is no luck for the man who carries the face of Haneemar with him.
That is why David used the whip. He knew Haneemar. Also, in the other
days I remember that when a child was sick in the village they tied a
goat in the forest and Haneemar came and ate the goat. If he ate the
goat like a lion and left tooth marks on the bones then the child got
well and lived. If he ate the goat like a panther and left the guts the
child died. But if the goat was not eaten for one day then Haneemar came
and ate the child instead. I remember this. There will be no luck for
you while you carry Haneemar."

The big man had heard this speech with eyes that grew rounder and
rounder. Now he caught up the little image and raised his arm to throw
it through the window. But the old man hissed, and Joseph turned with a
shudder.

"You cannot throw Haneemar away," said the other. "Only when some one
takes him freely will you be rid of him."

"It is true," answered Joseph. "I remember the visitor would not take
him back."

"Then," said the old sage, "if the stranger will not take him back, bad
luck has come into the Garden, for only the stranger would carry
Haneemar out again. But do not give Haneemar to one of our friends, for
then he will stay with us all. If you dig a deep hole and bury him in
it, Haneemar may not be able to get out."

Joseph was beginning to swell with wrath.

"The stranger has put a curse on me," he said. "Abraham, what shall I do
to him? Teach me a curse to put on him!"

"Hush!" answered Abraham. "Those who pray to evil spirits are the slaves
of the powers they pray to."

"Then I shall take this Benjamin in my hands!"

He made a gesture as though he were snapping a stick of dry wood.

"You are the greater fool. Is not this Benjamin, this stranger, a guest
of the master?"

"I shall steal him away by night in such a manner that he shall not make
even the noise of a mouse when the cat breaks its back. I shall steal
him away and David will never know."

The loose eyelids of the old man puckered and his glance became a ray of
light.

"The curse already works; Haneemar already is in your mind, Joseph.
David will not know? Child, there is nothing that he does not know. He
uses us. We are his tools. My mind is to him as my hand is to me. He
comes inside my eyes; he knows what I think. And if old Abraham is
nothing before David, what is Joseph? Hush! Let not a whisper go out! Do
not even dare to think it. You have felt the whip of David, but you have
not felt his hand when he is in anger. A wounded mountain lion is not so
terrible as the rage of David; he would be to you as an ax at the root
of a sapling. These things have happened before. I remember. Did not
Boram once anger John? And was not Boram as great as Joseph? And did not
John take Boram in his hands and conquer him and break him? Yes, and
David is a greater body and a stronger hand than John. Also, his anger
is as free as the running of an untaught colt. Remember, my son!"

Joseph stretched out his enormous arms and his voice was a broken wail.

"Oh, Abraham, Abraham, what shall I do?"

"Wait," said the old man quietly. "For waiting makes the spirit strong.
Look at Abraham! His body has been dead these twenty years, but still
his spirit lives."

"But the curse of Haneemar, Abraham?"

"Haneemar is patient. Let Joseph be patient also."




_CHAPTER THIRTEEN_


Connor wakened in the gray hour of the morning, but beyond the window
the world was much brighter than his room. The pale terraces went down
to scattered trees, and beyond the trees was the water of the lake.
Farther still the mountains rolled up into a brighter morning. A horse
neighed out of the dawn; the sound came ringing to Connor, and he was
suddenly eager to be outside.

In the patio the fountain was still playing. As for the house, he found
it far less imposing than it had been when lantern light picked out
details here and there. The walls and the clumsy arches were the
disagreeable color of dried mud and all under the arcade was dismal
shadow. But the lawn was already a faintly shining green, and the
fountain went up above the ground shadow in a column of light. He passed
on. The outside wall had that squat, crumbling appearance which every
one knows who has been in Mexico--and through an avenue of trees he saw
the two buildings between which he had ridden the night before. From the
longer a man was leading one of the gray horses. This, then, was the
stable; the building opposite it was a duplicate on a smaller scale of
the house of David, and must be the servants' quarters.

Connor went on toward a hilltop which alone topped the site of the
master's house; the crest was naked of trees, and over the tops of the
surrounding ones Connor found that he commanded a complete view of the
valley. The day before, looking from the far-off mountaintop, it had
seemed to be a straight line very nearly, from the north to the south;
now he saw that from the center both ends swung westward. The valley
might be twelve miles long, and two or three wide, fenced by an unbroken
wall of cliffs. Over the northern barrier poured a white line of water,
which ran on through the valley in a river that widened above David's
house into a spacious lake three or four miles long. The river began
again from the end of the lake and continued straight to the base of the
southern cliffs. Roads followed the swing of the river closely on each
side, and the stream was bridged at each end of the lake. His angle of
vision was so small that both extremities of the valley seemed a solid
forest, but in the central portion he made out broad meadow lands and
plowed fields checkering the groves. The house, as he had guessed the
evening before, stood into the lake on a slender peninsula. And due west
a narrow slit of light told of the gate into the Garden. It gave him a
curiously confused emotion, as of a prisoner and spy in one.

He had walked back almost to the edge of the clearing when David, from
the other side went up to the crest of the hill. Connor was already
among the trees and he watched unobserved. The master of the Garden, at
the top of the hill, paused and turned toward Connor. The gambler
flushed; he was about to step out and hail his host when a second
thought assured him that he could not have been noticed behind that
screen of shrubbery and trunks; moreover the glance of David Eden passed
high above him. It might have been the cry of a hawk that made him turn
so sharply; but through several minutes he remained without moving
either hand or head, and as though he were waiting. Even in the distance
Connor marked the smile of happy expectation. If it had been another
place and another man Connor would have thought it a lover waiting for
his mistress.

But, above all, he was glad of the opportunity to see David and remain
unseen. He realized that the evening before it had been difficult to
look directly into David's face. He had carried away little more than
impressions; of strength, dignity, a surface calm and strong passions
under it; but now he was able to see the face. It was full of
contradiction; a profile irregular and deeply cut, but the full face had
a touch of nobility that made it almost handsome.

As he watched, Connor thought he detected a growing excitement in
David--his head was raised, his smile had deepened. Perhaps he came here
to rejoice in his possessions; but a moment later Connor realized that
this could not be the case, for the gaze of the other must be fixed as
high as the mountain peaks.

At that instant came the revelation; there was a stiffening of the whole
body of David; his breast filled and he swayed forward and raised almost
on tiptoe. Connor, by sympathy, grew tense--and then the miracle
happened. Over the face of David fell a sudden radiance. His hair, dull
black the moment before, now glistened with light, and the swarthy skin
became a shining bronze; his lips parted as though he drank in strength
and happiness out of that miraculous light.

The hard-headed Connor was staggered. Back on his mind rushed a score of
details, the background of this picture. He remembered the almost
superhuman strength of Joseph; he saw again the old servants withering
with many years, but still bright-eyed, straight and agile. Perhaps
they, too, knew how to stand here and drink in a mysterious light which
filled their outworn bodies with youth of the spirit, at least. And
David? Was not this the reason that he scorned the world? Here was his
treasure past reckoning, this fountain of youth. Here was the
explanation, too, of that intolerable brightness of his eye.

The gambler bowed his head.

When he looked up again his soul had traveled higher and lower in one
instant than it had ever moved before; he was staring like a child.
Above all, he wanted to see the face of David again, to examine that
mysterious change, but the master was already walking down the hill and
had almost reached the circle of the trees on the opposite side of the
slope. But now Connor noted a difference everywhere surrounding him. The
air was warmer; the wind seemed to have changed its fiber; and then he
saw that the treetops opposite him were shaking and glistening in a
glory of light. Connor went limp and leaned against a tree, laughing
weakly, silently.

"Hell," he said at length, recovering himself. "It was only the sunrise!
And me--I thought--"

He began to laugh again, aloud, and the sound was caught up by the
hillside and thrown back at him in a sharp echo. Connor went
thoughtfully back to the house. In the patio he found the table near the
fountain laid with a cloth, the wood scrubbed white, and on it the heavy
earthenware. David Eden came in with the calm, the same eye, difficult
to meet. Indeed, then and thereafter when he was with David, he found
himself continually looking away, and resorting to little maneuvers to
divert the glance of his host.

"Good morrow," said David.

"I have kept you waiting?" asked Connor.

The master paused to make sure that he had understood the speech, then
replied:

"If I had been hungry I should have eaten."

There was no rebuff in that quiet statement, but it opened another door
to Connor's understanding.

"Take this chair," said David, moving it from the end of the table to
the side. "Sitting here you can look through the gate of the patio and
down to the lake. It is not pleasant to have four walls about one; but
that is a thing which Isaac cannot understand."

The gambler nodded, and to show that he could be as unceremonious as his
host, sat down without further words. He immediately felt awkward, for
David remained standing. He broke a morsel from the loaf of bread, which
was yet the only food on the table, and turned to the East with a solemn
face.

"Out of His hands from whom I take this food," said the master--"into
His hands I give myself."

He sat down in turn, and Isaac came instantly with the breakfast. It was
an astonishing menu to one accustomed to toast and coffee for the
morning meal. On a great wooden platter which occupied half the surface
of the table, Isaac put down two chickens, roasted brown. A horn-handled
hunting knife, razor sharp, was the only implement at each place, and
fingers must serve as forks. To David that was a small impediment. Under
the deft edge of his knife the breast of one chicken divided rapidly; he
ate the white slices like bread. Indeed, the example was easy to follow;
the mountain air had given him a vigorous appetite, and when Connor next
looked up it was at the sound of glass tinkling. He saw Isaac holding
toward the master a bucket of water in which a bottle was immersed
almost to the cork; David tried the temperature of the water with his
fingers with a critical air, and then nodded to Isaac, who instantly
drew the cork. A moment later red wine was trickling into Connor's cup.
He viewed it with grateful astonishment, but David, poising his cup,
looked across at his guest with a puzzled air.

"In the old days," he said gravely, "when my masters drank they spoke to
one another in a kindly fashion. It is now five years since a man has
sat at my table, and I am moved to say this to you, Benjamin: it is
pleasant to speak to another not as a master who must be obeyed, but as
an equal who may be answered, and this is my wish, that if I have doubts
of Benjamin, and unfriendly thoughts, they may disappear with the wine
we drink."

"Thank you," said Connor, and a thrill went through him as he met the
eye of David. "That wish is my wish also--and long life to you, David."

There was a glint of pleasure in the face of David, and they drank
together.

"By Heaven," cried Connor, putting down the cup, "it is Medoc! It is
Chateau Lafite, upon my life!"

He tasted it again.

"And the vintage of '96! Is that true?"

David shook his head.

"I have never heard of Medoc or Chateau Lafite."

"At least," said Connor, raising his cup and breathing the delicate
bouquet, "this wine is Bordeaux you imported from France? The grapes
which made this never grew outside of the Gironde!"

But David smiled.

"In the north of the Garden," he said, "there are some low rolling
hills, Benjamin; and there the grapes grow from which we make this
wine."

Connor tasted the claret again. His respect for David had suddenly
mounted; the hermit seemed nearer to him.

"You grew these grapes in your valley?" he repeated softly.

"This very bottle we are drinking," said David, warming to the talk. "I
remember when the grapes of this vintage were picked; I was a boy,
then."

"I believe it," answered Connor solemnly, and he raised the cup with a
reverent hand, so that the sun filtered into the red and filled the
liquid with dancing points of light.

"It is a full twenty years old."

"It is twenty-five years old," said David calmly, "and this is the best
vintage in ten years." He sighed. "It is now in its perfect prime and
next year it will not be the same. You shall help me finish the stock,
Benjamin."

"You need not urge me," smiled Connor.

He shook his head again.

"But that is one wine I could have vowed I knew--Medoc. At least, I can
tell you the soil it grows in."

The brows of the host raised; he began to listen intently.

"It is a mixture of gravel, quartz and sand," continued Connor.

"True!" exclaimed David, and looked at his guest with new eyes.

"And two feet underneath there is a stone for subsoil which is a sort of
sand or fine gravel cemented together."

David struck his hands together, frankly delighted.

"This is marvelous," he said, "I would say you have seen the hills."

"I paid a price for what I know," said Connor rather gloomily. "But
north of Bordeaux in France there is a strip of land called the
Medoc--the finest wine soil in the world, and there I learned what
claret may be--there I tasted Chateau Lafite and Chateau Datour. They
are both grown in the commune of Pauillac."

"France?" echoed David, with the misty eyes of one who speaks of a lost
world. "Ah, you have traveled?"

"Wherever fine horses race," said Connor, and turned back to the
chicken.

"Think," said David suddenly, "for five years I have lived in silence.
There have been voices about me, but never mind; and now you here, and
already you have taken me at a step halfway around the world.

"Ah, Benjamin, it is possible for an emptiness to be in a manlike
hunger, you understand, and yet different--and nothing but a human voice
can fill the space."

"Have you no wish to leave your valley for a little while and see the
world?" said Connor, carelessly.

He watched gloomily, while an expression of strong distaste grew on the
face of David. He was still frowning when he answered:

"We will not speak of it again."

He jerked his head up and cleared away his frown with an effort.

"To speak with one man in the Garden--that is one thing," he
went on, "but to hear the voices of two jabbering and gibbering
together--grinning like mindless creatures--throwing their hands out to
help their words, as poor Joseph does--bah, it is like drinking new
wine; it makes one sick. It made me so five times."

"Five times?" said Connor. "You have traveled a good deal, then?"

"Too much," sighed David. "And each time I returned from Parkin Crossing
I have cared less for what lies outside the valley."

"Parkin Crossing?"

"I have been told that there are five hundred people in the city," said
David, pronouncing the number slowly. "But when I was there, I was never
able to count more than fifty, I believe."

Connor found it necessary to cough.

"And each time you have left the valley you have gone no farther than
Parkin Crossing?" he asked mildly, his spirits rising.

"And is not that far enough?" replied the master, frowning. "It is a
ride between dawn and dark."

"What is that in miles?"

"A hundred and thirty miles," said David, "or thereabout."

Connor closed his eyes twice and then: "You rode that distance between
dawn and dark?"

"Yes."

"Over these mountains most of the way?" he continued gently.

"About half the distance," answered David.

"And how long"--queried Connor hoarsely--"how long before your horse was
able to make the trip back after you had ridden a hundred and thirty
miles in twelve hours?"

"The next day," said David, "I always return."

"In the same time?"

"In the same time," said David.

To doubt that simple voice was impossible. But Connor knew horses, and
his credence was strained to the breaking point.

"I should like very much," he said, "to see a horse that had covered two
hundred and sixty miles within forty-eight hours."

"Thirty-six," corrected David.

Connor swallowed.

"Thirty-six," he murmured faintly.

"I shall send for him," said the master, and struck the little gong
which stood on one side of the table. Isaac came hurrying with that
light step which made Connor forget his age.

"Bring Glani," said David.

Isaac hurried across the patio, and David continued talking to his
guest.

"Glani is not friendly; but you can see him from a distance."

"And yet," said Connor, "the other horses in the Garden seem as friendly
as pet dogs. Is Glani naturally vicious?"

"His is of other blood," replied David. "He is the blood of the great
mare Rustir, and all in her line are meant for one man only. He is more
proud than all the rest."

He leaned back in his chair and his face, naturally stern, grew tender.

"Since he was foaled no hand has touched him except mine; no other has
ridden him, groomed him, fed him."

"I'll be glad to see him," said Connor quietly. "For I have never yet
found a horse which would not come to my hand."

As he spoke, he looked straight into the eyes of David, with an effort,
and at the same time took from the pocket of his coat a little bulbous
root which was always with him. A Viennese who came from a life half
spent in the Orient had given him a small box of those herbs as a
priceless present. For the secret was that when the root was rubbed over
the hands it left a faint odor on the skin, like freshly cut apples; and
to a horse that perfume was irresistible. They seemed to find in it a
picture of sweet clover, blossoming, and clean oats finely headed; yet
to the nostrils of a man the scent was barely perceptible. Under cover
of the table the gambler rubbed his hands swiftly with the little root
and dropped it back into his pocket. That was the secret of the power
over Abra which had astonished the two old men at the gate. A hundred
times, in stable and paddock, Connor had gone up to the most intractable
race horses and looked them over at close hand, at his leisure. The
master seemed in nowise disturbed by the last remark of Connor.

"That is true of old Abraham, also," he said. "There was never a colt
foaled in the valley which Abraham had not been able to call away from
its mother; he can read the souls of them all with a touch of his
withered hands. Yes, I have seen that twenty times. But with Glani it is
different. He is as proud as a man; he is fierce as a wolf; and Abraham
himself cannot touch the neck of my horse. Look!"




_CHAPTER FOURTEEN_


Under the arch of the entrance Connor saw a gray stallion, naked of
halter or rope, with his head raised. From the shadow he came shining
into the sunlight; the wind raised his mane and tail in ripples of
silver. Ben Connor rose slowly from his chair. Horses were religion to
him; he felt now that he had stepped into the inner shrine.

When he was able to speak he turned slowly toward David. "Sir," he said
hoarsely, "that is the greatest horse ever bred."

It was far more than a word of praise; it was a confession of faith
which surrounded the moment and the stallion with solemnity, and David
flushed like a proud boy.

"There he stands," he said. "Now make him come to your hand."

It recalled Connor to his senses, that challenge, and feeling that his
mind had been snatched away from him for a moment, almost that he had
been betrayed, he looked at David with a pale face.

"He is too far away," he said. "Bring him closer."

There was one of those pauses which often come before crises, and Connor
knew that by the outcome of this test he would be judged either a man
or a cheap boaster.

"I shall do this thing," said the master of the Garden of Eden. "If you
bring Glani to your hand I shall give him to you to ride while you stay
in the valley. Listen! No other man had so much as laid a hand on the
withers of Glani, but if you can make him come to you of his own free
will--"

"No," said Connor calmly. "I shall make him come because my will is
stronger than his."

"Impossible!" burst out David.

He controlled himself and looked at Connor with an almost wistful
defiance.

"I hold to this," he said. "If you can bring Glani to your hand, he is
yours while you stay in the Garden--for my part, I shall find another
mount."

Connor slipped his right hand into his pocket and crushed the little
root against the palm.

"Come hither, Glani," commanded the master. The stallion came up behind
David's chair, looking fearlessly at the stranger.

"Now," said David with scorn. "This is your time."

"I accept it," replied Connor.

He drew his hand from his pocket, and leaning over the table, he looked
straight into the eye of the stallion. But in reality, it was only to
bring that right hand closer; the wind was stirring behind him, and he
knew that it wafted the scent of the mysterious root straight to Glani.

"That is impossible," said David, following the glance of Connor with a
frown. "A horse has no reasoning brain. Silence cannot make him come to
you."

"However," said Connor carelessly, "I shall not speak."

The master set his teeth over unuttered words, and glancing up to
reassure himself, his face altered swiftly, and he whispered:

"Now, you four dead masters, bear witness to this marvel! Glani feels
the influence!"

For the head of Glani had raised as he scented the wind. Then he circled
the table and came straight toward Connor. Within a pace, the scent of
strange humanity must have drowned the perfume of the root; he sprang
away, catlike and snorted his suspicion.

David heaved a great sigh of relief.

"You fail!" he cried, and snatching up a bottle of wine, he poured out a
cup. "Brave Glani! I drink this in your honor!"

Every muscle in David's strong body was quivering, as though he were
throwing all the effort of his will on the side of the stallion.

"You think I have failed?" asked Connor softly.

"Admit it," said David.

His flush was gone and he was paler than Connor now; he seemed to desire
with all his might that the test should end; there was a fiber of
entreaty in his voice.

"Admit it, Benjamin, as I admit your strange power."

"I have hardly begun. Give me quiet."

David flung himself into his chair, his attention jerking from Glani to
Connor and back. It was at this critical moment that a faint breeze
puffed across the patio, carrying the imperceptible fragrance of the
root straight to Glani. Connor watched the stallion prick his ears, and
he blessed the quaint old Viennese with all his heart.

The first approach of Glani had been in the nature of a feint, but now
that he was sure, he went with all the directness of unspoiled courage
straight to the stranger. He lowered the beautiful head and thrust out
his nose until it touched the hand of Connor. The gambler saw David
shudder.

"You have conquered," he said, forcing out the words.

"Take Glani; to me he is now a small thing. He is yours while you stay
in the Garden. Afterward I shall give him to one of my servants."

Connor stood up, and though at his rising Glani started back, he came to
Connor again, following that elusive scent. To David it seemed the last
struggle of the horse before completely submitting to the rule of a new
master. He rose in turn, trembling with shame and anger, while Connor
stood still, for about this stranger drifted a perfume of broad green
fields with flowering tufts of grass, the heads well-seeded and sweet.
And when a hand touched his withers, the stallion merely turned his head
and nuzzled the shoulder of Connor inquisitively.

With his hand on the back of the horse, the gambler realized for the
first time Glani's full stature. He stood at least fifteen-three, though
his perfect proportions made him seem smaller at a distance. No doubt he
was a giant among the Eden Grays, Connor thought to himself. The gallop
on Abra the night before had been a great moment, but a ride on Glani
was a prospect that took his breath. He paused. Perhaps it was the
influence of a forgotten Puritan ancestor, casting a shade on every hope
of happiness. With his weight poised for the leap to the back of the
stallion, Connor looked at David. The master was in a silent agony, and
the hand of Connor fell away from the horse. He was afraid.

"I can't do it," he said frankly.

"Jump on his back," urged David bitterly. "He's no more to you than a
yearling to the hands of Abraham."

Connor realized now how far he had gone; he set about retracing the
wrong steps.

"It may appear that way, but I can't trust myself on his back. You
understand?"

He stepped back with a gesture that sent Glani bounding away.

"You see," went on Connor, "I never could really understand him."

The master seized with eagerness upon this gratifying suggestion.

"It is true," he said, "that you are a little afraid of Glani. That is
why none of the rest can handle him."

He stopped in the midst of his self-congratulation and directed at
Connor one of those glances which the gambler could never learn to meet.

"Also," said David, "you make me happy. If you had sat on his back I
should have felt your weight on my own shoulders and spirit."

He laid a hand on Connor's shoulder, but the gambler had won and lost
too often with an impenetrable face to quail now. He even managed to
smile.

"Hearken," said David. "My masters taught me many things, and everything
they taught me must be true, for they were only voices of a mind out of
another world. Yet, in spite of them," he went on kindly, "I begin to
feel a kinship with you, Benjamin. Come, we will walk and talk together
in the cool of the morning. Glani!"

The gray had wandered off to nibble at the turf; he whirled and came
like a thrown lance.

"Glani," said David, "is usually the only living thing that walks with
me in the morning; but now, my friend, we are three."




_CHAPTER FIFTEEN_


In the mid-afternoon of that day Connor rested in his room, and David
rested in the lake, floating with only his nose and lips out of water.
Toward the center of the lake even the surface held the chill of the
snows, but David floated in the warm shallows and looked up to the sky
through a film of water. The tiny ripples became immense air waves that
rushed from mountain to mountain, dashed the clouds up and down, and
then left the heavens placid and windless.

He grew weary of this placidity, and as he turned upon one side he heard
a prolonged hiss from the shore. David rolled with the speed of a water
moccasin and headed in with his arm flashing in a powerful stroke that
presently brought him to the edge of the beach. He rose in front of old
Abraham.

A painter should have seen them together--the time-dried body of the old
man and the exuberant youth of the master. He looked on the servant with
a stern kindness.

"What are you doing here without a covering for your head while the sun
is hot? Did they let you come of their own accord, Abraham?"

"I slipped away," chuckled Abraham. "Isaac was in the patio, but I went
by him like a hawk-shadow. Then I ran among the trees. Hat? Well, no
more have you a hat, David."

The master frowned, but his displeasure passed quickly and he led the
way to the lowest terrace. They sat on the soft thick grass, with their
feet in the hot sand of the beach, and as the wind stirred the tree
above them a mottling of shadow moved across them.

"You have come to speak privately with me," said David. "What is it?"

But Abraham embraced his skinny knees and smiled at the lake, his jaw
falling.

"It's not what it was," he said, and wagged his head. "It's a sad lake
compared to what it was."

David controlled his impatience.

"Tell me how it is changed."

"The color," said the old man. "Why, once, with a gallon of that blue
you could have painted the whole sky." He shaded his face to look up,
but so doing his glance ventured through the branches and close to the
white-hot circle of the sun. His head dropped and he leaned on one arm.

"Look at the green of the grass," suggested David. "It will rest your
eyes."

"Do you think my eyes are weak? No, I dropped my head to think how the
world has fallen off in the last fifty years. It was all different in
the days of John. But that was before you came to the valley."

"The sky was not the same?" queried the master.

"And men, also," said Abraham instantly. "Ho, yes! John was a man; you
will not see his like in these days."

David flushed, but he held back his first answer. "Perhaps."

"There is no 'perhaps.'"

Abraham spoke with a decision that brought his jaw close up under his
nose.

"He is my master," insisted Abraham, and, smiling suddenly, he
whispered: "Mah ol' Marse Johnnie Cracken!"

"What's that?" called David.

Abraham stared at him with unseeing eyes. A mist of years drifted
between them, and now the old man came slowly out of the past and found
himself seated on the lawn in a lonely valley with great, naked
mountains piled around it.

"What did you say?" repeated David.

Abraham hastily changed the subject.

"In those days if a stranger came to the Garden of Eden he did not stay.
Aye, and in those days Abraham could have taken the strongest by the
neck and pitched him through the gates. I remember when the men came
over the mountains--long before you were born. Ten men at the gate, I
remember, and they had guns. But when my master told them to go away
they looked at him and they looked at each other, but after a while they
went away."

Abraham rocked in an ecstasy.

"No man could face my master. I remember how he sat on his horse that
day."

"It was Rustir?" asked David eagerly.

"She was the queen of horses," replied the old man indirectly, "and he
was the king of men; there are no more men like my master, and there are
no more horses like Rustir."

There was a pause, then David spoke.

"John was a good man and a strong man," he said, looking down at his own
brown hands. "And Rustir was a fine mare, but it is foolish to call her
the best."

"There was never a horse like Rustir," said the old man monotonously.

"Bah! What of Glani?"

"Yes, that is a good colt."

"A good colt! Come, Abraham! Have you ever opened your dim eyes and
really looked at him? Name one fault."

"I have said Glani is a good colt," repeated Abraham, worried.

"Come, come! You have said Rustir was better."

"Glani is a good colt, but too heavy in the forehand. Far too heavy
there."

The restraint of David snapped.

"It is false! Ephraim, Jacob, they all say that Glani is the greatest."

"They change like the masters," grumbled Abraham. "The servants change.
They flatter and the master believes. But my master had an eye--he
looked through a man like an eagle through mist. When I stood before my
master my soul was naked; a wind blew through me. But I say John was one
man; and there are no other horses like his mare Rustir. My master is
silent; other men have words as heavy as their hands."

"Peace, Abraham, peace. You shame me. The Lord was far from me, and I
spoke in anger, and I retract it."

"A word is a bullet that strikes men down, David. Let the wind blow on
your face when your heart is hot."

"I confess my sin," said David, but his jaw was set.

"Confess your sins in silence."

"It is true."

He looked at Abraham as if he would be rid of him.

"You are angry to-day, Abraham."

"The law of the Garden has been broken."

"By whom?"

"David has unbarred the gate."

"Yes, to one man."

"It is enough."

"Peace, Abraham. You are old and look awry. This one man is no danger. I
could break him in my hands--so!"

"A strong man may be hopeless against words," said the oracular old man.
"With a word he may set you on fire."

"Do you think me a tinder and dry grass? Set me on fire with a word?"

"An old man who looks awry had done it with a word. And see--again!"

There was a silence filled only by the sound of David's breathing and
the slow curling of the ripples on the beach.

"You try me sorely, Abraham."

"Good steel will bend, but not break."

"Say no more of this man. He is harmless."

"Is that a command, David?"

"No--but at least be brief."

"Then I say to you, David, that he has brought evil into the valley."

The master burst into sudden laughter that carried away his anger.

"He brought no evil, Abraham. He brought only the clothes on his back."

"The serpent brought into the first Garden only his skin and his forked
tongue."

"There was a devil in that serpent."

"Aye, and what of Benjamin?"

"Tell me your proofs, and let them be good ones, Abraham."

"I am old," said Abraham sadly, "but I am not afraid."

"I wait."

"Benjamin brought an evil image with him. It is the face of a great
suhman, and he tempted Joseph with it, and Joseph fell."

"The trinket of carved bone?" asked David.

"The face of a devil! Who was unhappy among us until Benjamin came? But
with his charm he bought Joseph, and now Joseph walks alone and thinks
unholy thoughts, and when he is spoken to he looks up first with a
snake's eye before he answers. Is not this the work of Benjamin?"

"What would you have me do? Joseph has already paid for his fault with
the pain of the whip."

"Cast out the stranger, David."

David mused. At last he spoke. "Look at me, Abraham!"

The other raised his head and peered into the face of David, but
presently his glance wavered and turned away.

"See," said David. "After Matthew died there was no one in the Garden
who could meet my glance. But Benjamin meets my eye and I feel his
thoughts before he speaks them. He is pleasant to me, Abraham."

"The voice of the serpent was pleasant to Eve," said Abraham.

The nostrils of David quivered.

"What is it that you call the trinket?"

"A great suhman. My people feared and worshiped him in the old days. A
strong devil!"

"An idol!" said David. "What! Abraham, do you still worship sticks and
stones? Have you been taught no more than that? Do you put a mind in the
handiwork of a man?"

The head of Abraham fell.

"I am weak before you, David," he said. "I have no power to speak except
the words of my master, which I remember. Now I feel you rise against
me, and I am dust under your feet. Think of Abraham, then, as a voice in
the wind, but hear that voice. I know, but I know not why I know, or how
I know, there is evil in the valley, David. Cast it out!"

"I have broken bread and drunk milk with Benjamin. How can I drive him
out of the valley?"

"Let him stay in the valley if you can keep him out of your mind. He is
in your thoughts. He is with you like a shadow."

"He is not stronger than I," said the master.

"Evil is stronger than the greatest."

"It is cowardly to shrink from him before I know him."

"Have no fear of him--but of yourself. A wise man trembleth at his own
strength."

"Tell me, Abraham--does the seed of Rustir know men? Do they know good
and evil?"

"Yes, for Rustir knew my master."

"And has Glani ever bowed his head for any man saving for me?"

"He is a stubborn colt. Aye, he troubled me!"

"But I tell you, Abraham, he came to the hand of Benjamin!"

The old man blinked at the master.

"Then there was something in that hand," he said at last.

"There was nothing," said David in triumph. "I saw the bare palm."

"It is strange."

"You are wrong. Admit it."

"I must think, David."

"Yes," said the master kindly. "Here is my hand. Rise, and come with me
to your house."

They went slowly, slowly up the terrace, Abraham clinging to the arm of
the master.

"Also," said David, "he has come for only a little time. He will soon be
gone. Speak no more of Benjamin."

"I have already spoken almost enough," said Abraham. "You will not
forget."




_CHAPTER SIXTEEN_


Although David was smiling when he left Abraham, he was serious when he
turned from the door of the old man. He went to Connor's room, it was
empty. He summoned Zacharias.

"The men beyond the mountains are weak," said David, "and when I left
him a little time since Benjamin was sighing and sleepy. But now he is
not in his room. Where is he, Zacharias?"

"Shakra came into the patio and neighed," Zacharias answered, "and at
that Benjamin came out, rubbing his eyes. 'My friend,' said he to me,
and his voice was smooth--not like those voices--"

"Peace, Zacharias," said David. "Leave this talk of his voice and tell
me where he is gone."

"Away from the house," said the old man sullenly.

The master knitted his brows.

"You old men," he said, "are like yearlings who feel the sap running in
their legs in the spring. You talk as they run--around and around.
Continue."

Zacharias sulked as if he were on the verge of not speaking at all. But
presently his eye lighted with his story.

"Benjamin," he went on, "said to me, 'My friend, that is a noble mare.'

"'She is a good filly,' said I.

"'With a hundred and ten up,' said Benjamin, 'she would make a fast
track talk.'"

"What?" said David.

"I do not know the meaning of his words," said the old servant, "but I
have told them as he said them."

"He is full of strange terms," murmured David. "Continue."

"He went first to one side of Shakra and then to the other. He put his
hand into his coat and seemed to think. Presently he stretched out his
hand and called her. She came to him slowly."

"Wonderful!"

"That was my thought," nodded Zacharias.

"Why do you stop?" cried David.

"Because I am talking around and around, like a running yearling," said
Zacharias ironically. "However, he stood back at length and combed the
forelock of Shakra with his fingers. 'Tell me, Zacharias,' he said, 'if
this is not the sister of Glani?'"

"He guessed so much? It is strange!"

"Then he looked in her mouth and said that she was four years old."

"He is wise in horses, indeed."

"When he turned away Shakra followed him; he went to his room and came
out again, carrying the saddle with which he rode Abra. He put this on
her back and a rope around her neck. 'Will the master be angry if I ride
her?' he asked.

"I told him that she was first ridden only three months before to-day,
and that she must not be ridden more than fifty miles now in a day.

"He looked a long time at me, then said he would not ride farther than
that. Then he went galloping down the road to the south."

"Good!" said the master, and sent a long whistle from the patio; it was
pitched as shrill and small as the scream of a hawk when the hawk itself
cannot be seen in the sky.

Zacharias ran into the house, and when he came out again bringing a pad
Glani was already in the patio.

David took the pad and cinched it on the back of the stallion.

"And when Shakra began to gallop," said Zacharias, "Benjamin cried out."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing."

"Zacharias, men do not cry out without speaking."

"Nevertheless," said Zacharias, "it was like the cry of a wolf when they
hunt along the cliffs in winter and see the young horses and the cattle
in the Garden below them. It was a cry, and there was no spoken word in
it."

The master bit his lip.

"Abraham has been talking folly to you," he said; and, springing on the
back of the stallion, he raced out of the patio and on to the south road
with his long, black hair whipping straight out behind his head.

At length the southern wall rose slowly over the trees, and a deep
murmur which had begun about them as soon as they left the house, light
as the humming of bees, increasing as they went down the valley, now
became a great rushing noise. It was like a great wind in sound; one
expected the push of a gale, coming out from the trees, but there was
only the river which ran straight at the cliff, split solid rock, and
shot out of sunlight into a black cavern. Beside this gaping mouth of
rock stood Connor with Shakra beside him. Twice the master called, but
Connor could not hear.

The tumbling river would have drowned a volley of musketry. Only when
David touched his shoulder did Connor turn a gloomy face. They took
their horses across the bridge which passed over the river a little
distance from the cliff, and rode down the farther side of the valley
until the roar sank behind them. A few barriers of trees reduced it to
the humming which on windless days was picked up by echoes and reached
the house of David with a solemn murmur.

"I thought you would rest," said David, when they were come to a place
of quiet, and the horses cantered lightly over the road with that
peculiar stride, at once soft and reaching, which Connor was beginning
to see as the chief characteristic of the Eden Gray.

"I have rested more in two minutes on the back of Shakra than I could
rest in two hours on my bed."

It was like disarming a father by praise of his son.

"She has a gentle gait," smiled David.

"I tell you, man, she's a knockout!"

"A knockout?"

The gambler added hastily: "Next to Glani the best horse I have seen."

"You are right. Next to Glani the best in the valley."

"In the world," said Connor, and then gave a cry of wonder.

They had come through an avenue of the eucalyptus trees, and now they
reached an open meadow, beyond which aspens trembled and flashed silver
under a shock from the wind. Half the meadow was black, half green; for
one of the old men was plowing. He turned a rich furrow behind him, and
the blackbirds followed in chattering swarms in their hunt for worms.
The plow team was a span of slender-limbed Eden Grays. They walked
lightly with plow, shaking their heads at the blackbirds, and sometimes
they touched noses in that cheery, dumb conversation of horses. The plow
turned down the field with the sod curling swiftly behind. The
blackbirds followed. There were soldier-wings among them making flashes
of red, and all the swarm scolded.

"David," said Connor when he could speak, "you might as well harness
lightning to your plow. Why in the name of God, man, don't you get mules
for this work?"

The master looked to the ground, for he was angered.

"It is not against His will that I work them at the plow," he answered.
"He has not warned me against it."

"Who hasn't?"

"Our Father whose name you spoke. Look! They are not unhappy, Jurith and
Rajima, of the blood of Aliriz."

He whistled, whereat the off mare tossed her head and whinnied.

"By Heaven, she knows you at this distance!" gasped Connor.

"Which is only to say that she is not a fool. Did I not sit with her
three days and three nights when she was first foaled? That was
twenty-five years ago; I was a child then."

Connor, staring after the high, proud head of Jurith, sighed. The horses
started on at a walk which was the least excellent gait in the Eden
Grays. Their high croups and comparatively low withers, their long
hindlegs and the shorter forelegs, gave them a waddling motion with the
hind quarters apparently huddling the forehand along.

Indeed, they seemed designed in every particular for the gallop alone.
But Glani was an exception. Just as in size he appeared a freak among
the others, so in his gaits all things were perfectly proportioned.
Connor, with a deep, quiet delight, watched the big stallion stepping
freely. Shakra had to break into a soft trot now and then to catch up.

"Let us walk," said David. "The run is for when a man feels with the
hawk in the sky; the gallop is for idle pleasure; the trot is an ugly
gait, for distance only; but a walk is the gait when two men speak
together. In this manner Matthew and I went up and down the valley
roads. Alas, it is five years since I have walked my horse! Is it not,
Glani, my king? And now, Benjamin, tell me your trouble."

"There is no trouble," said Connor.

But David smiled, saying: "We are brothers in Glani, Benjamin. To us
alone he has given his head. Therefore speak freely."

"Look back," said Connor, feeling that the crisis had come and that he
must now put his fortune to the touch.

David turned on the stallion. "What do you see?"

"I see old Elijah. He drives the two mares, and the furrow follows
them--the blackbirds also."

"Do you see nothing else?"

"I see the green meadow and the sky with a cloud in it; I see the river
yonder and the aspens flash as the wind strikes them."

"And do you hear nothing?"

"I hear the falling of the Jordan and the cry of the birds. Also, Elijah
has just spoken to Rajima. Ah, she is lazy for a daughter of Aliriz!"

"Do you wish to know what I see and hear, David?"

"If it is your pleasure, brother."

"I see a blue sky like this, with the wind and the clouds in it and all
that stuff--"

"All of what?"

"And I see also," continued Connor, resolving to watch his tongue,
"thousands of people, acres of men and women."

David was breathless with interest. He had a way of opening his eyes and
his mind like a child.

"We are among them; they jostle us; we can scarcely breathe. There is a
green lawn below us; we cannot see the green, it is so thickly covered
with men. They have pulled out their wallets and they have money in
their hands."

"What is it?" muttered David. "For my thoughts swim in those waves of
faces."

"I see," went on Connor, "a great oval road fenced on each side, with
colored posts at intervals. I see horses in a line, dancing up and down,
turning about--"

"Ah, horses!"

"Kicking at each other."

"So? Are there such bad manners among them?"

"But what each man is trembling for, and what each man has risked his
money upon, is this question: Which of all those is the fastest horse?
Think! The horses which fret in that line are the finest money can buy.
Their blood lines are longer than the blood lines of kings. They are
all fine muscles and hair-trigger nerves. They are poised for the start.
And now--"

"Benjamin, is there such love of horses over the mountains? Listen!
Fifty thousand men and women breathe with those racers."

"I know." There was a glint in the eyes of David. "When two horses match
their speed--"

"Some men have wagered all their money. They have borrowed, they have
stolen, to get what they bet. But there are two men only who bet on one
of the horses. You, David, and I!"

"Ha? But money is hard to come by."

"We ask them the odds," continued Connor. "For one dollar we shall take
a hundred if our horse wins--odds of a hundred to one! And we wager. We
wager the value of all we have. We wager the value of the Garden of Eden
itself!"

"It is madness, Benjamin!"

"Look closer! See them at the post. There's the Admiral. There's
Fidgety--that tall chestnut. There's Glorious Polly--the little bay. The
greatest stake horses in the country. The race of the year. But the
horse we bet on, David, is a horse which none of the rest in that crowd
knows. It is a horse whose pedigree is not published. It is a small
horse, not more than fourteen-three. It stands perfectly still in the
midst of that crowd of nervous racers. On its back is an old man."

"But can the horse win? And who is the old man?"

"On the other horses are boys who have starved until they are wisps with
only hands for the reins of a horse and knees to keep on his back. They
have stirrups so short that they seem to be floating above the racers.
But on the back of the horse on which we are betting there is only an
old, old man, sitting heavily."

"His name! His name!" David cried.

"Elijah! And the horse is Jurith!"

"No, no! Withdraw the bets! She is old."

"They are off! The gray mare is not trained for the start. She is left
standing far behind."

"Ah!" David groaned.

"Fifty thousand people laughing at the old gray mare left at the post!"

"I see it! I hear it!"

"She's too short in front; too high behind. She's a joke horse. And see
the picture horses! Down the back stretch! The fifty thousand have
forgotten the gray, even to laugh at her. The pack drives into the home
stretch. There's a straight road to the finish. They straighten out.
They get their feet. They're off for the wire!"

The voice of Connor had risen to a shrill cry. "But look! Look! There's
a streak of gray coming around the turn. It's the mare! It's old
Jurith!"

"Jurith!"

"No awkwardness now! She spreads herself out and the posts disappear
beside her. She stretches down low and the rest come back to her. Fine
horses; they run well. But Jurith is a racing machine. She's on the hip
of the pack! Look at the old man all the thousand were laughing at. He
sits easily in the saddle. He has no whip. His reins are loose. And then
he uses the posts ahead of him. He leans over and speaks one word in the
ear of the gray mare.

"By the Lord, she was walking before; she was cantering! Now she runs!
Now she runs! And the fifty thousand are dumb, white. A solid wall of
faces covered with white-wash! D'you see? They're sick! And then all at
once they know they're seeing a miracle. They have been standing up
ever since the horses entered the home-stretch. Now they climb on one
another's shoulders. They forget all about thousands--the hundreds of
thousands of dollars which they are going to lose. They only know that
they are seeing a great horse. And they love that new, great horse. They
scream as they see her come. Women break into tears as the old man
shoots past the grand stand. Men shriek and hug each other. They dance.

"The gray streak shoots on. She is past the others. She is rushing for
the finish wire as no horse ever ran before. She is away. One length,
two lengths, six lengths of daylight show between her and the rest. She
gallops past the finish posts with Elijah looking back at the others!

"She has won! You have won, David. I have won. We are rich. Happy. The
world's before us. David, do you see?"

"Is it possible? But no, Benjamin, not Jurith. Some other, perhaps,
Shakra--Glani--"

"No, we would take Jurith--twenty-five years old!"

Connor's last words trailed off into hysterical laughter.




_CHAPTER SEVENTEEN_


David was still flushed with the excitement of the tale, and he was
perplexed and troubled when Connor's strange, high laughter brought to
an abrupt end the picture they had both lived in.

The gambler saw the frown on David's brow, and with an effort he made
himself suddenly grave, though he was still pale and shaking.

"David, this is the reason Jurith can win. Somewhere in the past there
was a freak gray horse. There are other kinds of freaks; oranges had
seeds in 'em; all at once up pops a tree that has seedless fruit. People
plant shoots from it. There you have the naval orange, all out of one
tree. It's the same way with that gray horse. It was a freak; had a high
croup and muscles as stretchy as India-rubber, and strong--like the
difference between the muscles of a mule and the muscles of most horses.
That's what that first horse was. He was bred and the get came into this
valley. They kept improving--and the result is Glani! The Eden Gray,
David, is the finest horse in the world because it's a _different_ and a
better horse!"

The master paused for some time, and Connor knew he was deep in thought.
Finally he spoke:

"But if we know the speed of the Eden Grays, why should we go out into
the world and take the money of other men because they do not know how
fast our horses run?"

Connor made sure the master was serious and nerved himself for the
second effort.

"What do you wish, David?"

"In what measure, Benjamin?"

"The sky's the limit! I say, what do you wish? The last wish that was in
your head."

"Shakra stumbled a little while ago; I wished for a smoother road."

"David, with the money we win on the tracks we'll tear up these roads,
cut trenches, fill 'em with solid blocks of rock, lay 'em over with
asphalt, make 'em as smooth as glass! What else?"

"You jest, Benjamin. That is a labor for a thousand men."

"I say, it's nothing to what we'll do. What else do you want? Turn your
mind loose--open up your eyes and see something that's hard to get."

"Every wish is a regret, and why should I fail of gratitude to God by
making my wishes? Yet, I have been weak, I confess. I have sometimes
loathed the crumbling walls of my house. I have wished for a tall
chamber--on the floor a covering which makes no sound, colors about
me--crystal vases for my flowers--music when I come--"

"Stop there! You see that big white cliff? I'll have that stone cut in
chunks as big as you and your horse put together. I'll have 'em piled on
a foundation as strong as the bottom of those hills. You see the way
those mountain-tops walk into the sky? That's how the stairways will
step up to the front of your house and put you out on a big terrace with
columns scooting up fifty feet, and when you walk across the terrace a
couple of great big doors weighing about a ton apiece will drift open
and make a whisper when you mosey in. And when you get inside you'll
start looking up and up, but you'll get dizzy before your eyes hit the
ceiling; and up there you'll see a lighting stunt that looks like a
million icicles with the sun behind 'em."

He paused an instant for breath and saw David smiling in a hazy
pleasure.

"I follow you," he said softly. "Go on!" And his hand stretched out as
though to open a door.

"What I've told you about is only a beginning. Turn yourself loose;
dream, and I'll turn your dream into stone and color, and fill up your
windows with green and gold and red glass till you'll think a rainbow
has got all tangled up there! I'll give you music that'll make you
forget to think, and when you think I'll give you a room so big that
you'll have silence with an echo to it."

"All this for my horses?"

"Send one of the grays--just one, and let me place the wagers. You don't
even have to risk your own money. I've made a slough of it betting on
things that weren't lead pipe cinches like this. I made on Fidgety
Midget at fifty to one. I made on Gosham at eight to one. Nobody told me
how to bet on 'em. I know a horse--that's all! You stay in the Garden; I
take one of the grays; I bring her back in six months with more coin
than she can pack, and we split it fifty-fifty. You furnish the horse. I
furnish the jack. Is it a go?"

A bird stopped above them, whistled and dipped away over the treetops.
David turned his head to follow the trailing song, and Connor realized
with a sick heart that he had failed to sweep his man off his feet.

"Would you have me take charity?" asked David at length.

It seemed to Connor that there was a smile behind this. He himself burst
into a roar of laughter.

"Sure, it sounds like charity. They'll be making you a gift right
enough. There isn't a horse on the turf that has a chance with one of
the grays! But they'll bet their money like fools."

"Would it not be a sin, then?"

"What sin?" asked Connor roughly. "Don't they grab the coin of other
people? Does the bookie ask you how much coin you have and if you can
afford to lose it? No, he's out to get all that he can grab. And we'll
go out and do some grabbing in turn. Oh, they'll squeal when we turn the
screw, but they'll kick through with the jack. No fear, Davie!"

"Whatever sins may be theirs, Benjamin, those sins need not be mine."

Connor was dumb.

"Because they are foolish," said David, "should I take advantage of
their folly? A new man comes into the valley. He sees Jurith, and
notices that she runs well in spite of her years. He says to me: 'This
mare will run faster than your stallion. I have money and this ring
upon my finger which I will risk against one dollar of your money; If
the mare beats Glani I take your dollar. If Glani beats the mare, you
take my purse and my ring; I have no other wealth. It will ruin me, but
I am willing to be ruined if Jurith is not faster than Glani.

"Suppose such foolish man were to come to me, Benjamin, would I not say
to him: 'No, my friend. For I understand better than you, both Jurith
and Glani!' Tell me therefore, Benjamin, that you have tempted me toward
a sin, unknowing."

It made Connor think of the stubbornness of a woman, or of a priest. It
was a quiet assurance which could only be paralleled from a basis of
religion or instinct. He knew the danger of pressing too hard upon this
instinct or blind faith. He swallowed an oath, and answered, remembering
dim lessons out of his childhood:

"Tell me, David, my brother, is there no fire to burn fools? Is there no
rod for the shoulders of the proud? Should not such men be taught?"

"And I say to you, Benjamin," said the master of the Garden: "what wrong
have these fools done to me with their folly?"

Connor felt that he was being swept beyond his depth. The other went on,
changing his voice to gentleness:

"No, no! I have even a kindness for men with such blind faith in their
horses. When Jacob comes to me and says privately in my ear: 'David,
look at Hira. Is she not far nobler and wiser than Ephraim's horse,
Numan?' When he says this to me, do I shake my head and frown and say:
'Risk the clothes on your back and the food you eat to prove what you
say.' No, assuredly I do neither of these things, but I put my hand on
his shoulder and I say: 'He who has faith shall do great things; and a
tender master makes a strong colt.' In this manner I speak to him,
knowing that truth is good, but the whole truth is sometimes a fire that
purifies, perhaps, but it also destroys. So Jacob goes smiling on his
way and gives kind words and fine oats to Hira."

Connor turned the flank of this argument.

"These men are blind. You say that your horses can run a mile in such
and such a time, and they shrug their shoulders and answer that they
have heard such chatter before--from trainers and stable boys. But you
put your horse on a race track and prove what you say, and they pay for
knowledge. Once they see the truth they come to value your horses. You
open a stud and your breed is crossed with theirs. The blood of Rustir,
passing through the blood of Glani, goes among the best horses of the
world. A hundred years from now there will be no good horse in the
world, of which men do not ask: 'Is the blood of Glani in him? Is he of
the line of the Eden Grays?' Consider that, David!"

He found the master of the Garden frowning. He pressed home the point
with renewed vigor.

"If you live in this valley, David, what will men know of you?"

"Have you come to take me out of the Garden of Eden?"

"I have come to make your influence pass over the mountains while you
stay here. A hundred years from now who will know David of the Garden of
Eden? Of the men who used to live here, who remains? Not one! Where do
they live now? Inside your head, inside your head, David, and no other
place!"

"They live with God," said David hoarsely.

"But here on earth they don't live at all except in your mind. And when
you die, they die with you. But if you let me do what I say, a thousand
years from to-day, people will be saying: 'There was a man named David,
and he had these gray horses, which were the finest in the world, and he
gave their blood to the world.' They'll pick up every detail of your
life, and they'll trace back the horses--"

"Do I live for the sake of a horse?" cried David, in a voice unnaturally
high.

"No, but because of your horses the world will ask what sort of a man
you are. People will follow your example. They'll build a hundred
Gardens of Eden. Every one of those valleys will be full of the memories
of David and the men who went before him. Then, David, you'll never
die!"

It was the highest flight to which Connor's eloquence ever attained. The
results were alarming. David spoke, without facing his companion,
thoughtfully.

"Benjamin, I have been warned. By sin the gate to the Garden was opened,
and perhaps sin has entered in you. For why did the first men withdraw
to this valley, led by John, save to live apart, perfect lives? And you,
Benjamin, wish to undo all that they accomplished."

"Only the horses," said the gambler. "Who spoke of taking you out of the
Garden?"

Still David would not look at him.

"God grant me His light," said the master sadly. "You have stirred and
troubled me. If the horses go, my mind goes with them. Benjamin, you
have tempted me. Yet another thing is in my mind. When Matthew came to
die he took me beside him and said:

"'David, it is not well that you should lead a lonely life. Man is made
to live, and not to die. Take to yourself a woman, when I am gone, wed
her, and have children, so that the spirit of John and Matthew and Luke
and Paul shall not die. And do this in your youth, before five years
have passed you by.'

"So spoke Matthew, and this is the fifth year. And perhaps the Lord
works in you to draw me out, that I may find this woman. Or perhaps it
is only a spirit of evil that speaks in you. How shall I judge? For my
mind whirls!"

As if to flee from his thoughts, the master of the Garden called on
Glani, and the stallion broke into a full gallop. Shakra followed at a
pace that took the breath of Connor, but instantly she began to fall
behind; before they had reached the lake Glani was out of sight across
the bridge.

Full of alarm--full of hope also--Connor reached the house. In the patio
he found Zacharias standing with folded arms before a door.

"I must find David at once," he told Zacharias. "Where has he gone?"

"Up," said the servant, and pointed solemnly above him.

"Nonsense!" He added impatiently: "Where shall I find him, Zacharias?"

But again Zacharias waved to the blue sky.

"His body is in this room, but his mind is with Him above the world."

There was something in this that made Connor uneasy as he had never been
before.

"You may go into any room save the Room of Silence," continued
Zacharias, "but into this room only David and the four before him have
been. This is the holy place."




_CHAPTER EIGHTEEN_


Glani waited in the patio for the reappearance of the master, and as
Connor paced with short, nervous steps on the grass at every turn he
caught the flash of the sun on the stallion. Above his selfish greed he
had one honest desire: he would have paid with blood to see the great
horse face the barrier. That, however was beyond the reach of his
ambition, and therefore the beauty of Glani was always a hopeless
torment.

The quiet in the patio oddly increased his excitement. It was one of
those bright, still days when the wind stirs only in soft breaths,
bringing a sense of the open sky. Sometimes the breeze picked up a
handful of drops from the fountain and showered it with a cool rustling
on the grass. Sometimes it flared the tail of Glani; sometimes the
shadow of the great eucalyptus which stood west of the house quivered on
the turf.

Connor found himself looking minutely at trivial things, and in the
meantime David Eden in his room was deciding the fate of the American
turf. Even Glani seemed to know, for his glance never stirred from the
door through which the master had disappeared. What a horse the big
fellow was! He thought of the stallion in the paddock at the track. He
heard the thousands swarm and the murmur which comes deep out of a man's
throat when he sees a great horse.

The palms of Connor were wet with sweat. He kept rubbing them dry on the
hips of his trousers. Rehearsing his talk with David, he saw a thousand
flaws, and a thousand openings which he had missed. Then all thought
stopped; David had come out into the patio.

He came straight to Connor, smiling, and he said:

"The words were a temptation, but the mind that conceived them was not
the mind of a tempter."

Ineffable assurance and good will shone in his face, and Connor cursed
him silently.

"I, leaving the valley, might be lost in the torrent. And neither the
world nor I should profit. But if I stay here, at least one soul is
saved to God."

"Your own?" muttered Connor. But he managed to smile above his rage.
"And after you," he concluded, "what of the horses, David?"

"My sons shall have them."

"And if you have no sons?"

"Before my death I shall kill all of the horses. They are not meant for
other men than the sons of David."

The gambler drew off his hat and raised his face to the sky, asking
mutely if Heaven would permit this crime.

"Yet," said David, "I forgive you."

"You forgive me?" echoed Connor through his teeth.

"Yes, for the fire of the temptation has burned out. Let us forget the
world beyond the mountains."

"What is your proof that you are right in staying here?"

"The voice of God."

"You have spoken to Him, perhaps?"

The irony passed harmless by the raised head of David.

"I have spoken to Him," he asserted calmly.

"I see," nodded the gambler. "You keep Him in that room, no doubt?"

"It is true. His spirit is in the Room of Silence."

"You've seen His face?"

A numbness fell on the mind of Connor as he saw his hopes destroyed by
the demon of bigotry.

"Only His voice has come to me," said David.

"It speaks to you?"

"Yes."

Connor stared in actual alarm, for this was insanity.

"The four," said David, "spoke to Him always in that room. He is there.
And when Matthew died he gave me this assurance--that while the walls of
this house stood together God would not desert me or fail to come to me
in that room until I love another thing more than I love God."

"And how, David, do you hear the voice? For while you were there I was
in the patio, close by, and yet I heard no whisper of a sound from the
room."

"I shall tell you. When I entered the Room of Silence just now your
words had set me on fire. My mind was hot with desire of power over
other men. I forgot the palace you built for me with your promises. And
then I knew that it had been a temptation to sin from which the voice
was freeing me.

"Could a human voice have spoken more clearly than that voice spoke to
my heart? Anxiously I called before my eyes the image of Benjamin to ask
for His judgment, but your face remained an unclouded vision and was not
dimmed by the will of the Lord as He dims creatures of evil in the Room
of Silence. Thereby I knew that you are indeed my brother."

The brain of Connor groped slowly in the rear of these words. He was too
stunned by disappointment to think clearly, but vaguely he made out that
David had dismissed the argument and was now asking him to come for a
walk by the lake.

"The lake's well enough," he answered, "but it occurs to me that I've
got to get on with my journey."

"You must leave me?"

There was such real anxiety in his voice that Connor softened a little.

"I've got a lot to do," he explained. "I only stopped over to rest my
nags, in the first place. Then this other idea came along, but since the
voice has rapped it there's nothing for me to do but to get on my way
again."

"It is a long trip?"

"Long enough."

"The Garden of Eden is a lonely place."

"You'll have the voice to cheer you up."

"The voice is an awful thing. There is no companionship in it. This
thought comes to me. Leave the mule and the horse. Take Shakra. She will
carry you swiftly and safely over the mountains and bring you back
again. And I shall be happy to know that she is with you while you are
away. Then go, brother, if you must, and return in haste."

It was the opening of the gates of heaven to Connor at the very moment
when he had surrendered the last hope. He heard David call the servants,
heard an order to bring Shakra saddled at once. The canteen was being
filled for the journey. Into the incredulous mind of the gambler the
truth filtered by degrees, as candlelight probes a room full of
treasure, flashing ever and anon into new corners filled with
undiscovered riches.

Shakra was his to ride over the mountains. And why stop there? There was
no mark on her, and his brand would make her his. She would be safe in
an Eastern racing stable before they even dreamed of pursuit. And when
her victories on the track had built his fortune he could return her,
and raise a breed of peerless horses. A theft? Yes, but so was the
stealing of the fire from heaven for the use of mankind.

He would have been glad to leave the Garden of Eden at once, but that
was not in David's scheme of things. To him a departure into the world
beyond the mountains was as a voyage into an uncharted sea. His dignity
kept him from asking questions, but it was obvious that he was painfully
anxious to learn the necessity of Connor's going.

That night in the patio he held forth at length of the things they would
do together when the gambler returned. "The Garden is a book," he
explained. "And I must teach you to turn the pages and read in them."

There was little sleep for Connor that night. He lay awake, turning over
the possibilities of a last minute failure, and when he finally dropped
into a deep, aching slumber it was to be awakened almost at once by the
voice of David calling in the patio. He wakened and found it was the
pink of the dawn.

"Shakra waits at the gate of the patio. Start early, Benjamin, and
thereby you will return soon."

It brought Connor to his feet with a leap. As if he required urging!
Through the hasty breakfast he could not retain his joyous laughter
until he saw David growing thoughtful. But that breakfast was over, and
David's kind solicitations, at length. Shakra was brought to him; his
feet were settled into the stirrups, and the dream changed to a sense of
the glorious reality. She was his--Shakra!

"A journey of happiness for your sake and a speed for mine, Benjamin."

Connor looked down for the last time into the face of the master of the
Garden, half wild and half calm--the face of a savage with the mind of a
man behind it. "If he should take my trail!" he thought with horror.

"Good-by!" he called aloud, and in a burst of joy and sudden
compunction, "God bless you, David!"

"He has blessed me already, for He has given to me a friend."

A touch of the rope--for no Eden Gray would endure a bit--whirled Shakra
and sent her down the terraces like the wind. The avenue of the
eucalyptus trees poured behind them, and out of this, with astonishing
suddenness, they reached the gate.

The fire already burned, for the night was hardly past, and Joseph
squatted with the thin smoke blowing across his face unheeded. He was
grinning with savage hatred and muttering.

Connor knew what profound curse was being called down upon his head, but
he had only a careless glance for Joseph. His eye up yonder where the
full morning shone on the mountains, his mind was out in the world, at
the race track, seeing in prospect beautiful Shakra fleeing away from
the finest of the thoroughbreds. And he saw the face of Ruth, as her
eyes would light at the sight of Shakra. He could have burst into song.

Connor looking forward, high-headed, threw up his arm with a low shout,
and Shakra burst into full gallop down the ravine.




_CHAPTER NINETEEN_


When Ruth Manning read the note through for the first time she raised
her glance to the bearer. The boy was so sun-blackened that the paler
skin of the eyelids made his eyes seem supremely large. He was now
poised accurately on one foot, rubbing his calloused heel up and down
his shin, while he drank in the particulars of the telegraph office. He
could hardly be a party to a deception. She looked over the note again,
and read:

     DEAR MISS MANNING:

     I am a couple of miles out of Lukin, in a place to which the
     bearer of this note will bring you. I am sure you will come,
     for I am in trouble, out of which you can very easily help me.
     It is a matter which I cannot confide to any other person in
     Lukin. I am impatiently expecting you.

     BEN CONNOR.

She crumpled the note in her hand thoughtfully, but, on the verge of
dropping it in the waste basket, she smoothed it again, and for the
third time went over the contents. Then she rose abruptly and confided
her place to the lad who idled at the counter.

"The wire's dead," she told him. "Besides, I'll be back in an hour or
so."

And she rode off a moment later with the boy. He had a blanket-pad
without stirrups, and he kept prodding the sliding elbows of the horse
with his bare toes while he chattered at Ruth, for the drum of the
sounder had fascinated him and he wanted it explained. She listened to
him with a smile of inattention, for she was thinking busily of Connor.
Those thoughts made her look down to the dust that puffed up from the
feet of the horses and became a light mist behind them; then, raising
her head, she saw the blue ravines of the farther mountains and the sun
haze about the crests. Connor had always been to her as the ship is to a
traveler; the glamour of strange places was about him.

Presently they left the trail, and passing about a hillside, came to an
old shack whose unpainted wood had blackened with time.

"There he is," said the boy, and waving his hand to her, turned his pony
on the back trail at a gallop.

Connor called to her from the shack and came to meet her, but she had
dismounted before he could reach the stirrup. He kept her hand in his
for a moment as he greeted her. It surprised him to find how glad he was
to see her. He told her so frankly.

"After the mountains and all that," he said cheerfully, "it's like
meeting an old chum again to see you. How have things been going?"

This direct friendliness in a young man was something new to the girl.
The youths who came in to the dances at Lukin were an embarrassed lot
who kept a sulky distance, as though they made it a matter of pride to
show they were able to resist the attraction of a pretty girl. But if
she gave them the least encouragement, the merest shadow of a friendly
smile, they were at once all eagerness. They would flock around her,
sending savage glances to one another, and simpering foolishly at her.
They had stock conversation of politeness; they forced out prodigious
compliments to an accompaniment of much writhing. Social conversation
was a torture to them, and the girl knew it.

Not that she despised them. She understood perfectly well that most of
them were fine fellows and strong men. But their talents had been
cultivated in roping two-year-olds and bulldogging yearlings. They could
encounter the rush of a mad bull far more easily than they could
withstand a verbal quip. With the familiarity of years, she knew, they
lost both their sullenness and their starched politeness. They became
kindly, gentle men with infinite patience, infinite devotion to their
"womenfolk." Homelier girls in Lukin had an easier time with them. But
in the presence of Ruth Manning, who was a more or less celebrated
beauty, they were a hopeless lot. In short, she had all her life been in
an amphibious position, of the mountain desert and yet not of the
mountain desert. On the one hand she despised the "slick dudes" who now
and again drifted into Lukin with marvelous neckties and curiously
patterned clothes; on the other hand, something in her revolted at the
thought of becoming one of the "womenfolk."

As a matter of fact, there are two things which every young girl should
have. The first is the presence of a mother, which is the oldest of
truisms; the second is the friendship of at least one man of nearly her
own age. Ruth had neither. That is the crying hurt of Western life. The
men are too busy to bother with women until the need for a wife and a
home and children, and all the physical destiny of a man, overwhelms
them. When they reach this point there is no selection. The first girl
they meet they make love to.

And most of this Ruth understood. She wanted to make some of those
lumbering, fearless, strong-handed, gentle-souled men her friends. But
she dared not make the approaches. The first kind word or the first
winning smile brought forth a volley of tremendous compliments, close on
the heels of which followed the heavy artillery of a proposal of
marriage. No wonder that she was rejoiced beyond words to meet this
frank friendliness in Ben Connor. And what a joy to be able to speak
back freely, without putting a guard over eyes and voice!

"Things have gone on just the same--but I've missed you a lot!"

"That's good to hear."

"You see," she explained, "I've been living in Lukin with just half a
mind--the rest of it has been living off the wire. And you're about the
only interesting thing that's come to me except in the Morse."

And what a happiness to see that there was no stiffening of his glance
as he tried to read some profound meaning into her words! He accepted
them as they were, with a good-natured laughter that warmed her heart.

"Sit down over here," he went on, spreading a blanket over a chairlike
arrangement of two boulders. "You look tired out."

She accepted with a smile, and letting her head go back against the
upper edge of the blanket she closed her eyes for a moment and permitted
her mind to drift into utter relaxation.

"I _am_ tired," she whispered. It was inexpressibly pleasant to lie
there with the sense of being guarded by this man. "They never guess how
tired I get--never--never! I feel--I feel--as if I were living under the
whip all the time."

"Steady up, partner." He had picked up that word in the mountains, and
he liked it. "Steady, partner. Everybody has to let himself go. You tell
me what's wrong. I may not be able to fix anything, but it always helps
to let off steam."

She heard him sit down beside her, and for an instant, though her eyes
were still closed, she stiffened a little, fearful that he would touch
her hand, attempt a caress. Any other man in Lukin would have become
familiar long ago. But Connor did not attempt to approach her.

"Turn and turn about," he was saying smoothly. "When I went into your
telegraph office the other night my nerves were in a knot. Tell you
straight I never knew I _had_ real nerves before. I went in ready to
curse like a drunk. When I saw you, it straightened me out. By the Lord,
it was like a cool wind in my face. You were so steady, Ruth; straight
eyes; and it ironed out the wrinkles to hear your voice. I blurted out a
lot of stuff. But when I remembered it later on I wasn't ashamed. I knew
you'd understand. Besides, I knew that what I'd said would stop with
you. Just about one girl in a million who can keep her mouth shut--and
each one of 'em is worth her weight in gold. You did me several thousand
dollars' worth of good that night. That's honest!"

She allowed her eyes to open, slowly, and looked at him with a misty
content. The mountains had already done him good. The sharp sun had
flushed him a little and tinted his cheeks and strong chin with tan. He
looked more manly, somehow, and stronger in himself. Of course he had
flattered her, but the feeling that she had actually helped him so much
by merely listening on that other night wakened in her a new
self-reverence. She was too prone to look on life as a career of manlike
endeavor; it was pleasant to know that a woman could accomplish
something even more important by simply sitting still and listening. He
was watching her gravely now, even though she permitted herself the
luxury of smiling at him.

All at once she cried softly: "Thank Heaven that you're not a fool, Ben
Connor!"

"What do you mean by that?"

"I don't think I can tell you." She added hastily: "I'm not trying to be
mysterious."

He waved the need of an apology away.

"Tell you what. Never knew a girl yet that was worth her salt who could
be understood all the time, or who even understood herself."

She closed her eyes again to ponder this, lazily. She could not arrive
at a conclusion, but she did not care. Missing links in this
conversation were not vitally important.

"Take it easy, Ruth; we'll talk later on," he said after a time.

She did not look at him as she answered: "Tell me why?"

There was a sort of childlike confiding in all this that troubled Ben
Connor. He had seen her with a mind as direct and an enthusiasm as
strong as that of a man. This relaxing and softening alarmed him,
because it showed him another side of her, a new and vital side. She was
very lovely with the shadows of the sombrero brim cutting across the
softness of her lips and setting aglow the clear olive tan of her chin
and throat. Her hand lay palm upward beside her, very small, very
delicate in the making. But what a power was in that hand! He realized
with a thrill of not unmixed pleasure that if the girl set herself to
the task she could mold him like wax with the gestures of that hand. If
into the softness of her voice she allowed a single note of warmth to
creep, what would happen in Ben Connor? He felt within himself a chord
ready to vibrate in answer.

Now he caught himself leaning a little closer to study the purple stain
of weariness in her eyelids. Even exhaustion was attractive in her. It
showed something new, and newly appealing. Weariness gave merely a new
edge to her beauty. What if her eyes, opening slowly now, were to look
upon him not with the gentleness of friendship, but with something
more--the little shade of difference in a girl's wide eyes that admits a
man to her secrets--and traps him in so doing.

Ben Connor drew himself up with a shake of the shoulders. He felt that
he must keep careful guard from now on. What a power she was. What a
power! If she set herself to the task who could deal with her? What man
could keep from her? Then the picture of David jumped into his mind out
of nothingness. And on the heels of that picture the inspiration came
with a sudden uplifting of the heart, surety, intoxicating insight. He
wanted to jump to his feet and shout until the great ravine beneath them
echoed. With an effort he remained quiet. But he was thinking
rapidly--rapidly. He had intended to use her merely to arrange for
shipping Shakra away from Lukin Junction. For he dared not linger about
the town where expert horse thieves might see the mare. But now
something new, something more came to him. The girl was a power? Why not
use her?

What he said was: "Do you know why you close your eyes?"

Still without looking up she answered: "Why?"

"All of these mountains--you see?" She did not see, so he went on to
describe them. "There's that big peak opposite us. Looks a hundred yards
away, but it's two miles. Comes down in big jags and walks up into the
sky--Lord knows how many thousand feet. And behind it the other ranges
stepping off into the horizon with purple in the gorges and mist at the
tops. Fine picture, eh? But hard to look at, Ruth. Mighty hard to look
at. First thing you know you get to squinting to make out whether that's
a cactus on the side of that mountain or a hundred-foot pine tree. Might
be either. Can't tell the distance in this air. Well, you begin to
squint. That's how the people around here get that long-distance look
behind their eyes and the long-distance wrinkles around the corners of
their eyes. All the men have those wrinkles. But the women have them,
too, after a while. You'll get them after a while, Ruth. Wrinkles around
the eyes and wrinkles in the mind to match, eh?"

Her eyes opened at last, slowly, slowly. She smiled at him plaintively.

"Don't I know, Ben? It's a man's country. It isn't made for woman."

"Ah, there you've hit the nail on the head. Exactly! A man's country. Do
you know what it does to the women?"

"Tell me."

"Makes 'em like the men. Hardens their hands after a while. Roughens
their voices. Takes time, but that's what comes after a while.
Understand?"

"Oh, don't I understand!"

And he knew how the fear had haunted her, then, for the first time.

"What does this dry, hot wind do to you in the mountains? What does it
do to your skin? Takes the velvet off, after a while; makes it dry and
hard. Lord, girl, I'd hate to see the change it's going to make in
you!"

All at once she sat up, wide awake.

"What are you trying to do to me, Ben Connor?"

"I'm trying to wake you up."

"I _am_ awake. But what can I do?"

"You think you're awake, but you're not. Tell you what a girl needs, a
stage--just like an actor. Think they can put on a play with these
mountains for a setting? Never in the world. Make the actors look too
small. Make everything they say sound too thin.

"Same way with a girl. She needs a setting. A room, a rug, a picture, a
comfortable chair, and a dress that goes with it. Shuts out the rest of
the world and gives her a chance to make a man focus on her--see her
behind the footlights. See?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"Do you know what I've been doing while I watched you just now?"

"Tell me."

He was fighting for a great purpose now, and a quality of earnest
emotion crept into his voice. "Around your throat I've been running an
edging of yellow old lace. Under your hand that was lying there I put a
deep blue velvet; I had your shoulders as white as snow, with a flash to
'em like snow when you turned in the light; I had you proud as a queen,
Ruth, with a blur of violets at your breast. I took out the tired look
in your face. Instead, I put in happiness."

He stopped and drew a long breath.

"You're pretty now, but you could be--beautiful. Lord, what a flame of a
beauty you could be, girl!"

Instead of flushing and smiling under the praise, he saw tears well into
her eyes and her mouth grow tremulous. She winked the tears away.

"What are you trying to do, Ben? Make everything still harder for me?
Don't you see I'm helpless--helpless?"

And instead of rising to a wail her voice sank away at the end in
despair.

"Oh, you're trapped well enough," he said. "I'm going to bust the trap!
I'm going to give you your setting. I'm going to make you what you ought
to be--beautiful!"

She smiled as at any unreal fairy tale.

"How?"

"I can show you better than I can tell you! Come here!" He rose, and she
was on her feet in a flash. He led the way to the door of the shack, and
as the shadows fell inside, Shakra tossed up her head.

The girl's bewildered joy was as great as if the horse were a present to
her.

"Oh, you beauty, you beauty," she cried.

"Watch yourself," he warned. "She's as wild as a mountain lion."

"But she knows a friend!"

Shakra sniffed the outstretched hand, and then with a shake of her head
accepted the stranger and looked over Ruth's shoulder at Connor as
though for an explanation. Connor himself was smiling and excited; he
drew her back and forgot to release her hand, so that they stood like
two happy children together. He spoke very softly and rapidly, as though
he feared to embarrass the mare.

"Look at the head first--then the bone in the foreleg, then the length
above her back--see how she stands! See how she stands! And those black
hoofs, hard as iron, I tell you--put the four of 'em in my double hands,
almost--ever see such a nick? But she's no six furlong flash! That
chest, eh? Run your finger-tips down that shoulder!"

She turned with tears of pleasure in her eyes. "Ben Connor, you've been
in the valley of the grays!"

"I have. And do you know what it means to us?"

"To _us_?"

"I said it. I mean it. You're going to share."

"I--"

"Look at that mare again!"

She obeyed.

"Say something, Ruth!"

"I can't say what I feel!"

"Then try to understand this: you're looking at the fastest horse that
ever stepped into a race track. You understand? I'm not speaking in
comparisons. I'm talking the cold dope! Here's a pony that could have
given Salvator twenty pounds, run him sick in six furlongs, and walked
away to the finish by herself. Here's a mare that could pick up a
hundred and fifty pounds and beat the finest horse that ever faced a
barrier with a fly-weight jockey in the saddle. You're looking at
history, girl! Look again! You're looking at a cold million dollars.
You're looking at the blood that's going to change the history of the
turf. That's what Shakra means!"

She was trembling with his excitement.

"I see. It's the sure thing you were talking about. The horse that can't
be beat--that makes the betting safe?"

But Connor grew gloomy at once.

"What do you mean by sure thing? If I could ever get her safely away
from the post in a stake race, yes; sure as anything on earth. But
suppose the train is wrecked? Suppose she puts a foot in a hole? Suppose
at the post some rotten, cheap-selling plater kicks her and lays her
up!"

He passed a trembling hand along the neck of Shakra.

"God, suppose!"

"But you only brought one; nothing else worth while in the valley?"

"Nothing else? I tell you, the place is full of 'em! And there's a
stallion as much finer than Shakra as she's finer than that broken-down,
low-headed, ewe-necked, straight-shouldered, roach-backed skate you have
out yonder!"

"Mr. Connor, that's the best little pony in Lukin! But I know--compared
with this--oh, to see her run, just once!"

She sighed, and as her glance fell Connor noted her pallor and her
weariness. She looked up again, and the great eyes filled her face with
loveliness. Color, too, came into her cheeks and into her parted lips.

"You beauty!" she murmured. "You perfect, perfect beauty!"

Shakra was nervous under the fluttering hands, but in spite of her
uneasiness she seemed to enjoy the light-falling touches until the
finger-tips trailed across her forehead; then she tossed her head high,
and the girl stood beneath, laughing, delighted. Connor found himself
smiling in sympathy. The two made a harmonious picture. As harmonious,
say, as the strength of Glani and the strength of David Eden. His face
grew tense with it when he drew the girl away.

"Would you like to have a horse like that--half a dozen like it?"

The first leap of hope was followed by a wan smile at this cruel
mockery.

He went on with brutal tenseness, jabbing the points at her with his
raised finger.

"And everything else you've ever wanted: beautiful clothes? Manhattan? A
limousine as big as a house. A butler behind your chair and a maid in
your dressing room? A picture in the papers every time you turn around?
You want 'em?"

"Do I want heaven?"

"How much will you pay?"

He urged it on her, towering over her as he drew close.

"What's it worth? Is it worth a fight?"

"It's worth--everything."

"I'm talking shop. I'm talking business. Will you play partners with
me?"

"To the very end."

"The big deaf-mute doesn't own the grays in that valley they call the
Garden of Eden. They're owned by a white man. They call him David Eden.
And David Eden has never been out in the world. It's part of his creed
not to. It's part of his creed, however, to go out just once, find a
woman for his wife, and bring her back with him. Is that clear?"

"I--"

"You're to go up there. That old gray gelding we saw in Lukin the day of
the race. I'll finance you to the sky. Ride it to the gates of the
Garden of Eden. Tell the guards that you've got to have another horse
because the one you own is old. Insist on seeing David. Smile at 'em;
win 'em over. Make them let you see David. And the minute you see him,
he's ours! You understand? I don't mean marriage. One smile will knock
him stiff. Then play him. Get him to follow you out of the valley. Tell
him you have to go back home. He'll follow you. Once we have him outside
you can keep him from going back and you can make him bring out his
horses, too. Easy? It's a sure thing! We don't rob him, you see? We
simply use his horses. I race them and play them. I split the winnings
with you and David. Millions, I tell you; millions. Don't answer. Gimme
a chance to talk!"

There was a rickety old box leaning against the wall; he made her sit on
it, and dropping upon one knee, he poured out plan, reason, hopes,
ambitions in fierce confusion. It ended logically enough. David was
under what he considered a divine order to marry, and he would be clay
in the hands of the first girl who met him. She would be a fool indeed
if she were not able to lead him out of the valley.

"Think it over for one minute before you answer," concluded Connor, and
then rose and folded his arms. He controlled his very breathing for fear
of breaking in on the dream which he saw forming in her eyes.

Then she shook herself clear of the temptation.

"Ben, it's crooked! I'm to lie to him--live a lie until we have what we
want!"

"God A'mighty, girl! Don't you see that we'd be doing the poor fathead a
good turn by getting him out of his hermitage and letting him live in
the world? A lie? Call it that if you want. Aren't there such things as
white lies? If there are, this is one of 'em or I'm not Ben Connor."

His voice softened. "Why, Ruth, you know damned well that I wouldn't put
the thing up to you if I didn't figure that in the end it would be the
best thing in the world for you? I'm giving you your chance. To save
Dave Eden from being a fossil. To earn your own freedom. To get
everything you've longed for. Think!"

"I'm trying to think--but I only keep feeling, inside, 'It's wrong! It's
wrong! It's wrong!' I'm not a moralizer, but--tell me about David Eden!"

Connor saw his opening.

"Think of a horse that's four years old and never had a bit in his
teeth. That's David Eden. The minute you see him you'll want to tame
him. But you'll have to go easy. Keep gloves on. He's as proud as a
sulky kid. Kind of a chap you can't force a step, but you could coax him
over a cliff. Why, he'd be thread for you to wind around your little
finger if you worked him right. But it wouldn't be easy. If he had a
single suspicion he'd smash everything in a minute, and he's strong
enough to tear down a house. Put the temper of a panther in the size of
a bear and you get a small idea of David Eden."

He was purposely making the task difficult and he saw that she was
excited. His own work with Ruth Manning was as difficult as hers would
be with David. The fickle color left her all at once and he found her
looking wistfully at him.

She returned neither answer, argument, nor comment. In vain he detailed
each step of her way into the Garden and how she could pass the gate.
Sometimes he was not even sure that she heard him, as she listened to
the silent voice which spoke against him. He had gathered all his energy
for a last outburst, he was training his tongue for a convincing storm
of eloquence, when Shakra, as though she wearied of all this human
chatter, pushed in between them her beautiful head and went slowly
toward Ruth with pricking ears, inquisitive, searching for those light,
caressing touches.

The voice of Connor became an insidious whisper.

"Look at her, Ruth. Look at her. She's begging you to come. You can have
her. She'll be a present to you. Quick! What's the answer!"

A strange answer! She threw her arms around the shoulder of the
beautiful gray, buried her face in the mane, and burst into tears.

For a moment Connor watched her, dismayed, but presently, as one
satisfied, he withdrew to the open air and mopped his forehead. It had
been hard work, but it had paid. He looked over the distant blue waves
of mountains with the eye of possession.




_CHAPTER TWENTY_


"The evil at heart, when they wish to take, seem to give," said Abraham,
mouthing the words with his withered lips, and he came to one of his
prophetic pauses.

The master of the Garden permitted it to the privileged old servant, who
added now: "Benjamin is evil at heart."

"He did not ask for the horse," said David, who was plainly arguing
against his own conviction.

"Yet he knew." The ancient face of Abraham puckered. "Po' white trash!"
he muttered. Now and then one of these quaint phrases would break
through his acquired diction, and they always bore home to David a sense
of that great world beyond the mountains. Matthew had often described
that world, but one of Abraham's odd expressions carried him in a breath
into cities filled with men.

"His absence is cheaply bought at the price of one mare," continued the
old servant soothingly.

"One mare of Rustir's blood! What is the sin for which the Lord would
punish me with the loss of Shakra? And I miss her as I would miss a
human face. But Benjamin will return with her. He did not ask for the
horse."

"He knew you would offer."

"He will not return?"

"Never!"

"Then I shall go to find him."

"It is forbidden."

Abraham sat down, cross-legged, and watched with impish self-content
while David strode back and forth in the patio. A far-off neighing
brought him to a halt, and he raised his hand for silence. The neighing
was repeated, more clearly, and David laughed for joy.

"A horse coming from the pasture to the paddock," said Abraham, shifting
uneasily.

The day was old and the patio was filled with a clear, soft light,
preceding evening.

"It is Shakra! Shakra, Abraham!"

Abraham rose.

"A yearling. It is too high for the voice of a grown mare."

"The distance makes it shrill. Abraham, Abraham, cannot I find her voice
among ten all neighing at once?"

"Then beware of Benjamin, for he has returned to take not one but all."

But David smiled at the skinny hand which was raised in warning.

"Say no more," he said solemnly. "I am already to blame for hearkening
to words against my brother Benjamin."

"You yourself had said that he tempted you."

Because David could find no ready retort he grew angry.

"Also, think of this. Your eyes and your ears are grown dull, Abraham,
and perhaps your mind is misted also."

He had gone to the entrance into the patio and paused there to wait with
a lifted head. Abraham followed and attempted to speak again, but the
last cruel speech had crushed him. He went out on the terrace, and
looking back saw that David had not a glance for him; so Abraham went
feebly on.

"I have become as a false prophet," he murmured, "and I am no more
regarded."

His life had long been in its evening, and now, at a step, the darkness
of old age fell about him. From the margin of the lake he looked up and
saw Connor ride to the patio.

David, at the entrance, clasped the hand of his guest while he was still
on the horse and helped him to the ground.

"This," he said solemnly, "is a joyful day in my house."

"What's the big news?" inquired the gambler, and added: "Why so happy?"

"Is it not the day of your return? Isaac! Zacharias!"

They came running as he clapped his hands.

"Set out the oldest wine, and there is a haunch of the deer that was
killed at the gate. Go! And now, Benjamin, did Shakra carry you well and
swiftly?"

"Better than I was ever carried before."

"Then she deserves well of me. Come hither, Shakra, and stand behind me.
Truly, Benjamin, my brother, my thoughts have ridden ten times across
the mountains and back, wishing for your return!"

Connor was sufficiently keen to know that a main reason for the warmth
of his reception was that he had been doubted while he was away, and
while they supped in the patio he was even able to guess who had raised
the suspicion against him. Word was brought that Abraham lay in his bed
seriously ill, but David Eden showed no trace of sympathy.

"Which is the greater crime?" he asked Benjamin a little later. "To
poison the food a man eats or the thoughts in his mind?"

"Surely," said the crafty gambler, "the mind is of more importance than
the stomach."

Luckily David bore the main burden of conversation that evening, for the
brain of Connor was surcharged with impatient waiting. His great plan,
he shrewdly guessed, would give him everything or else ruin him in the
Garden of Eden, and the suspense was like an eating pain. Luckily the
crisis came on the very next day.

Jacob galloped into the patio, and flung himself from the back of Abra.

David and Connor rose from their chairs under the arcade where they had
been watching Joseph setting great stones in place around the border of
the fountain pool. The master of the Garden went forward in some anger
at this unceremonious interruption. But Jacob came as one whose news is
so important that it overrides all need of conventional approach.

"A woman," he panted. "A woman at the gate of the Garden!"

"Why are you here?" said David sternly.

"A woman--"

"Man, woman, child, or beast, the law is the same. They shall not enter
the Garden of Eden. Why are you here?"

"And she rides the gray gelding, the son of Yoruba!"

At that moment the white trembling lips of Connor might have told the
master much, but he was too angered to take heed of his guest.

"That which has once left the Garden is no longer part of it. For us,
the gray gelding does not exist. Why are you here?"

"Because she would not leave the gate. She says that she will see you."

"She is a fool. And because she was so confident, you were weak enough
to believe her?"

"I told her that you would not come; that you could not come!"

"You have told her that it is impossible for me to speak with her?" said
David, while Connor gradually regained control of himself, summoning all
his strength for the crisis.

"I told her all that, but she said nevertheless she would see you."

"For what reason?"

"Because she has money with which to buy another horse like her gelding,
which is old."

"Go back and tell her that there is no money price on the heads of my
horses. Go! When Ephraim is at the gate there are no such journeyings to
me."

"Ephraim is here," said Jacob stoutly, "and he spoke much with her.
Nevertheless she said that you would see her."

"For what reason?"

"She said: 'Because.'"

"Because of what?"

"That word was her only answer: 'Because.'"

"This is strange," murmured David, turning to Connor. "Is that one word
a reason?

"Go back again," commanded David grimly. "Go back and tell this woman
that I shall not come, and that if she comes again she will be driven
away by force. And take heed, Jacob, that you do not come to me again on
such an errand. The law is fixed. It is as immovable as the rocks in the
mountains. You know all this. Be careful hereafter that you remember. Be
gone!"

The ruin of his plan in its very inception threatened Ben Connor. If he
could once bring David to see the girl he trusted in her beauty and her
cleverness to effect the rest. But how lead him to the gate? Moreover,
he was angered and his frown boded no good for Jacob. The old servant
was turning away, and the gambler hunted his mind desperately for an
expedient. Persuasion would never budge this stubborn fellow so used to
command. There remained the opposite of persuasion. He determined on an
indirect appeal to the pride of the master.

"You are wise, David," he said solemnly. "You are very wise. These
creatures are dangerous, and men of sense shun them. Tell your servants
to drive her away with blows of a stick so that she will never return."

"No, Jacob," said the master, and the servant returned to hear the
command. "Not with sticks. But with words, for flesh of women is tender.
This is hard counsel, Benjamin!"

He regarded the gambler with great surprise.

"Their flesh may be tender, but their spirits are strong," said Connor.
The opening he had made was small. At least he had the interest of
David, and through that entering wedge he determined to drive with all
his might.

"And dangerous," he added gravely.

"Dangerous?" said the master. He raised his head. "Dangerous?"

As if a jackal had dared to howl in the hearing of the lion.

"Ah, David, if you saw her you would understand why I warn you!"

"It would be curious. In what wise does her danger strike?"

"That I cannot say. They have a thousand ways."

The master turned irresolutely toward Jacob.

"You could not send her away with words?"

"David, for one of my words she has ten that flow with pleasant sound
like water from a spring, and with little meaning, except that she will
not go."

"You are a fool!"

"So I felt when I listened to her."

"There is an old saying, David, my brother," said Connor, "that there is
more danger in one pleasant woman than in ten angry men. Drive her from
the gate with stones!"

"I fear that you hate women, Benjamin."

"They were the source of evil."

"For which penance was done."

"The penance followed the sin."

"God, who made the mountains, the river and this garden and man, He made
woman also. She cannot be all evil. I shall go."

"Then, remember that I have warned you. God, who made man and woman,
made fire also."

"And is not fire a blessing?"

He smiled at his triumph and this contest of words.

"You shall go with me, Benjamin."

"I? Never!"

"In what is the danger?"

"If you find none, there is none. For my part I have nothing to do with
women."

But David was already whistling to Glani.

"One woman can be no more terrible than one man," he declared to
Benjamin. "And I have made Joseph, who is great of body, bend like a
blade of grass in the wind."

"Farewell," said Connor, his voice trembling with joy. "Farewell, and
God keep you!"

"Farewell, Benjamin, my brother, and have no fear."

Connor followed him with his eyes, half-triumphant, half-fearful. What
would happen at the gate? He would have given much to see even from a
distance the duel between the master and the woman.

At the gate of the patio David turned and waved his hand.

"I shall conquer!"

And then he was gone.

Connor stared down at the grass with a cynical smile until he felt
another gaze upon him, and he became aware of the little beast--eyes of
Joseph glittering. The giant had paused in his work with the stones.

"What are you thinking of, Joseph?" asked the gambler.

Joseph made an indescribable gesture of hate and fear.

"Of the whip!" he said. "I also opened the gate of the Garden. On whose
back will the whip fall this time?"




_CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE_


Near the end of the eucalyptus avenue, and close to the gate, David
dismounted and made Jacob do likewise.

"We may come on them by surprise and listen," he said. "A soft step has
won great causes."

They went forward cautiously, interchanging sharp glances as though they
were stalking some dangerous beast, and so they came within earshot of
the gate and sheltered from view of it by the edge of the cliff. David
paused and cautioned his companion with a mutely raised hand.

"He lived through the winter," Ephraim was saying. "I took him into my
room and cherished him by the warmth of my fire and with rubbing, so
that when spring came, and gentler weather, he was still alive--a great
leggy colt with a backbone that almost lifted through the skin. Only
high bright eyes comforted me and told me that my work was a good work."

David and Jacob interchanged nods of wonder, for Ephraim was telling to
this woman the dearest secret of his life.

It was how he had saved the weakling colt, Jumis, and raised him to a
beautiful, strong stallion, only to have him die suddenly in the height
of his promise. Certainly Ephraim was nearly won over by the woman; it
threw David on guard.

"Go back to Abra," he whispered. "Ride on to the gate and tell her
boldly to be gone. I shall wait here, and in time of need I shall help
you. Make haste. Ephraim grows like wet clay under her fingers. Ah, how
wise is Benjamin!"

Jacob obeyed. He stole away and presently shot past at the full gallop
of Abra. The stallion came to a sliding halt, and Jacob spoke from his
back, which was a grave discourtesy in the Garden of Eden.

"The master will not see you," he said. "The sun is still high. Return
by the way you have come; you get no more from the Garden than its water
and its air. He does not sell horses."

For the first time she spoke, and at the sound of her voice David Eden
stepped out from the rock; he remembered himself in time and shrank back
to shelter.

"He sold this horse."

"It was the will of the men before David that these things should be
done, but the Lord knows the mind of David and that his heart bleeds for
every gelding that leaves the Garden. See what you have done to him! The
marks of the whip and the spur are on his sides. Woe to you if David
should see them!"

She cried out at that in such a way that David almost felt she had been
struck.

"It was the work of a drunken fool, and not mine."

"Then God have mercy on that man, for if the master should see him,
David would have no mercy. I warn you: David is one with a fierce eye
and a strong hand. Be gone before he comes and sees the scars on the
gray horse."

"Then he is coming?"

"She is quick," thought David, as an embarrassed pause ensued. "Truly,
Benjamin was right, and there is danger in these creatures."

"He has many horses," the girl went on, "and I have only this one.
Besides, I would pay well for another."

"What price?"

"He should not have asked," muttered David.

"Everything that I have," she was answering, and the low thrill of her
voice went through and through the master of the Garden. "I could buy
other horses with this money, but not another like my gray. He is more
than a horse. He is a companion to me. He understands me when I talk,
and I understand him. You see how he stands with his head down? He is
not tired, but hungry. When he neighs in a certain way from the corral I
know that he is lonely. You see that he comes to me now? That is because
he knows I am talking about him, for we are friends. But he is old and
he will die, and what shall I do then? It will be like a death in my
house!"

Another pause followed.

"You love the horse," said the voice of Ephraim, and it was plain that
Jacob was beyond power of speech.

"And I shall pay for another. Hold out your hand."

"I cannot take it."

Nevertheless, it seemed that he obeyed, for presently the girl
continued: "After my father died I sold the house. It was pretty well
blanketed with a mortgage, but I cleared out this hundred from the
wreck. I went to work and saved what I could. Ten dollars every month,
for twenty months--you can count for yourself--makes two hundred, and
here's the two hundred more in your hand. Three hundred altogether. Do
you think it's enough?"

"If there were ten times as much," said Jacob, "it would not be enough.
There--take your money. It is not enough. There is no money price on the
heads of the master's horses."

But a new light had fallen upon David. Women, as he had heard of them,
were idle creatures who lived upon that which men gained with sweaty
toil, but this girl, it seemed, was something more. She was strong
enough to earn her bread, and something more. Money values were not
clear to David Eden, but three hundred dollars sounded a very
considerable sum. He determined to risk exposure by glancing around the
rock. If she could work like a man, no doubt she was made like a man and
not like those useless and decorative creatures of whom Matthew had
often spoken to him, with all their graces and voices.

Cautiously he peered and he saw her standing beside the old, broken gray
horse. Even old Ephraim seemed a stalwart figure in comparison.

At first he was bewildered, and then he almost laughed aloud. Was it on
account of this that Benjamin had warned him, this fragile girl? He
stepped boldly from behind the rock.

"There is no more to say," quoth Jacob.

"But I tell you, he himself will come."

"You are right," said David.

At that her eyes turned on him, and David was stopped in the midst of a
stride until she shrank back against the horse.

Then he went on, stepping softly, his hand extended in that sign of
peace which is as old as mankind.

"Stay in peace," said David, "and have no fear. It is I, David."

He hardly knew his own voice, it was so gentle. A twilight dimness
seemed to have fallen upon Jacob and Ephraim, and he was only aware of
the girl. Her fear seemed to be half gone already, and she even came a
hopeful step toward him.

"I knew from the first that you would come," she said, "and let me buy
one horse--you have so many."

"We will talk of that later."

"David," broke in the grave voice of Ephraim, "remember your own law!"

He looked at the girl instead of Ephraim as he answered: "Who am I to
make laws? God begins where David leaves off."

And he added: "What is your name?"

"Ruth."

"Come, Ruth," said David, "we will go home together."

She advanced as one in doubt until the shadow of the cliff fell over
her. Then she looked back from the throat of the gate and saw Ephraim
and Jacob facing her as though they understood there was no purpose in
guarding against what might approach the valley from without now that
the chief enemy was within. David, in the pause, was directing Jacob to
place the girl's saddle on the back of Abra.

"For it is not fitting," he explained, "that you should enter my garden
save on one of my horses. And look, here is Glani."

The stallion came at the sound of his name. She had heard of the great
horse from Connor, but the reality was far more than the words.

"And this, Glani, is Ruth."

She touched the velvet nose which was stretched inquisitively toward
her, and then looked up and found that David was smiling. A moment later
they were riding side by side down the avenue of the eucalyptus trees,
and through the tall treetrunks new vistas opened rapidly about her.
Every stride of Abra seemed to carry her another step into the life of
David.

"I should have called Shakra for you," said David, watching her with
concern, "but she is ridden by another who has the right to the best in
the garden."

"Even Glani?"

"Even Glani, save that he fears to ride my horse, and therefore he has
Shakra. I am sorry, for I wish to see you together. She is like
you--beautiful, delicate, and swift."

She urged Abra into a shortened gallop with a touch of her heel, so that
the business of managing him gave her a chance to cover her confusion.
She could have smiled away a compliment, but the simplicity of David
meant something more.

"Peace, Abra!" commanded the master. "Oh, unmannerly colt! It would be
other than this if the wise Shakra were beneath your saddle."

"No, I am content with Abra. Let Shakra be for your servant."

"Not servant, but friend--a friend whom Glani chose for me. Consider how
fickle our judgments are and how little things persuade us. Abraham is
rich in words, but his face is ugly, and I prefer the smooth voice of
Zacharias, though he is less wise. I have grieved for this and yet it is
hard to change. But a horse is wiser than a fickle-minded man, and when
Glani went to the hand of Benjamin without my order, I knew that I had
found a friend."

She knew the secret behind that story, and now she looked at David with
pity.

"In my house you will meet Benjamin," the master was saying
thoughtfully, evidently encountering a grave problem. "I have said that
little things make the judgments of men! If a young horse shies once,
though he may become a true traveler and a wise head, yet his rider
remembers the first jump and is ever uneasy in the saddle."

She nodded, wondering what lay behind the explanation.

"Or if a snake crosses the road before a horse, at that place the horse
trembles when he passes again."

"Yes."

She found it strangely pleasant to follow the simple processes of his
mind.

"It is so with Benjamin. At some time a woman crosses his way like a
snake, and because of her he has come to hate all women. And when I
started for the gate, even now, he warned me against you."

The clever mind of the gambler opened to her and she smiled at the
trick.

"Yes, it is a thing for laughter," said David happily. "I came with a
mind armed for trouble--and I find you, whom I could break between my
hands."

He turned, casting out his arms.

"What harm have I received from you?"

They had reached the head of the bridge, and even as David turned a
changing gust carried to them a chorus of men's voices. David drew rein.

"There is a death," he said, "in my household."




_CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO_


The singing took on body and form as the pitch rose.

"There is a death," repeated David. "Abraham is dead, the oldest and the
wisest of my servants. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Glory
to His name!"

Ruth was touched to the heart.

"I am sorry," she said simply.

"Let us rejoice, rather, for Abraham is happy. His soul is reborn in a
young body. Do you not hear them singing? Let us ride on."

He kept his head high and a stereotyped smile on his lips as the horses
sprang into a gallop--that breath-taking gallop which made the spirit of
the girl leap; but she saw his breast raise once or twice with a sigh.
It was the stoicism of an Indian, she felt, and like an Indian's was the
bronze-brown skin and the long hair blowing in the wind. The lake was
beside them now, and dense forest beyond opening into pleasant meadows.
She was being carried back into a primitive time of which the type was
the man beside her. Riding without a saddle his body gave to the swing
of the gallop, and she was more conscious than ever of physical
strength.

But now the hoofs beat softly on the lawn terraces, and in a moment they
had stopped before the house where the death had been. She knew at once.
The empty arch into the patio of the servants' house was eloquent, in
some manner, of the life that had departed. Before it was the group of
singers, all standing quiet, as though their own music had silenced
them, or perhaps preparing to sing again. Connor had described the old
servant, but she was not prepared for these straight, withered bodies,
these bony, masklike faces, and the white heads.

All in an instant they seemed to see her, and a flash of pleasure went
from face to face. They stirred, they came toward her with glad murmurs,
all except one, the oldest of them all, who remained aloof with his arms
folded. But the others pressed close around her, talking excitedly to
one another, as though she could not understand what they said. And she
would never forget one who took her hand in both of his. The touch of
his fingers was cold and as dry as parchment. "Honey child, God bless
your pretty face."

Was this the formal talk of which Connor had warned her? A growl from
David drove them back from her like leaves before a wind. He had slipped
from his horse, and now walked forward.

"It is Abraham?" he asked.

"He is dead and glorious," answered the chorus, and the girl trembled to
hear those time-dried relics of humanity speak so cheerily of death.

The master was silent for a moment, then: "Did he leave no message for
me?"

In place of answering the group shifted and opened a passage to the one
in the rear, who stood with folded arms.

"Elijah, you were with him?"

"I heard his last words."

"And what dying message for David?"

"Death sealed his lips while he had still much to say. To the end he was
a man of many words. But first he returned thanks to our Father who
breathed life into the clay."

"That was a proper thought, and I see that the words were words of
Abraham."

"He gave thanks for a life of quiet ease and wise masters, and he
forgave the Lord the length of years he was kept in this world."

"In that," said David gravely, "I seem to hear his voice speaking.
Continue."

"He commanded us to sing pleasantly when he was gone."

"I heard the singing on the lake road. It is well."

"Also, he bade us keep the first master in our minds, for John, he said,
was the beginning."

At this the face of David clouded a little.

"Continue. What word for David?"

Something that Connor had said about the pride and sulkiness of a child
came back to Ruth.

Elijah, after hesitation, went on: "He declared that Glani is too heavy
in the forehead."

"Yes, that is Abraham," said the master, smiling tenderly. "He would
argue even on the death bed."

"But a cross with Tabari would remedy that defect."

"Perhaps. What more?"

"He blessed you and bade you remember and rejoice that he was gone to
his wife and child."

"Ah?" cried David softly. His glance, wandering absently, rested on the
girl for a moment, and then came back to Elijah. "His mind went back to
that? What further for my ear?"

"I remember nothing more, David."

"Speak!" commanded the master.

The eyes of Elijah roved as though for help.

"Toward the end his voice grew faint and his mind seemed to wander."

"Far rather tremble, Elijah, if you keep back the words he spoke,
however sharp they may be. My hand is not light. Remember, and speak."

The fear of Elijah changed to a gloomy pride, and now he not only raised
his head, but he even made a step forward and stood in dignity.

"Death took Abraham by the throat, and yet he continued to speak. 'Tell
David that four masters cherished Abraham, but David cast him out like a
dog and broke his heart, and therefore he dies. Although I bless him,
God will hereafter judge him!'"

A shudder went through the entire group, and Ruth herself was uneasy.

"Keep your own thoughts and the words of Abraham well divided," said
David solemnly. "I know his mind and its working. Continue, but be
warned."

"I am warned, David, but my brother Abraham is dead and my heart weeps
for him!"

"God will hereafter judge me," said David harshly. "And what was the
further judgment of Abraham, the old man?"

"Even this: 'David has opened the Garden to one and therefore it will be
opened to all. The law is broken. The first sin is the hard sin and the
others follow easily. It is swift to run downhill. He has brought in
one, and another will soon follow.'"

"Elijah," thundered David, "you have wrested his words to fit the thing
you see."

"May the dead hand of Abraham strike me down if these were not his
words."

"Had he become a prophet?" muttered David. "No, it was maundering of an
old man."

"God speaks on the lips of the dying, David."

"You have said enough."

"Wait!"

"You are rash, Elijah."

She could not see the face of David, but the terror and frenzied
devotion of Elijah served her as mirror to see the wrath of the master
of the Garden.

"David has opened the gate of the Garden. The world sweeps in and shall
carry away the life of Eden like a flood. All that four masters have
done the fifth shall undo."

The strength of his ecstasy slid from Elijah and he dropped upon his
knees with his head weighted toward the earth. The others were frozen in
their places. One who had opened his lips to speak, perhaps to intercede
for the rash Elijah, remained with his lips parted, a staring mask of
fear. In them Ruth saw the rage of David Eden, and she was sickened by
what she saw. She had half pitied the simplicity of this man, this gull
of the clever Connor. Now she loathed him as a savage barbarian. Even
these old men were hardly safe from his furies of temper.

"Arise," said the master at length, and she could feel his battle to
control his voice. "You are forgiven, Elijah, because of your
courage--yet, beware! As for that old man whose words you repeated, I
shall consider him." He turned on his heel, and Ruth saw that his face
was iron.




_CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE_


From the gate of the patio Connor, watching all that time in a nightmare
of suspense, saw, first of all, the single figure of David come around
the trees, David alone and walking. But before that shock passed he saw
Glani at the heels of the master, and then, farther back, Ruth!

She had passed the gate and two-thirds of the battle was fought and won.
Yet all was not well, as he plainly saw. With long, swift steps David
came over the terrace, and finally paused as if his thoughts had stopped
him. He turned as Glani passed, and the girl came up to him; his
extended arm halted Abra and he stood looking up to the girl and
speaking. Only the faint murmur of his voice came unintelligibly to
Connor, but he recognized danger in it as clearly as in the hum of bees.
Suddenly the girl, answering, put out her hands as if in gesture of
surrender. Another pause--it was only a matter of a second or so, but it
was a space for life or death with Connor. In that interval he knew that
his scheme was made or ruined. What had the girl said? Perhaps that
mighty extended arm holding back Abra had frightened her, and with the
wind blowing his long black hair aside, David of Eden was a figure wild
enough to alarm her. Perhaps in fear of her life she had exposed the
whole plan. If so, it meant broken bones for Connor.

But now David turned again, and this time he was talking by the side of
Abra as they came up the hill. He talked with many gestures, and the
girl was laughing down to him.

"God bless her!" muttered Connor impulsively. "She's a true-blue one!"

He remembered his part in the nick of time as they came closer, and
David helped the girl down from the saddle and brought her forward. The
gambler drew himself up and made his face grave with disapproval. Now or
never he must prove to David that there was no shadow of a connection
between him and the girl. Yet he was by no means easy. There was
something forced and stereotyped in the smile of the girl that told him
she had been through a crucial test and was still near the breaking
point.

David presented them to one another uneasily. He was even a little
embarrassed under the accusing eye of Connor.

"I make you known, Ruth," he said, "to my brother Benjamin. He is that
man of whom I told you."

"I am happy," said the girl, "to be known to him."

"That much I cannot say," replied the gambler.

He turned upon David with outstretched arm.

"Ah, David, I have warned you!"

"As Abraham warned me against you, Benjamin. And dying men speak truth."

The counter-attack was so shrewd, so unexpected, that the gambler, for
the moment, was thrown completely off his guard.

He could only murmur: "You are the judge for yourself, David."

"I am. Do not think that the power is in me. But God loves the Garden
and His voice is never far from me. Neither are the spirits of the four
who lived here before me and made this place. When there is danger they
warn me. When I am in error the voice of God corrects me. And just as I
heard the voice against the woman, Ruth, and heed it not."

He seemed to have gathered conviction for himself, much needed
conviction, as he spoke. He turned now toward the girl.

"Be not wroth with Benjamin; and bear him no malice."

"I bear him none in the world," she answered truthfully, and held out
her hand.

But Connor was still in his role. He folded his arms and pointedly
disregarded the advance.

"Woman, let there be peace and few words between us. My will is the will
of David."

"There speaks my brother!" cried the master of the valley.

"And yet," muttered Connor, "why is she here?"

"She came to buy a horse."

"But they are not sold."

"That is true. Yet she has traveled far and she is in great need of food
and drink. Could I turn her away hungry, Benjamin?"

"She could have been fed at the gate. She could surely have rested
there."

It was easy to see that David was hardpressed. His eye roved eagerly to
Ruth. Then a triumphant explanation sparkled in his eye.

"It is the horse she rides, a gelding from my Garden. His lot in the
world has been hard. He is scarred with the spur and the whip. I have
determined to take him back, at a price. But who can arrange matters of
buying and selling all in a moment? It is a matter for much talk.
Therefore she is here."

"I am answered," said Connor, and turning to Ruth he winked broadly.

"It is well," said David, "and I foresee happy days. In the meantime
there is a duty before me. Abraham must be laid in his grave and I leave
Ruth to your keeping, Benjamin. Bear with her tenderly for my sake."

He stepped to the girl.

"You are not afraid?"

"I am not afraid," she answered.

"My thoughts shall be near you. Farewell."

He had hardly reached the gate of the patio when Joseph, going out after
finishing his labor at the fountain, passed between the gambler and the
girl. Connor stopped him with a sign.

"The whip hasn't fallen, you see," he said maliciously.

"There is still much time," replied Joseph. "And before the end it will
fall. Perhaps on you. Or on that!"

He indicated the girl with his pointing finger; his glance turned
savagely from one to the other, and then he went slowly out of the patio
and they were alone. She came to Connor at once and even touched his arm
in her excitement.

"What did he mean?"

"That's the one I told you about. The one David beat up with the whip.
He'd give his eye teeth to get back at me, and he has an idea that
there's going to be hell to pay because another person has come into the
valley. Bunk! But--what happened down the hill?"

"When he stopped me? Did you see that?"

"My heart stopped the same minute. What was it?"

"He had just heard the last words of Abraham. When he stopped me on the
hill his face was terrible. Like a wolf!"

"I know that look in him. How did you buck up under it?"

"I didn't. I felt my blood turn to water and I wanted to run."

"But you stuck it out--I saw! Did he say anything?"

"He said: 'Dying men do not lie. And I have been twice warned. Woman,
why are you here?'"

"And you?" gasped Connor. "What did you say?"

"Nothing. My head spun. I looked up the terrace. I wanted to see you,
but you weren't in sight. I felt terribly alone and absolutely helpless.
If I'd had a gun, I would have reached for it."

"Thank God you didn't!"

"But you don't know what his face was like! I expected him to tear me
off the horse and smash me with his hands. All at once I wanted to tell
him everything--beg him not to hurt me." Connor groaned.

"I knew it! I knew that was in your head!"

"But I didn't."

"Good girl."

"He said: 'Why are you here? What harm have you come to work in the
Garden?'"

"And you alone with him!" gasped Connor.

"That was what did it. I was so helpless that it made me bold. Can you
imagine smiling at a time like that?"

"Were you able to?"

"I don't know how. It took every ounce of strength in me. But I made
myself smile--straight into his face. Then I put out my hands to him all
at once.

"'How could I harm you?' I asked him.

"And then you should have seen his face change and the anger break up
like a cloud. I knew I was safe, then, but I was still dizzy--just as
if I'd looked over a cliff--you know?"

"And yet you rode up the hill after that laughing down to him! Ruth,
you're the gamest sport and the best pal in the world. The finest little
act I ever saw on the stage or off. It was Big Time stuff. My hat's off,
but--where'd you get the nerve?"

"I was frightened almost to death. Too much frightened for it to show.
When I saw you, my strength came back."

"But what do you think of him?"

"He's--simply a savage. What do I think of an Indian?"

"No more than that?"

"Ben, can you pet a tiger after you've seen his claws?"

He looked at her with anxiety.

"You're not going to break down later on--feeling as if he's dynamite
about to explode all the time?"

"I'm going to play the game through," she said with a sort of fierce
happiness. "I've felt like a sneak thief about this. But now it's
different. He's more of a wolf than a man. Ben, I saw murder in his
face, I swear! And if it isn't wrong to tame wild beasts it isn't wrong
to tame him. I'm going to play the game, lead him as far as I can until
we get the horses--and then it'll be easy enough to make up by being
good the rest of my life."

"Ruth--girl--you've covered the whole ground. And when you have the
coin--" He broke off with laughter that was filled with drunken
excitement. "But what did you think of my game?"

She did not hear him, and standing with her hands clasped lightly behind
her she looked beyond the roof of the house and over the tops of the
western mountains, with the sun-haze about them.

"I feel as if I were on the top of the world," she said at last. "And I
wouldn't have one thing changed. We're playing for big stakes, but we're
taking a chance that makes the game worth while. What we win we'll
earn--because he's a devil. Isn't it what you'd call a fair bet?"

"The squarest in the world," said Connor stoutly.




_CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR_


They had no means of knowing when David would return and the ominous
shadow of Joseph, lingering near the patio, determined Connor on a walk
out of any possible earshot. They went down to the lake with the singing
of the men on the other side of the hill growing dim as they descended.
The cool of the day was beginning, and they walked close to the edge of
the water with the brown treetrunks on one side and the green images
floating beyond. Peace lay over Eden valley and the bright river that
ran through it, but Ben Connor had no mind to dwell on unessentials.

He had found in the girl an ally of unexpected strength. He expected
only a difficult tool filled with scruples, drawing back, imperiling his
plans with her hesitation. Instead, she was on fire with the plan. He
thought well to fan that fire and keep it steadily blazing.

"It's better for David; better for him than it is for us. Look at the
poor fool! He's in prison here and doesn't know it. He thinks he's
happy, but he's simply kidding himself. In six months I'll have him
chatting with millionaires."

"Let a barber do a day's work on him first."

"No. It's just the long-haired nuts like that who get by with the
high-steppers. He has a lingo about flowers and trees that'll knock
their eye out. I know the gang. Always on edge for something
different--music that sounds like a riot in a junk shop and poetry that
reads like a drunken printing-press. Well, David ought to be different
enough to suit 'em. I'll boost him, though: 'The Man that Brought Out
the Eden Grays!' He'll be headline stuff!"

He laughed so heartily that he did not notice the quick glance of
criticism which the girl cast at him.

"I'm not taking anything from him, really," went on Connor. "I'm simply
sneaking around behind him so's I can pour his pockets full of the coin.
That's all there is to it. Outside of the looks, tell me if there's
anything crooked you can see?"

"I don't think there is," she murmured. "I almost hope that there
isn't!"

She was so dubious about it that Connor was alarmed. He was fond of Ruth
Manning, but she was just "different" enough to baffle him. Usually he
divided mankind into three or four categories for the sake of fast
thinking. There were the "boobs," the "regular guys," the "high
steppers," and the "nuts." Sometimes he came perilously close to
including Ruth in the last class--with David Eden. And if he did not do
so, it was mainly because she had given such an exhibition of cool
courage only a few moments before. He had finished his peroration, now,
with a feeling of actual virtue, but the shadow on her face made him
change his tactics and his talk.

He confined himself, thereafter, strictly to the future. First he
outlined his plans for raising the cash for the big "killing." He told
of the men to whom he could go for backing. There were "hard guys" who
would take a chance. "Wise ones" who would back his judgment. "Fall
guys" who would follow him blindly. For ten percent he would get all the
cash he could place. Then it remained to try out the grays in secret,
and in public let them go through the paces ridden under wraps and
heavily weighted. He described the means of placing the big money before
the great race.

And as he talked his figures mounted from tens to hundreds to thousands,
until he was speaking in millions. In all of this profit she and David
and Connor would share dollar for dollar. At the first corner of the
shore they turned she had arrived at a snug apartment in New York. She
would have a housekeeper-companion. There would be a cosy living room
and a paneled dining room. In the entrance hall of the apartment house,
imitation of encrusted marble, no doubt.

But as they came opposite a little wooded island in the lake she had
added a maid to the housekeeper. Also, there was now a guest room. Some
one from Lukin would be in that room; some one from Lukin would go
through the place with her, marveling at her good fortune.

And clothes! They made all the difference. Dressed as she would be
dressed, when she came into a room that queer, cold gleam of envy would
be in the eyes of the women and the men would sit straighter!

Yet when they reached the place where the shore line turned north and
west her imagination, spurred by Connor's talk, was stumbling along
dizzy heights. Her apartment occupied a whole floor. Her butler was a
miracle of dignity and her chef a genius in the kitchen. On the great
table the silver and glass were things of frosted light. Her chauffeur
drove a monster automobile with a great purring engine that whipped her
about the city with the color blown into her cheeks. In her box at the
opera she was allowing the deep, soft luxury of the fur collar to slide
down from her throat, while along the boxes, in the galleries, there was
a ripple of light as the thousand glasses turned upon her. Then she
found that Connor was smiling at her. She flushed, but snapped her
fingers.

"This thing is going through," she declared.

"You won't weaken?"

"I'm as cold as steel. Let's go back. He'll probably be in the house by
this time."

Time had slipped past her unnoticed, and the lake was violet and gold
with the sunset as they turned away; under the trees along the terraces
the brilliant wild flowers were dimmed by a blue shadow.

"But I never saw wild flowers like those," she said to Connor.

"Nobody else ever did. But old Matthew, whoever he was, grew 'em and
kept crossing 'em until he got those big fellows with all the colors of
the rainbow."

"Hurry! We're late!"

"No, David's probably on top of that hill, now; always goes up there to
watch the sun rise and the sun set. Can you beat that?"

He chuckled, but a shade had darkened the face of the girl for a moment.
Then she lifted her head resolutely.

"I'm not going to try to understand him. The minute you understand a
thing you stop being afraid of it; and as soon as I stop being afraid of
David Eden I might begin to like him--which is what I don't want."

"What's that?" cried Connor, breaking in on her last words. When Ruth
began to think aloud he always stopped listening; it was a maxim of his
to never listen when a woman became serious.

"It's that strange giant."

"Joseph!" exclaimed Connor heavily. "Whipping did him no good. He'll
need killing one of these days."

But she had already reverted to another thing.

"Do you think he worships the sun?"

"I don't think. Try to figure out a fellow like that and you get to be
just as much of a nut as he is. Go on toward the house and I'll follow
you in a minute. I want to talk to big Joe."

He turned aside into the trees briskly, and the moment he was out of
sight of the girl he called softly: "Joseph!"

He repeated the call after a trifling wait before he saw the big man
coming unconcernedly through the trees toward him. Joseph came close
before he stopped--very close, as a man will do when he wishes to make
another aware of his size, and from this point of vantage, he looked
over Connor from head to foot with a glance of lingering and insolent
criticism. The gambler was somewhat amused and a little alarmed by that
attitude.

"Now, Joseph," he said, "tell me frankly why you're dodging me about the
valley. Waiting for a chance to throw stones?"

His smile remained without a reflection on the stolid face of the
servant.

"Benjamin," answered the deep, solemn voice, "I know all!"

It made Connor peer into those broad features as into a dim light. Then
a moment of reflection assured him that Joseph could not have learned
the secret.

"Haneemar, whom you know," continued Joseph, "has told me about you."

"And where," asked Connor, completely at sea, "did you learn of
Haneemar?"

"From Abraham. And I know that this is the head of Haneemar."

He brought out in his palm the little watch-charm of carved ivory.

"Of course," nodded Connor, feeling his way. "And what is it that you
know from Haneemar?"

"That you are evil, Benjamin, and that you have come here for evil. You
entered by a trick; and you will stay here for evil purposes until the
end."

"You follow around to pick up a little dope, eh?" chuckled Connor. "You
trail me to find out what I intend to do? Why don't you go to David and
warn him?"

"Have I forgotten the whip?" asked Joseph, his nostrils trembling with
anger. "But the good Haneemar now gives me power and in the end he will
betray you into my hands. That is why I follow you. Wherever you go I
follow; I am even able to know what you think! But hearken to me,
Benjamin. Take back the head of Haneemar and the bad luck that lives in
it. Take it back, and I shall no longer follow you. I shall forget the
whip. I shall be ready to do you a service."

He extended the little piece of ivory eagerly, but Connor drew back. His
superstitions were under the surface of his mind, but, still, they were
there, and the fear which Joseph showed was contagious.

"Why don't you throw it away if you're afraid of it, Joseph?"

"You know as I know," returned Joseph, glowering, "that it cannot be
thrown away. It must be given and freely accepted, as I--oh
fool--accepted it from you."

There was such a profound conviction in this that Connor was affected in
spite of himself. That little trinket had been the entering wedge
through which he had worked his way into the Garden and started on the
road to fortune. He would rather have cut off his hand, now, than take
it back.

"Find some one else to take it," he suggested cheerily. "I don't want
the thing."

"Then all that Abraham told me is true!" muttered Joseph, closing his
hand over the trinket. "But I shall follow you, Benjamin. When you think
you are alone you shall find me by turning your head. Every day by
sunrise and every day by the dark I beg Haneemar to put his curse on
you. I have done you no wrong, and you have had me shamed."

"And now you're going to have me bewitched, eh?" asked Connor.

"You shall see."

The gambler drew back another pace and through the shadows he saw the
beginning of a smile of animal-cunning on the face of Joseph.

"The devil take you and Haneemar together," he growled. "Remember this,
Joseph. I've had you whipped once. The next time I'll have you flayed
alive."

Instead of answering, Joseph merely grinned more openly, and the
gambler, to forget the ape-face, wheeled and hurried out from the trees.
The touch of nightmare dread did not leave him until he rejoined Ruth on
the higher terrace.

They found the patio glowing with light, the table near the fountain,
and three chairs around it. David came out of the shadow of the arcade
to meet them, and he was as uneasy as a boy who had a surprise for
grown-ups. He had not even time for a greeting.

"You have not seen your room?" he said to Ruth. "I have made it ready
for you. Come!"

He led the way half a pace in front, glancing back at them as though to
reprove their slowness, until he reached a door at which he turned and
faced her, laughing with excitement. She could hardly believe that this
man with his childish gayety was the same whose fury had terrified the
servants that same afternoon.

"Close your eyes--close them fast. You will not look until I say?"

She obeyed, setting her teeth to keep from smiling.

"Now come forward--step high for the doorway. So! You are in. Now
wait--now open your eyes and look!"

She obeyed again and saw first David standing back with an anxious smile
and the gesture of one who reveals, but is not quite sure of its effect.
Then she heard a soft, startled exclamation from Connor behind her. Last
of all she saw the room.

It was as if the walls had been broken down and a garden let inside--it
gave an effect of open air, sunlight and wind. Purple flowers like warm
shadows banked the farther corners, and out of them rose a great vine
draping the window. It had been torn bodily from the earth, and now the
roots were packed with damp moss, yellow-green. It bore in clusters and
single flowers and abundant bloom, each blossom as large as the mallow,
and a dark gold so rich that Ruth well-nigh listened for the murmur of
bees working this mine of pollen. From above, the great flowers hung
down against the dull red of the sunset sky; and from below the distant
treetops on the terrace pointed up with glimmers of the lake between.
There was only the reflected light of the evening, now, but the cuplike
blossoms were filled to the brim with a glow of their own.

She looked away.

A dapple deerskin covered the bed like the shadow under a tree in
mid-day, and the yellow of the flowers was repeated dimly on the floor
by a great, tawny hide of a mountain-lion. She took up some of the
purple flowers, and letting the velvet petals trail over her finger
tips, she turned to David with a smile. But what Connor saw, and saw
with a thrill of alarm, was that her eyes were filling with tears.

"See!" said David gloomily. "I have done this to make you happy, and now
you are sad!"

"Because it is so beautiful."

"Yes," said David slowly. "I think I understand."

But Connor took one of the flowers from her hand. She cried out, but too
late to keep him from ripping the blossom to pieces, and now he held up
a single petal, long, graceful, red-purple at the broader end and deep
yellow at the narrow.

"Think of that a million times bigger," said Connor, "and made out of
velvet. That'd be a design for a cloak, eh? Cost about a thousand bucks
to imitate this petal, but it'd be worth it to see you in it, eh?"

She looked to David with a smile of apology for Connor, but her hand
accepted the petal, and her second smile was for Connor himself.




_CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE_


When they went out into the patio again, David had lost a large part of
his buoyancy of spirits, as though in some subtle manner Connor had
overcast the triumph of the room; he left them with word that the
evening meal would soon be ready and hurried off calling orders to
Zacharias.

"Why did you do it?" she asked Connor as soon as they were alone.

"Because it made me mad to see a stargazer like that turning your head."

"But didn't you think the room was beautiful?"

"Sure. Like a riot in a florist's shop. But don't let this David take
you off guard with his rooms full of flowers and full of silence."

"Silence?"

"Haven't I told you about his Room of Silence? That's one of his queer
dodges. That room; you see? When anything bothers him he goes over and
sits down in there, because--do you know what he thinks sits with him?"

"Well?"

"God!"

She was between a smile and a gasp.

"Yep, that's David," grinned Connor. "Just plain nut."

"What's inside?"

"I don't know. Maybe flowers."

"Let's find out."

He caught her arm quickly.

"Not in a thousand years!" He changed color at the thought and glanced
guiltily around. "That would be the smash of everything. Why, he turned
over the whole Garden of Eden to me. I can go anywhere, but not a step
inside that room. It's his Holy Ground, you see! Maybe it's where he
keeps his jack. And I've a hunch that he has a slough of it tucked away
somewhere."

She raised her hand as an idea came to her half way through this speech.

"Listen! I have an idea that the clew to all of David's mystery is in
that room!"

"Drop that idea, Ruth," he ordered gruffly. "You've seen David on one
rampage, but it's nothing to what would happen if you so much as peeked
into that place. When the servants pass that door they take off their
hats--watch 'em the next time you have a chance. You won't make a slip
about that room?"

"No." But she added: "I'd give my soul--for one look!"

Dinner that night under the stars with the whispering of the fountain
beside them was a ceremony which Connor never forgot. The moon rose late
and in the meantime the sky was heavy and dark with sheeted patchwork of
clouds, with the stars showing here and there. The wind blew in gusts.
A wave began with a whisper on the hill, came with a light rushing
across the patio, and then diminished quickly among the trees down the
terraces. Rough, iron-framed lanterns gave the light and showed the
arcade stepping away on either side and growing dim toward the entrance.
That uncertain illumination made the crude pillars seem to have only the
irregularity of vast antiquity, stable masses of stone. Where the circle
of lantern-light overlapped rose the fountain, a pale spray forever
dissolving in the upper shadow. Connor himself was more or less used to
these things, but he became newly aware of them as the girl sent quick,
eager glances here and there.

She had placed a single one of the great yellow blossoms in her hair and
it changed her shrewdly. It brought out the delicate coloring of her
skin, and to the darkness of her eyes it lent a tint of violet. Plainly
she enjoyed the scene with its newness. David, of course, was the spice
to everything, and his capitulation was complete; he kept the girl
always on an uneasy balance between happiness and laughter. And Connor
trembled for fear the mirth would show through. But each change of her
expression appeared to delight David more than the last.

Under his deft knife the choicest white meat came away from the breast
of a chicken and he heaped it at once on the plate of Ruth. Then he
dropped his chin upon his great brown fist and watched with silent
delight while she ate. It embarrassed her; but her flush had a tinge of
pleasure in it, as Connor very well knew.

"Look!" said David, speaking softly as though Ruth would not hear him.
"How pleasant it is, to be three together. When we were two, one talked
and the other grew weary--was it not so? But now we are complete. One
speaks, one listens, and the other judges. I have been alone. The
Garden of Eden has been to me a prison, at many times. And now there is
nothing wanting. And why? There were many men before. We were not
lacking in numbers. Yet there was an emptiness, and now comes one small
creature, as delicate as a colt of three months, this being of smiles
and curious glances, this small voice, this woman--and at once the gap
is filled. Is it not strange?"

He cast himself back in his chair, as though he wished to throw her into
perspective with her surroundings, and all the time he was staring as
though she were an image, a picture, and not a thing of flesh and blood.
Connor himself was on the verge of a smile, but when he saw the face of
Ruth Manning his mirth disappeared in a chill of terror. She was
struggling and struggling in vain against a rising tide of laughter,
laughter in the face of David Eden and his sensitive pride.

It came, it broke through all bonds, and now it was bubbling from her
lips. As one who awaits the falling of a blow, Connor glanced furtively
at the host, and again he was startled.

There was not a shade of evil temper in the face of David. He leaned
forward, indeed, with a surge of the great shoulders, but it was as one
who listens to an entrancing music. And when she ceased, abruptly, he
sighed.

"Speak to me," he commanded.

She murmured a faint reply.

"Again," said David, half closing his eyes. And Connor nodded a frantic
encouragement to her.

"But what shall I say?"

"For the meaning of what you say," said David, "I have no care, but only
for the sound. Have you heard dripping in a well, a sound like water
filling a bottle and never reaching the top? It keeps you listening for
an hour, perhaps, always a soft sound, but always rising toward a
climax? Or a drowsy day when the wind hardly moves and the whistling of
a bird comes now and then out of the trees, cool and contented? Or you
pass a meadow of flowers in the warm sun and hear the ground murmur of
the bees, and you think at once of the wax films of the honeycomb, and
the clear golden honey? All those things I heard and saw when you
spoke."

"Plain nut!" said Connor, framing the words with silent lips.

But though her eyes rested on him, apparently she did not see his face.
She looked back at Connor with a wistful little half-smile.

At once David cast out both his hands toward hers.

"Ah, you are strange, new, delightful!" He stopped abruptly. Then: "Does
it make you happy to hear me say these things?"

"Why do you ask me that?" she said curiously.

"Because it fills me with unspeakable happiness to say them. If I am
silent and only think then I am not so pleased. When I see Glani
standing on the hilltop I feel his speed in the slope of his muscles,
the flaunt of his tail, the pride of his head; but when I gallop him,
and the wind of his galloping strikes my face--ha, that is a joy! So it
is speaking with you. When I see you I say within: 'She is beautiful!'
But when I speak it aloud your lips tremble a little toward a smile,
your eyes darken with pleasure, and then my heart rises into my throat
and I wish to speak again and again and again to find new things to say,
to say old things in new words. So that I may watch the changes in your
face. Do you understand? But now you blush. Is that a sign of anger?"

"It is a sign that no other men have ever talked to me in this manner."

"Then other men are fools. What I say is true. I feel it ring in me,
that it is the truth. Benjamin, my brother, is it not so? Ha!"

She was raising the wine-cup; he checked her with his eager, extended
hand.

"See, Benjamin, how this mysterious thing is done, this raising of the
hand. _We_ raise the cup to drink. An ugly thing--let it be done and
forgotten. But when _she_ lifts the cup it is a thing to be remembered;
how her fingers curve and the weight of the cup presses into them, and
how her wrist droops."

She lowered the cup hastily and put her hand before her face.

"I see," said Connor dryly.

"Bah!" cried the master of the Garden. "You do not see. But you, Ruth,
are you angry? Are you shamed?"

He drew down her hands, frowning with intense anxiety. Her face was
crimson.

"No," she said faintly.

"He says that he sees, but he does not see," went on David. "He is
blind, this Benjamin of mine. I show him my noblest grove of the
eucalyptus trees, each tree as tall as a hill, as proud as a king, as
beautiful as a thought that springs up from the earth. I show him these
glorious trees. What does he say? 'You could build a whole town out of
that wood!' Bah! Is that seeing? No, he is blind! Such a man would give
you hard work to do. But I say to you, Ruth, that to be beautiful is to
be wise, and industrious, and good. Surely you are to me like the rising
of the sun--my heart leaps up! And you are like the coming of the night
making the world beautiful and mysterious. For behind your eyes and
behind your words, out of the sound of your voice and your glances, I
guess at new things, strange things, hidden things. Treasures which
cannot be held in the hands. Should you grow as old as Elijah, withered,
meager as a grasshopper, the treasures would still be there. I, who have
seen them, can never forget them!"

Once more she covered her eyes with her hand, and David started up from
his chair.

"What have I done?" he asked faintly of Connor. He hurried around the
table to her. "Look up! How have I harmed you?"

"I am only tired," she said.

"I am a fool! I should have known. Come!" said David.

He drew her from the chair and led her across the lawn, supporting her.
At her door: "May sleep be to you like the sound of running water,"
murmured David.

And when the door was closed he went hastily back to Connor.




_CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX_


"What have I done? What have I done?" he kept moaning. "She is in pain.
I have hurt her."

"Sit down," said Connor, deeply amused.

It had been a curious revelation to him, this open talk of a man who was
falling in love. He remembered the way he had proposed to a girl, once:
"Say, Betty, don't you think you and me would hit it off pretty well,
speaking permanently?"

This flaunting language was wholly ludicrous to Connor. It was
book-stuff.

David had obeyed him with childlike docility, and sat now like a pupil
about to be corrected by the master.

"That point is this," explained Connor gravely. "You have the wrong
idea. As far as I can make out, you like Ruth?"

"It is a weak word. Bah! It is not enough."

"But it's enough to tell her. You see, men outside of the Garden don't
talk to a girl the way you do, and it embarrasses her to have you talk
about her all the time."

"Is it true?" murmured the penitent David. "Then what should I have
said?"

"Well--er--you might have said--that the flower went pretty well in her
hair, and let it go at that."

"But it was more, more, more! Benjamin, my brother, these hands of mine
picked that very flower. And I see that it has pleased her. She had
taken it up and placed it in her hair. It changes her. My flower brings
her close to me. It means that we have found a thing which pleases us
both. Just as you and I, Benjamin, are drawn together by the love of one
horse. So that flower in her hair is a great sign. I dwell upon it. It
is like a golden moon rising in a black night. It lights my way to her.
Words rush up from my heart, but cannot express what I mean!"

"Let it go! Let it go!" said Connor hastily, brushing his way through
this outflow of verbiage, like a man bothered with gnats. "I gather what
you mean. But the point is that about nine-tenths of what you think
you'd better not say. If you want to talk--well, talk about yourself.
That's what I most generally do with a girl. They like to hear a man say
what he's done."

"Myself!" said David heavily. "Talk of a dead stump when there is a
great tree beside it? Well, I see that I have much to learn."

"You certainly have," said Connor with much meaning. "I'd hate to turn
you loose in Manhattan."

"In what?"

"Never mind. But here's another thing. You know that she'll have to
leave pretty soon?"

The meaning slowly filtered into David's mind.

"Benjamin," he said slowly, "you are wise in many ways, with horses and
with women, it seems. But that is a fool's talk. Let me hear no more of
it. Leave me? Why should she leave me?"

Triumph warmed the heart of Connor.

"Because a girl can't ramble off into the mountains and put up in a
valley where there are nothing but men. It isn't done."

"Why not?"

"Isn't good form."

"I fail to understand."

"My dear fellow, she'd be compromised for life if it were known that she
had lived here with us."

David shook his head blankly.

"In one word," said Connor, striving to make his point, "she'd be
pointed out by other women and by men. They'd never have anything to do
with her. They'd say things that would make her ashamed, hurt her, you
know."

Understanding and wrath gathered in David's face.

"To such a man--to such a dog of a man--I would talk with my hands!"

"I think you would," nodded Connor, not a little impressed. "But you
might not be around to hear the talk."

"But women surely live with men. There are wives--"

"Ah! Man and wife--all very well!"

"Then it is simple. I marry her and then I keep her here forever."

"Perhaps. But will she marry you?"

"Why not?"

"Well, does she love you?"

"True." He stood up. "I'll ask her."

"For Heaven's sake, no! Sit down! You mustn't rush at a woman like this
the first day you know her. Give her time. Let me tell you when!"

"Benjamin, my dear brother, you are wise and I am a fool!"

"You'll do in time. Let me coach you, that's all, and you'll come on
famously. I can tell you this: that I think she likes you very well
already."

"Your words are like a shower of light, a fragrant wind. Benjamin, I am
hot with happiness! When may I speak to her?"

"I don't know. She may have guessed something out of what you said
to-night." He swallowed a smile. "You might speak to her about this
marriage to-morrow."

"It will be hard; but I shall wait."

"And then you'll have to go out of the Garden with her to get married."

"Out of the Garden? Never! Why should we?"

"Why, you'll need a minister, you know, to marry you."

"True. Then I shall send for one."

"But he might not want to make this long journey for the sake of one
marriage ceremony."

"There are ways, perhaps, of persuading him to come," said David, making
a grim gesture.

"No force or you ruin everything."

"I shall be ruled by you, brother. It seems I have little knowledge."

"Go easy always and you'll come out all right. Give her plenty of time.
A woman always needs a lot of time to make up her mind, and even then
she's generally wrong."

"What do you mean by that?"

"No matter. She'll probably want to go back to her home for a while."

"Leave me?"

"Not necessarily. But you, when a man gets engaged, it's sometimes a
couple of years between the time a woman promises to marry him and the
day of the ceremony."

"Do they wait so long, and live apart?"

"A thousand miles, maybe."

"Then you men beyond the mountains are made of iron!"

"Do you have to be away from her? Why not go along with her when she
goes home?"

"Surely, Benjamin, you know that a law forbids it!"

"You make your own laws in important things like this."

"It cannot be."

And so the matter rested when Connor left his host and went to bed. He
had been careful not to press the point. So unbelievably much ground had
been covered in the first few hours that he was dizzy with success. It
seemed ages since that Ruth had come running to him in the patio in
terror of her life. From that moment how much had been done!

Closing his eyes as he lay on his bed, he went back over each incident
to see if a false step had been made. As far as he could see, there had
not been a single unsound measure undertaken. The first stroke had been
the masterpiece. Out of a danger which had threatened instant
destruction of their plan she had won complete victory by her facing of
David, and when she put her hand in his as a sign of weakness, Connor
could see that she had made David her slave.

As the scene came back vividly before his eyes he could not resist an
impulse to murmur aloud to the dark: "Brave girl!"

She had grown upon him marvelously in that single half-day. The ability
to rise to a great situation was something which he admired above all
things in man or woman. It was his own peculiar power--to judge a man or
a horse in a glance, and dare to venture a fortune on chance. Indeed, it
was hardly a wonder that David Eden or any other man should have fallen
in love with her in that one half-day. She was changed beyond
recognition from the pale girl who sat at the telegraph key in Lukin and
listened to the babble of the world. Now she was out in that world,
acting on the stage and proving herself worthy of a role.

He rehearsed her acts. And finally he found himself flushing hotly at
the memory of her mingled pleasure and shame and embarrassment as David
of Eden had poured out his amazing flow of compliments.

At this point Connor sat up suddenly and violently in his bed.

"Steady, Ben!" he cautioned himself. "Watch your step!"




_CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN_


Ben Connor awoke the next morning with the sun streaming across the room
and sprang out of bed at once, worried. For about dawn noises as a rule
began around the house and the singing of the old men farther down the
hill. The Garden of Eden awakened at sunrise, and this silence even when
the sun was high alarmed the gambler. He dressed hastily, and opening
his door, he saw David walking slowly up and down the patio. At the
sight of Connor he raised a warning finger.

"Let us keep a guard upon our voices," he murmured, coming to Connor. "I
have ordered my servants to move softly and to keep from the house if
they may."

"What's happened?"

"She sleeps, Benjamin." He turned toward her door with a smile that the
gambler never forgot. "Let her waken rested."

Connor looked at the sky.

"I've come too late for breakfast, even?"

A glance of mild rebuke was turned upon him.

"Surely, Benjamin, we who are strong will not eat before her who is
weak?"

"Are you going to starve yourself because she's sleepy?"

"But I have not felt hunger."

He added in a voice of wonder: "Listen!"

Ruth Manning was singing in her room, and Connor turned away to hide his
frown. For he was not by any means sure whether the girl sang from the
joy she found in this great adventure or because of David Eden. He was
still further troubled when she came out to the breakfast table in the
patio. He had expected that she would be more or less confused by the
presence of David after his queer talk of the night before, but sleep
seemed to have wiped everything from her memory. Her first nod, to be
sure, was for the gambler, but her smile was for David of Eden. Connor
fell into a reverie which was hardly broken through the meal by the deep
voice of David or the laughter of Ruth. Their gayety was a barrier, and
he was, subtly, left on the outside. David had proposed to the girl a
ride through the Garden, and when he went for the horses the gambler
decided to make sure of her position. He was too much disturbed to be
diplomatic. He went straight to the point.

"I'm sorry this is such a mess for you; but if you can buck up for a
while it won't take long to finish the job."

She looked at him without understanding, which was what he least wanted
in the world. So he went on: "As a matter of fact, the worst of the job
hasn't come. You can do what you want with him right now. But
afterward--when you get him out of the valley the hard thing will be to
hold him."

"You're angry with poor David. What's he done now?"

"Angry with him? Of course not! I'm a little disgusted, that's all."

"Tell me why in words of one syllable, Ben."

"You're too fine a sort to have understood. And I can't very well
explain."

She allowed herself to be puzzled for a moment and then laughed.

"Please don't be mysterious. Tell me frankly."

"Very well. I think you can make David go out of the valley when we go.
But once we have him back in a town the trouble will begin. You
understand why he's so--fond of you, Ruth?"

"Let's not talk about it."

"Sorry to make you blush. But you see, it isn't because you're so
pretty, Ruth, but simply because you're a woman. The first he's ever
seen."

All her high coloring departed at once; a pale, sick face looked at
Connor.

"Don't say it," murmured the girl. "I thought last night just for a
moment--but I couldn't let myself think of it for an instant."

"I understand," said Connor gently. "You took all that highfaluting
poetry stuff to be the same thing. But, say, Ruth, I've heard a young
buck talk to a young squaw--before he married her. Just about the same
line of junk, eh? What makes me sick is that when we get him out in a
town he'll lose his head entirely when he sees a room full of girls.
We'll simply have to plant a contract on him and--then let him go!"

"Do you think it's only that?" she said again, faintly.

"I leave it to you. Use your reason, and figure it out for yourself. I
don't mean that you're in any danger. You know you're not as long as I'm
around!"

She thanked him with a wan smile.

"But how can I let him come near me--now?"

"It's a mess. I'm sorry about it. But once the deal goes through I'll
make this up to you if it takes me the rest of my life. You believe me?"

"I know you're true blue, Ben! And--I trust you."

He was a little disturbed to find that his pulse was decidedly quickened
by that simple speech.

"Besides, I want to thank you for letting me know this. I understand
everything about him now!"

In her heart of hearts she was hating David with all her might. For all
night long, in her dreams, she had been seeing again the gestures of
those strong brown hands, and the flash of his eyes, and hearing the
deep tremor of his voice. The newness of this primitive man and his ways
and words had been an intoxicant to her; because of his very difference
she was a little afraid, and now the warning of Connor chimed in
accurately with a premonition of her own. That adulation poured at the
feet of Ruth Manning had been a beautiful and marvelous thing; but flung
down simply in honor of her sex it became almost an insult. The memory
made her shudder. The ideal lover whom she had prefigured in some of her
waking dreams had always spoken with ardor--a holy ardor. From this
passion of the body she recoiled.

Something of all this Connor read in her face and in her thoughtful
silence, and he was profoundly contented. He had at once neutralized all
of David's eloquence and fortified his own position. It was both a blow
driven home and a counter. Not that he would admit a love for the girl;
he had merely progressed as far as jealousy. He told himself that his
only interest was in keeping her from an emotion which, once developed,
might throw her entirely on the side of David and ruin their joint
plans. He had refused to accompany the master of the Garden and the girl
on their ride through the valley because, as he told himself, he
"couldn't stand seeing another grown man make such an ass of himself" as
David did when he was talking with the girl.

He contented himself now with watching her face when David came back to
the patio, followed by Glani and the neat-stepping little mare, Tabari.
The forced smile with which she met the big man was a personal triumph
to the gambler.

"If you can win her under that handicap, David," he said softly to
himself, "you deserve her, and everything else you can get."

David helped her into the saddle on Tabari, and himself sprang onto the
pad upon Glani's back. They went out side by side.

It was a cool day for that season, and the moment the north wind struck
them David shouted softly and sent Glani at a rushing gallop straight
into the teeth of the wind. Tabari followed at a pace which Ruth, expert
horse-woman though she was, had never dreamed of. For the first time she
had that impression of which Ben Connor had spoken to her of the horse
pouring itself over the road without strain and without jar of smashing
hoofs.

Ruth let Tabari extend herself, until the mare was racing with ears flat
against her neck. She had even an impression that Glani, burdened by the
great weight of David, was being left behind, but when she glanced to
the side she saw that the master half a length back, was keeping a
strong pull on the stallion, and Glani went smoothly, easily, with
enormous strides, and fretting at the restraint.

She gained two things from that glance. The first was a sense of
impatience because the stallion kept up so easily; in the second place,
the same wind which drove the long hair of David straight back blew all
suspicious thoughts out of her mind. She drew Tabari back to a hand
gallop and then to a walk with her eyes dimmed by the wind of the ride
and the blood tingling in her cheeks.

"It was like having wings," she cried happily as David let the stallion
come up abreast.

"Tabari is sturdy, but she lacks speed," said the dispassionate master.
"When she was a foal of six months and was brought to me for judgment, I
thought twice, because her legs were short. However, it is well that she
was allowed to live and breed."

"Allowed to live?" murmured Ruth Manning.

"To keep the line of the gray horse perfect," said David, "they must be
watched with a jealous eye, and those which are weak must not live. The
mares are killed and the stallions gelded and sold."

"And can you judge the little colts?"

Her voice was too low for David to catch a sense of pain and anger in
it.

"It must be done. It is a duty. To-day is the sixth month of Timeh, the
daughter of Juri. You shall witness the judging. Elijah is the master."

His face hardened at the name of Elijah, and the girl caught her breath.
But before she could speak they broke out of a grove and came in view of
a wide meadow across which four yoked cattle drew a harrow, smoothing
the plow furrows to an even, black surface.

It carried the girl far back; it was like opening an ancient book of
still more ancient tales; the musty smell completes the illusion. The
cattle plodding slowly on, seeming to rest at every step, filled in the
picture of which the primitive David Eden was the central figure.

"Yokes," she cried. "I've never seen them before!"

"For some work we use the horses, but the jerking of the harrow ruins
their shoulders. Besides, we may need the cattle for a new journey."

"A journey? With those?"

"That was how the four came into the Garden. And I am enjoined to have
the strong wagons always ready and the ox teams always complete in case
it becomes necessary to leave this valley and go elsewhere. Of course,
that may never be."




_CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT_


He brought Glani to a halt. They had left the sight of the meadow,
though they could still hear the snorting of the oxen at their labor, a
distant sound. Here, on one side of the road, the forest tumbled back
from a swale of ground across which a tiny stream leaped and flashed
with crooked speed, and the ground seemed littered with bright gold, so
closely were the yellow wild flowers packed.

"Two days ago," said David, "they were only buds. See them now!"

He slipped from his horse and, stooping, rose again in a moment with his
hands full of the yellow blossoms.

"They have a fragrance that makes them seem far away," he said. "See!"

He tossed the flowers at her; the wind caught them and spangled her hair
and her clothes with them, and she breathed a rare perfume. David fell
to clapping his hands and laughing like a child at the picture she made.
She had never liked him so well as she did at this moment. She had never
pitied him as she did now; she was not wise enough to shrink from that
emotion.

"It was made for you--this place."

And before she could move to defend herself he had raised her strongly,
lightly from the saddle, and placed her on the knoll in the thickest of
the flowers. He stood back to view his work, nodding his satisfaction,
and she, looking up at him, felt the old sense of helplessness sweep
over her. Every now and then David Eden overwhelmed her like an
inescapable destiny; there was something foredoomed about the valley and
about him.

"I knew you would look like this," he was saying. "How do men make a
jewel seem more beautiful? They set it in gold! And so with you, Ruth.
Your hair against the gold is darker and richer and more like piles and
coils of shadow. Your face against the gold is the transparent white,
with a bloom in it. Your hands are half lost in the softness of that
gold. And to think that is a picture you can never see! But I forget."

His face grew dark.

"Here I have stumbled again, and yet I started with strong vows and
resolves. My brother Benjamin warned me!"

It shocked her for a reason she could not analyze to hear the big man
call Connor his brother. Connor, the gambler, the schemer! And here was
David Eden with the green of the trees behind, his feet in the golden
wild flowers, and the blue sky behind his head. Brother to Ben Connor?

"And how did he warn you?" she asked.

"That I must not talk to you of yourself, because, he said, it shames
you. Is that true?"

"I suppose it is," she murmured. Yet she was a little indignant because
Connor had presumed to interfere. She knew he could only have done it to
save her from embarrassment, but she rebelled at the thought of Connor
as her conversational guardian.

Put a guard over David of Eden, and what would he be? Just like a score
of callow youths whom she had known, scattering foolish commonplaces,
trying to make their dull eyes tell her flattering things which they had
not brains enough to put into words.

"I am sorry," said David, sighing. "It is hard to stand here and see
you, and not talk of what I see. When the sun rises the birds sing in
the trees; when I see you words come up to my teeth."

He made a grimace. "Well, I'll shut them in. Have I been very wrong in
my talk to you?"

"I think you haven't talked to many women," said Ruth. "And--most men do
not talk as you do."

"Most men are fools," answered the egoist. "What I say to you is the
truth, but if the truth offends you I shall talk of other things."

He threw himself on the ground sullenly. "Of what shall I talk?"

"Of nothing, perhaps. Listen!"

For the great quiet of the valley was falling on her, and the distances
over which her eyes reached filled her with the delightful sense of
silence. There were deep blue mountains piled against the paler sky;
down the slope and through the trees the river was untarnished, solid,
silver; in the boughs behind her the wind whispered and then stopped to
listen likewise. There was a faint ache in her heart at the thought that
she had not known such things all her life. She knew then what gave the
face of David of Eden its solemnity. She leaned a little toward him.
"Now tell me about yourself. What you have done."

"Of anything but that."

"Why not?"

"No more than I want you to tell me about yourself and what you have
done. What you feel, what you think from time to time, I wish to know; I
am very happy to know. I fit in those bits of you to the picture I have
made."

Once more the egoist was talking!

"But to have you tell me of what you have done--that is not pleasant. I
do not wish to know that you have talked to other men and smiled on
them. I do not wish to know of a single happy day you spent before you
came to the Garden of Eden. But I shall tell you of the four men who are
my masters if you wish."

"Tell me of them if you will."

"Very well. John was the beginning. He died before I came. Of the others
Matthew was my chief friend. He was very old and thin. His wrist was
smaller than yours, almost. His hair was a white mist. In the evening
there seemed to be a pale moonshine around his face.

"He was very small and old--so old that sometimes I thought he would dry
up or dissolve and disappear. Toward the last, before God called him,
Matthew grew weak, and his voice was faint, yet it was never sharp or
shaken. Also, until the very end his eyes were young, for his heart was
young.

"That was Matthew. He was like you. He liked the silence. 'Listen,' he
would say. 'The great stillness is the voice; God is speaking.' Then he
would raise one thin finger and we caught our breath and listened.

"Do you see him?"

"I see him, and I wish that I had known him."

"Of the others, Luke was taller than I. He had yellow hair as long and
as coarse as the mane of a yellow horse. When he rode around the lake we
could hear him coming for a great distance by his singing, for his voice
was as strong as the neigh of Glani. I have only to close my eyes, and I
can hear that singing of Luke from beside the lake. Ah, he was a huge
man! The horses sweated under him.

"His beard was long; it came to the middle of his belly; it had a great
blunt square end. Once I angered him. I crept to him when he slept--I
was a small boy then--and I trimmed the beard down to a point.

"When Luke wakened he felt the beard and sat for a long time looking at
me. I was so afraid that I grew numb, I remember. Then he went to the
Room of Silence. When he came out his anger was gone, but he punished
me. He took me to the lake and caught me by the heels and swung me
around his head. When he loosened his fingers I shot into the air like a
light stone. The water flashed under me, and when I struck the surface
seemed solid. I thought it was death, for my senses went out, but Luke
waded in and dragged me back to the shore. However, his beard remained
pointed till he died."

He chuckled at the memory.

"Paul reproved Luke for what he had done. Paul was a big man, also, but
he was short, and his bigness lay in his breadth. He had no hair, and he
stood under Luke nodding so that the sun flashed back and forth on his
bald head. He told Luke that I might have been killed.

"'Better teach him sober manners now,' said Luke, 'than be a jester to
knock at the gate of God.'

"This Paul was wonderfully silent. He was born unhappy and nothing could
make him smile. He used to wander through the valley alone in the middle
of winter, half dead with cold and eating nothing. In those times, even
Luke was not strong enough to make him come home to us.

"I know that for ten days at one time he had gone without speech. For
that reason he loved to have Joseph with him, because Joseph understood
signs.

"But when silence left him, Paul was great in speech. Luke spoke in a
loud voice and Matthew beautifully, but Paul was terrible. He would fall
on his knees in an agony and pray to God for salvation for us and for
himself. While he kneeled he seemed to grow in size. He filled the room.
And his words were like whips. They made me think of all my sins. That
is how I remember Paul, kneeling, with his long arms thrown over his
head.

"Matthew died in the evening just as the moon rose. He was sitting
beside me. He put his hand in mine. After a while I felt that the hand
was cold, and when I looked at Matthew his head had fallen.

"Paul died in a drift of snow. We always knew that he had been on his
knees praying when the storms struck him and he would not rise until he
had finished the prayer.

"Luke bowed his head one day at the table and died without a sound--in
spite of all his strength.

"All these men have not really died out of the valley. They are here,
like mists; they are faces of thin air. Sometimes when I sit alone at my
table, I can almost see a spirit-hand like that of Matthew rise with a
shadow-glass of wine.

"But shall I tell you a strange thing? Since you came into the valley,
these mist-images of my dead masters grow faint and thinner than ever."

"You will remember me, also, when I have gone?"

"Do not speak of it! But yes, if you should go, every spring, when these
yellow flowers blossom, you would return to me and sit as you are
sitting now. However you are young, yet there are ways. After Matthew
died, for a long time I kept fresh flowers in his room and kept his
memory fresh with them. But," he repeated, "you are young. Do not talk
of death!"

"Not of death, but of leaving the Garden."

He stared gravely at her, and flushed.

"You are tormenting me as I used to torment my masters when I was a boy.
But it is wrong to anger me. Besides I shall not let you go."

"Not _let_ me go?"

"Am I a fool?" he asked hotly. "Why should I let you go?"

"You could not keep me."

It brought him to his feet with a start.

"What will free you?"

"Your own honor, David."

His head fell.

"It is true. Yes, it is true. But let us ride on. I no longer am pleased
with this place. It is tarnished; there are unhappy thoughts here!"

"What a child he is!" thought the girl, as she climbed into the saddle
again. "A selfish, terrible, wonderful child!"

It seemed, after that, that the purpose of David was to show the
beauties of the Garden to her until she could not brook the thought of
leaving. He told her what grew in each meadow and what could be reaped
from it.

He told her what fish were caught in the river and the lake. He talked
of the trees. He swung down from Glani, holding with hand and heel, and
picked strange flowers and showed them to her.

"What a place for a house!" she said, when, near the north wall, they
passed a hill that overlooked the entire length of the valley.

"I shall build you a house there," said David eagerly. "I shall build it
of strong rock. Would that make you happy? Very tall, with great rooms."

An impish desire to mock him came to her.

"Do you know what I'm used to? It's a boarding house where I live in a
little back bedroom, and they call us to meals with a bell."

The humor of this situation entirely failed to appeal to him.

"I also," he said, "have a bell. And it shall be used to call you to
dinner, if you wish."

He was so grave that she did not dare to laugh. But for some reason that
moment of bantering brought the big fellow much closer to her than he
had been before. And when she saw him so docile to her wishes, for all
his strength and his mastery, the only thing that kept her from opening
her heart to him, and despising the game which she and Connor were
playing with him, was the warning of the gambler.

"I've heard a young buck talk to a young squaw--before he married her.
The same line of junk!"

Connor must be right. He came from the great city.

But before that ride was over she was repeating that warning very much
as Odysseus used the flower of Hermes against the arts of Circe. For the
Garden of Eden, as they came back to the house after the circuit, seemed
to her very much like a little kingdom, and the monarch thereof was
inviting her in dumb-show to be the queen of the realm.




_CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE_


At the house they were met by one of the servants who had been waiting
for David to receive from the master definite orders concerning some
woodchopping. For the trees of the garden were like children to David of
Eden, and he allowed only the ones he himself designated to be cut for
timber or fuel. He left the girl with manifest reluctance.

"For when I leave you of what do you think, and what do you do? I am
like the blind."

She felt this speech was peculiar in character. Who but David of Eden
could have been jealous of the very thoughts of another? And smiling at
this, she went into the patio where Ben Connor was still lounging. Few
things had ever been more gratifying to the gambler than the sight of
the girl's complacent smile, for he knew that she was judging David.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Nothing worth repeating. But I think you're wrong, Ben. He isn't a
barbarian. He's just a child."

"That's another word for the same thing. Ever see anything more brutal
than a child? The wildest savage that ever stepped is a saint compared
with a ten-year-old boy."

"Perhaps. He acts like ten years. When I mention leaving the valley he
flies into a tantrum; he has taken me so much for granted that he has
even picked out the site for my house."

"As if you'd ever stay in a place like this!"

He covered his touch of anxiety with loud laughter.

"I don't know," she was saying thoughtfully a moment later. "I like
it--a lot."

"Anything seems pretty good after Lukin. But when your auto is buzzing
down Broadway--"

She interrupted him with a quick little laugh of excitement.

"But do you really think I can make him leave the valley?"

"Of course I'm sure."

"He says there's a law against it."

"I tell you, Ruth, you're his law now; not whatever piffle is in that
Room of Silence."

She looked earnestly at the closed door. Her silence had always bothered
the gambler, and this one particularly annoyed him.

"Let's hear your thoughts?" he asked uneasily.

"It's just an idea of mine that inside that room we can find out
everything we want to know about David Eden."

"What do we want to know?" growled Connor. "I know everything that's
necessary. He's a nut with a gang of the best horses that ever stepped.
I'm talking horse, not David Eden. If I have to make the fool rich, it
isn't because I want to."

She returned no direct answer, but after a moment: "I wish I knew."

"What?"

She became profoundly serious.

"The point is this: he _may_ be something more than a boy or a savage.
And if he _is_ something more, he's the finest man I've ever laid eyes
on. That's why I want to get inside that room. That's why I want to
learn the secret--if there is a secret--the things he believes in, how
he happens to be what he is and how--"

Connor had endured her rising warmth of expression as long as he could.
Now he exploded.

"You do me one favor," he cried excitedly, more moved than she had ever
seen him before. "Let me do your thinking for you when it comes to other
men. You take my word about this David Eden. Bah! When I have you fixed
up in little old Manhattan you'll forget about him and his mystery
inside a week. Will you lay off on the thinking?"

She nodded absently. In reality she was struck by the first similarity
she had ever noticed between David of Eden and Connor the gambler:
within ten minutes they had both expressed remarkable concern as to what
might be her innermost thoughts. She began to feel that Connor himself
might have elements of the boy in his make up--the cruel boy which he
protested was in David Eden.

She had many reasons for liking Connor. For one thing he had offered
her an escape from her old imprisoned life. Again he had flattered her
in the most insinuating manner by his complete trust. She knew that
there was not one woman in ten thousand to whom he would have confided
his great plan, and not one in a million whose ability to execute his
scheme he would have trusted.

More than this, before her trip to the Garden he had given her a large
sum of money for the purchase of the Indian's gelding; and Ruth Manning
had learned to appreciate money. He had not asked for any receipt. His
attitude had been such that she had not even been able to mention that
subject.

Yet much as she liked Connor there were many things about him which
jarred on her. There was a hardness, always working to the surface like
rocks on a hard soil. Worst of all, sometimes she felt a degree of
uncleanliness about his mind and its working. She would not have
recoiled from these things had he been nearer her own age; but in a man
well over thirty she felt that these were fixed characteristics.

He was in all respects the antipode of David of Eden. It was easier to
be near Connor, but not so exciting. David wore her out, but he also was
marvelously stimulating. The dynamic difference was that Connor
sometimes inspired her with aversion, and David made her afraid. She was
roused out of her brooding by the voice of the gambler saying: "When a
woman begins to think, a man begins to swear."

She managed to smile, but these cheap little pat quotations which she
had found amusing enough at first now began to grate on her through
repetition. Just as Connor tagged and labeled his idea with this
aphorism, so she felt that Connor himself was tagged by them. She found
him considering her with some anxiety.

"You haven't begun to doubt me, Ruth?" he asked her.

And he put out his hand with a note of appeal. It was a new role for him
and she at once disliked it. She shook the hand heartily.

"That's a foolish thing to say," she assured him. "But--why does that
old man keep sneaking around us?"

It was Zacharias, who for some time had been prowling around the patio
trying to find something to do which would justify his presence.

"Do you think David Eden keeps him here as a spy on us?"

This was too much for even Connor's suspicious mind, and he chuckled.

"They all want to hang around and have a look at you--that's the point,"
he answered. "Speak to him and you'll see him come running."

It needed not even speech; she smiled and nodded at Zacharias, and he
came to her at once with a grin of pleasure wrinkling his ancient face.
She invited him to sit down.

"I never see you resting," she said.

"David dislikes an idler," said Zacharias, who acknowledged her
invitation by dropping his withered hands on the back of the chair, but
made no move to sit down.

"But after all these years you have worked for him, I should think he
would give you a little house of your own, and nothing to do except take
care of yourself."

He listened to her happily, but it was evident from his pause that he
had not gathered the meaning of her words.

"You come from the South?" he asked at length.

"My father came from Tennessee."

There was an electric change in the face of the Negro.

"Oh, Lawd, oh, Lawd!" he murmured, his voice changing and thickening a
little toward the soft Southern accent. "That's music to old
Zacharias!"

"Do you come from Tennessee, Zacharias?"

Again there was a pause as the thoughts of Zacharias fled back to the
old days.

"Everything in between is all shadowy like evening, but what I remember
most is the little houses on both sides of the road with the gardens
behind them, and the babies rolling in the dust and shouting and their
mammies coming to the doors to watch them."

"How long ago was that?" she asked, deeply touched.

He grew troubled.

"Many and many a year ago--oh, many a long, weary year, for Zacharias!"

"And you still think of the old days?"

"When the bees come droning in the middle of the day, sometimes I think
of them."

He struck his hands lightly together and his misty-bright eyes were
plainly looking through sixty years as though they were a day.

"But why did you leave?" asked Ruth tenderly.

Zacharias slowly drew his eyes away from the mists of the past and
became aware of the girl's face once more.

"Because my soul was burning in sin. It was burning and burning!"

"But wouldn't you like to go back?"

The head of Zacharias fell and he knitted his fingers.

"Coming to the Garden of Eden was like coming into heaven. There's no
way of getting out again without breaking the law. The Garden is just
like heaven!"

Connor spoke for the first time.

"Or hell!" he exclaimed.

It caused Ruth Manning to cry out at him softly; Zacharias was mute.

"Why did you say that?" said the girl, growing angry.

"Because I hate to see a bad bargain," said the gambler. "And it looks
to me as if our friend here paid pretty high for anything he gets out of
the Garden."

He turned sharply to Zacharias.

"How long have you been working here?"

"Sixty years. Long years!"

"And what have you out of it? What clothes?"

"Enough to wear."

"What food?"

"Enough to eat."

"A house of your own?"

"No."

"Land of your own?"

"No."

"Sixty years and not a penny saved! That's what I call a sharp bargain!
What else have you gained?"

"A good bright hope of heaven."

"But are you sure, Zacharias? Are you sure? Isn't it possible that all
these five masters of yours may have been mistaken?"

Zacharias could only stare in his horror. Finally he turned away and
went silently across the patio.

"Ben," cried the girl softly, "why did you do it? Aside from torturing
the poor man, what if this comes to David's ear?"

Connor snapped his finger. His manner was that of one who knows that he
has taken a foolish risk and wishes to brazen the matter out.

"It'll never come to the ear of David! Why? Because he'd wring the neck
of the old chap if he even guessed that he'd been talking about leaving
the valley. And in the meantime I cut away the ground beneath David's
feet. He has not standing room, pretty soon. Nothing left to him, by
Jove, but his own conceit, and he has tons of that! Well, let him use it
and get fat on it!"

She wondered why Connor had come to actually hate the master of the
Garden. Sure David of Eden had never harmed the gambler. She remembered
something that she had heard long before: that the hatred always lies on
the side of injurer and not of the injured.

They heard David's voice, at this point, approaching, and in another
moment a small cavalcade entered the patio.




_CHAPTER THIRTY_


First, a white flash beneath the shadow of the arched way, came a colt
at full run, stopping short with four sprawling, braced feet at the
sight of the strangers. It was not fear so much as surprise, for now it
pricked its ears and advanced a dainty step or two. Ruth cried out with
delight at the fawn-like beauty of the delicate creature. The Eden Gray
was almost white in the little colt, and with its four dark stockings it
seemed, when it ran, to be stepping on thin air. That impression was
helped by the comparatively great length of the legs.

Next came the mother, walking, as though she was quite confident that no
harm could come to her colt in this home of all good things, but with
her fine head held high and her eyes luminous with concern, a little
anxious because the youngster had been out of sight for a moment.

And behind them strode David with Elijah at his side.

Ruth could never have recognized Elijah as the statuesque figure which
had confronted David on the previous day. He was now bowing and scraping
like some withered old man, striving to make a good impression on a
creditor to whom a great sum was owing. She remembered then what David
had told her earlier in the day about the judging of Timeh, the daughter
of Juri. This, then, was the crisis, and here was Elijah striving to
conciliate the grim judge. The old man kept up a running fire of talk
while David walked slowly around the colt. Ruth wondered why the master
of the Garden did not cry out with pleasure at sight of the beautiful
creature. Connor had drawn her back a little.

"You see that six months' mare?" he said softly, with a tremor in his
voice. "I'd pay ten thousand flat for her the way she stands. Ten
thousand--more if it were asked!"

"But David doesn't seem very pleased."

"Bah! He's bursting with pleasure. But he won't let on because he
doesn't want to flatter old Elijah."

"If he doesn't pass the colt do you know what happens?"

"What?"

"They kill it!"

"I'd a lot rather see them kill a man!" snarled Connor. "But they won't
touch _that_ colt!"

"I don't know. Look at poor Elijah!"

David, stopping in his circular walk, now stood with his arms folded,
gazing intently at Timeh. Elijah was a picture of concern. The whites of
his eyes flashed as his glances rolled swiftly from the colt to the
master. Once or twice he tried to speak, but seemed too nervous to give
voice.

At length: "A true daughter of Juri, O David. And was there ever a more
honest mare than Juri? The same head, mark you, deep from the eye to the
angle of the jaw. And under the head--come hither, Timeh!"

Timeh flaunted her heels at the sun and then came with short, mincing
steps.

"At six months," boasted Elijah, "she knows my voice as well as her
mother. Stay, Juri!"

The inquisitive mare had followed Timeh, but now, reassured, she dropped
her head and began cropping the turf of the patio. Still, from the play
of her ears, it was evident that Timeh was not out of the mother's
thoughts for an instant.

"Look you, David!" said Elijah. He raised the head of Timeh by putting
his hand beneath her chin.

"I can put my whole hand between the angles of her jaw! And see how her
ears flick back and forth, like the twitching ears of a cat! Ha, is not
that a sign?"

He allowed the head to fall again, but he caught it under his arms and
faced David in this manner, throwing out his hand in appeal. Still David
spoke not a word.

With a gesture he made Elijah move to one side. Then he stepped to
Timeh. She was uneasy at his coming, but under the first touch of his
hand Timeh became as still as rock and looked at her mother in a scared
and helpless fashion. It seemed that Juri understood a great crisis was
at hand; for now she advanced resolutely and with her dainty muzzle she
followed with sniffs the hand of David as it moved over the little colt.
He seemed to be seeing with his finger-tips alone, kneading under the
skin in search of vital information. Along the muscles those dexterous
fingers ran, and down about the heavy bones of the joints, where they
lingered long, seeming to read a story in every crevice.

Never once did he speak, but Ruth felt that she could read words in the
brightening, calm, and sudden shadows across his face.

Elijah accompanied the examination with a running-fire of comment.

"There is quality in those hoofs, for you! None of your gray-blue stuff
like the hoofs of Tabari, say, but black as night and dense as rock.
Aye, David, you may well let your hand linger down that neck. She will
step freely, this Timeh of mine, and stride as far as a mountain-lion
can leap! Withers high enough. That gives a place for the ligaments to
take hold. A good long back, but not too long to carry a weight. She
will not be one of your gaunt-bellied horses, either; she will have wind
and a bottom for running. She will gallop on the third day of the
journey as freely as on the first. And she will carry her tail well out,
always, with that big, strong dock."

He paused a moment, for David was moving his hands over the hindlegs and
lingering long at the hocks. And the face of Elijah grew convulsed with
anxiety.

"Is there anything wrong with those legs?" murmured Ruth to Connor.

"Not a thing that I see. Maybe the stifles are too straight. I think
they might angle out a bit more. But that's nothing serious. Besides, it
may be the way Timeh is standing. What's the matter?"

She was clinging to his arm, white-faced.

"If that colt has to die I--I'll want to kill David Eden!"

"Hush, Ruth! And don't let him see your face!"

David moved back from Timeh and again folded his arms.

"The body of the horse is one thing," ran on Elijah uneasily, "and the
spirit is another. Have you not told us, David, that a curious colt
makes a wise horse? That is Timeh! Where will you guess that I found her
when I went to bring her to you even now? She had climbed up the face of
the cliff, far up a crevice where a man would not dare to go. I dared
not even cry out to her for fear she would fall if she turned her head.
To have climbed so high was almost impossible, but how would she come
down when there was no room for her to turn?

"I was dizzy and sick with grief. But Timeh saw me, and down she came,
without turning. She lifted her hoofs and put them down as a cat lifts
and puts down wet paws. And in a moment she was safe on the meadow and
frisking around me. Juri had been so worried that she made Timeh stop
running and nosed her all over to make sure that she was unhurt by that
climb. But tell me: will not a colt that risks its life to climb for a
tuft of grass, run till its heart breaks for the master in later years?"

For the first time David spoke.

"Is she so wise a colt?" he said.

"Wise?" cried Elijah, his eye shining with joy at the opening which he
had made. "I talk to her as I talk to a man. She is as full of tricks as
a dog. Look, now!"

He leaned over and pretended to pick at the grass, whereat Timeh stole
up behind him and drew out a handkerchief from his hip pocket. Off she
raced and came back in a flashing circle to face Elijah with the cloth
fluttering in her teeth.

"So!" cried Elijah, taking the handkerchief again and looking eagerly at
the master of the Garden. "Was there ever a colt like my Timeh?"

"The back legs," said David slowly.

Elijah had been preparing himself to speak again, with a smile. He was
arrested in the midst of a gesture and his face altered like a man at
the banquet at the news of a death.

"The hind legs, David," he echoed hollowly. "But what of them? They are
a small part of the whole! And they are not wrong. They are not very
wrong, oh my master!"

"The hocks are sprung in and turned a little."

"A very little. Only the eye of David could see it and know that it is
wrong!"

"A small flaw makes the stone break. At a rotten knot-hole the great
tree snaps in the storm. And a small sin may undermine a good man. The
hind legs are wrong, Elijah."

"To be sure. In a colt. Many things seem wrong in a colt, but in the
grown horse they disappear!"

"This fault will not disappear. It is the set of the joint and that can
never be changed. It can only grow worse."

Elijah, staring straight ahead, was searching his brain, but that brain
was numbed by the calamity which had befallen him. He could only stroke
the lovely head of the little colt and pray for help.

"Yesterday," he said at length in a trembling voice, "Elijah, as a fool,
spoke words which angered his master. Back on my head I call them now.
David, do not judge Timeh with a wrathful heart.

"Let the sins of Elijah fall on the head of Elijah, but let Timeh go
unpunished for my faults."

"You grow old, Elijah, and you forget. The judgment of David is never
colored by his own likes and dislikes, his own wishes and prejudice. He
sees the right, and therefore his judgments are true."

"Aye, David, but truth is not merciful, and blessed above all things is
mercy. When you see Timeh, think of Elijah. How he has watched over the
colt, and loved it, and played with it, and taught it, by the hours, the
proper manners for a colt and a mare of the Garden of Eden."

"That is true. It is a well-mannered colt."

Elijah caught at a new straw of hope.

"Also, in the field, if two colts race home for water and Timeh is one,
she reaches the water first--always. She comes to me like a child. In
the morning she slips out of the paddock, and coming to my window, she
puts in her head and calls me with a whinny as soft as the voice of a
man. Then I arise and go out to her and to Juri."

Ruth was weeping openly, her hand closed hard on the arm of Connor; and
she felt the muscles along that arm contract. She almost loved the
gambler for his rage at the inexorable David.

"Consider Juri, also," said Elijah. "Seven times--I numbered them on my
fingers and remembered--seven times when the horses were brought before
you in the morning, you have called to Juri and mounted her for the
morning ride--that was before Glani was raised to his full strength. And
always the master has said:

"'Stout-hearted Juri! She pours out her strength for her rider as a
generous host pours out his wine!'"

David frowned, but plainly he was touched.

"Juri!" he called, and when the noble mare came to him, he laid his hand
on her mane.

"Who has spoken of Juri? Surely I am not judging her this day. It was
Matthew who judged her when she was a foal of six months."

"And it was Matthew," added Elijah hastily, "who loved her above all
horses!"

"Ah!" muttered David, deeply moved.

"Consider the heart of Juri," went on Elijah, timidly following this new
thread of argument. "When the mares neigh and the colts come running,
there will be none to gallop to her side. When she goes out in the
morning there will be no daughter to gallop around and around her,
tossing her head and her heels. And when she comes home at night there
will be no tired foal leaning against her side for weariness."

"Peace, Elijah! You speak against the law."

In spite of himself, the glance of Elijah turned slowly and sullenly
until it rested upon Ruth Manning. David followed the direction of that
look and he understood. There stood the living evidence that he had
broken the law of the Garden at least once. He flushed darkly.

"The colt's gone," said Connor in a savagely-controlled murmur to the
girl. "That devil has made up his mind. His pride is up now!"

Elijah, too, seemed to realize that he had thrown away his last chance.

He could only stretch out his hands with the tears streaming down his
wrinkled face and repeat in his broken voice: "Mercy, David, mercy for
Timeh and Juri and Elijah!"

But the face of David was iron.

"Look at Juri," he commanded. "She is flawless, strong, sound of hoof
and heart and limb. And that is because her sire and her mother before
her were well seen to. No narrow forehead has ever been allowed to come
into the breed of the Eden Grays. I have heard Paul condemn a colt
because the very ears were too long and flabby and the carriage of the
horse dull. The weak and the faulty have been gelded and sent from the
Garden or else killed. And therefore Juri to-day is stout and noble, and
Glani has a spirit of fire. It is not easy to do. But if I find a sin in
my own nature, do I not tear it out at a price of pain? And shall I
spare a colt when I do not spare myself? A law is a law and a fault is a
fault. Timeh must die!"

The extended arms of Elijah fell. Connor felt Ruth surge forward from
beside him, but he checked her strongly.

"No use!" he said. "You could change a very devil more easily than you
can change David now! He's too proud to change his mind."

"Oh," sobbed the girl softly, "I hate him! I hate him!"

"Let Timeh live until the morning," said David in the same calm voice.
"Let Juri be spared this night of grief and uneasiness. If it is done in
the morning she will be less anxious until the dark comes, and by that
time the edge of her sorrow shall be dulled."

"Whose hand," asked Elijah faintly--"whose hand must strike the blow?"

"Yesterday," said David, "you spoke to me a great deal of the laws of
the Garden and their breaking. Do you not know that law which says that
he from whose household the faulty mare foal has come must destroy it?
You know that law. Then let it not be said that Elijah, who so loves the
law, has shirked his lawful burden!"

At this final blow poor Elijah lifted his face.

"Lord God!" he said, "give me strength. It is more than I can bear!"

"Go!" commanded the master of the Garden.

Elijah turned slowly away. As if to show the way, Timeh galloped before
him.




_CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE_


David watched them go, and while his back was turned a fierce, soft
dialogue passed between Ruth Manning and Ben Connor.

"Are you a man?" she asked him, through her set teeth. "Are you going to
let that beautiful little thing die?"

"I'd rather see the cold-hearted fool die in place of Timeh. But what
can we do? Nothing. Just smile in his face."

"I hate him!" she exclaimed.

"If you hate him, then use him. Will you?"

"If I can make him follow me, tease him to come, make him think I love
him, I'll do it. I'd do anything to torture him."

"I told you he was a savage."

"You were right, Ben. A fiend--not a man! Oh, thank Heavens that I see
through him."

Anger gave her color and banished her tears. And when David turned he
found what seemed a picture of pleasure. It was infinitely grateful to
him. If he had searched and studied for the words he could not have
found anything to embitter her more than his first speech.

"And what do you think of the justice of David?" he asked, coming to
them.

She could not speak; luckily Connor stepped in and filled the gap of
awkward silence.

"A very fine thing to have done, Brother David," he said. "Do you know
what I thought of when I heard you talk?"

"Of what?" said David, composing his face to receive the compliment. At
that Ruth turned suddenly away, for she dared not trust her eyes, and
the hatred which burned in them.

"I thought of the old story of Abraham and Isaac. You were offering up
something as dear to you as a child, almost, to the law of the Garden of
Eden."

"It is true," said David complacently. "But when the flesh is diseased
it must be burned away."

He called to Ruth: "And you, Ruth?"

This childish seeking after compliments made her smile, and naturally he
misjudged the smile.

"I think with Benjamin," she said softly.

"Yet my ways in the Garden must seem strange to you," went on David,
expanding in the warmth of his own sense of virtue. "But you will grow
accustomed to them, I know."

The opening was patent. She was beginning to nod her acquiescence when
Connor, in alarm, tapped on the table, once and again in swift
telegraphy: "No! No!"

The faint smile went out on her face.

"No," she said to David.

The master of the Garden turned a glance of impatience and suspicion
upon the gambler, but Connor carefully made his face a blank. He
continued to drum idly on the edge of the table, and the idle drumming
was spelling to the girl's quick ear: "Out!"

"You cannot stay?" murmured David.

She drank in his stunned expression. It was like music to her.

"Would you," she said, "be happy away from the Garden, and the horses
and your servants? No more am I happy away from my home."

"You are not happy with us?" muttered David. "You are not happy?"

"Could you be away from the Garden?"

"But that is different. The Garden was made by four wise men."

"By five wise men," said the girl. "For you are the fifth."

He was so blind that he did not perceive the irony.

"And therefore," he said, "the Garden is all that the heart should
desire. John and Matthew and Luke and Paul made it to fill that
purpose."

"But how do you know they succeeded? You have not seen the world beyond
the mountains."

"It is full of deceit, hard hearts, cruelty, and cunning."

"It is full of my dear friends, David!"

She thought of the colt and the mare and Elijah; and it became suddenly
easy to lure and deceive this implacable judge of others. She touched
the arm of the master lightly with her finger tips and smiled.

"Come with me, and see my world!"

"The law which the four made for me--I must not leave!"

"Was it wrong to let me enter?"

"You have made me happy," he argued slowly. "You have made me happier
than I was before. And surely I could not have been made happy by that
which is wrong. No, it was right to bring you into the valley. The
moment I looked at you I knew that it was right."

"Then, will it be wrong to go out with me? You need not stay! But see
what lies beyond the mountains before you judge it!"

He shook his head.

"Are you afraid? It will not harm you."

He flushed at that. And then began to walk up and down across the patio.
She saw Connor white with anxiety, but about Connor and his affairs she
had little concern at this moment. She felt only a cruel pleasure in her
control over this man, half savage and half child. Now he stopped
abruptly before her.

"If the world, after I see it, still displeases me, when I return, will
you come with me, Ruth? Will you come back to the Garden of Eden?"

In the distance Ben Connor was gesturing desperately to make her say
yes. But she could not resist a pause--a pause in which torment showed
on the face of David. And then, deliberately, she made her eyes
soften--made her lips smile.

"Yes, David, I will come back!"

He leaned a little toward her, then straightened with a shudder and
crossed the patio to the Room of Silence. Behind that door he
disappeared, and left Connor and the girl alone. The gambler threw down
his arms as if abandoning a burden.

"Why in the name of God did you let him leave you?" he groaned. "Why?
Why? Why?"

"He's going to come," asserted Ruth.

"Never in a thousand years. The fool will talk to his dummy god in
yonder and come out with one of his iced looks and talk about
'judgment'! Bah!"

"He'll come."

"What makes you think so?"

"Because--I know."

"You should have waited--to-morrow you could have done it, maybe, but
to-day is too soon."

"Listen to me, Ben. I know him. I know his childish, greedy mind. He
wants me just as much as he wants his own way. It's partly because I'm
new to him, being a woman. It's chiefly because I'm the first thing he's
ever met that won't do what he wants. He's going to try to stay with me
until he bends me." She flushed with angry excitement.

"It's playing with fire, Ruth. I know you're clever, but--"

"You don't know how clever, but I'm beginning to guess what I can do.
I've lost all feeling about that cruel barbarian, Ben. That poor little
harmless, pretty colt--oh, I want to make David Eden burn for that! And
I can do it. I'm going to wind him around my finger. I've thought of
ways while I stood looking at him just now. I know how I can smile at
him, and use my eyes, and woo him on, and pretend to be just about to
yield and come back with him--then grow cold the next minute and give
him his work to do over again. I'm going to make him crawl on his knees
in the dust. I'm going to make a fool of him before people. I'm going to
make him sign over his horses to us to keep them out of his vicious
power. And I can do it--I hate him so that I know I can make him really
love me. Oh, I know he doesn't really love me now. I know you're right
about him. He simply wants me as he'd want another horse. I'll change
him. I'll break him. When he's broken I'm going to laugh in his
face--and tell him--to remember Timeh!"

"Ruth!" gasped Connor.

He looked guiltily around, and when he was sure no one was within reach
of her voice, he glanced back with admiration.

"By the Lord, Ruth, who'd ever have guessed at all this fire in you?
Why, you're a wonder. And I think you can do it. If you can only get him
out of the infernal Garden. That's the sticking point! We make or break
in the next ten minutes!"

But he had hardly finished speaking before David of Eden came out of the
Room of Silence, and with the first glance at his face they knew that
the victory was theirs. David of Eden would come with them into the
world!

"I have heard the Voice," he said, "and it is just and proper for me to
go. In the morning, Ruth, we shall start!"




_CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO_


Night came as a blessing to Ruth, for the scenes of the early day had
exhausted her. At the very moment when David succumbed to her
domination, her own strength began to fail. As for Connor, it was
another story. The great dream which had come to him in far away Lukin,
when he watched the little gray gelding win the horse race, was now
verging toward a reality. The concrete accomplishment was at hand. Once
in the world it was easy to see that David would become clay, molded by
the touch of clever Ruth Manning, and then--it would be simply a matter
of collecting the millions as they rolled in.

But Ruth was tired. Only one thing sustained her, and that was the
burning eagerness to humble this proud and selfish David of Eden. When
she thought how many times she had been on the verge of open admiration
and sympathy with the man, she trembled and grew cold. But through the
fate of poor little Timeh, she thanked Heaven that her eyes had been
opened.

She went to her room shortly after dinner, and she slept heavily until
the first grayness of the morning. Once awake, in spite of the early
hour, she could not sleep again, so she dressed and went into the patio.
Connor was already there, pacing restlessly. He had been up all night,
he told her, turning over possibilities.

"It seems as though everything has worked out too much according to
schedule," he said. "There'll be a break. Something will happen and
smash everything!"

"Nothing will happen," she assured him calmly.

He took her hand in his hot fingers.

"Partner"--he began, and then stopped as though he feared to let himself
go on.

"Where is he?" she asked.

"On his mountain, waiting for the sun, I guess. He told the servants a
while ago that he was leaving to-day. Great excitement. They're all
chattering about it down in the servants' house."

"Is no one here?"

"Not a soul, I guess."

"Then--we're going into that Room of Silence!"

"Take that chance now? Never in the world! Why, Ruth, if he saw us in
there, or guessed we'd been there, he'd probably murder us both. You
know how gentle he is when he gets well started?"

"But how will he know? No one is here, and David won't be back from the
mountain for a long time if he waits for the sun."

"Just stop thinking about it, Ruth."

"I'll never stop as long as I live, unless I see it. I've dreamed
steadily about that room all night."

"Go alone, then, and I'll stay here."

She went resolutely across the patio, and Connor, following with an
exclamation, caught her arm roughly at the door.

"You aren't serious?"

"Deadly serious!"

The glitter of her dark eyes convinced him more than words.

"Then we'll go together. But make it short!"

They swept the patio with conscience-stricken glances, and then opened
the door. As they did so, the ugly face of Joseph appeared at the
entrance to the patio, looked and hastily was withdrawn.

"This is like a woman," muttered Connor, as they closed the door with
guilty softness behind them. "Risk her life for a secret that isn't
worth a tinker's damn!"

For the room was almost empty, and what was in it was the simplest of
the simple. There was a roughly made table in the center. Five chairs
stood about it. On the table was a book, and the seven articles made up
the entire furnishings. Connor was surprised to see tears in the eyes of
Ruth.

"Don't you see?" she murmured in reply to his exclamation. "The four
chairs for the four dead men when David sits down in his own place?"

"Well, what of that?"

"What's in the book?"

"Are you going to wait to see that?"

"Open the door a little, Ben, and then we can hear if any one comes
near."

He obeyed and came back, grumbling. "We can hear every one except David.
That step of his wouldn't break eggs."

He found the girl already poring over the first page of the old book, on
which there was writing in a delicate hand.

She read aloud: "The story of the Garden of Eden, who made it and why it
was made. Told without error by Matthew."

"Hot stuff!" chuckled Connor. "We got a little time before the sun comes
up. But it's getting red in the east. Let's hear some more."

There was nothing imposing about the book. It was a ledger with a
half-leather binding such as storekeepers use for accounts. Time had
yellowed the edges of the paper and the ink was dulled. She read:

"In the beginning there was a man whose name was John."

"Sounds like the start of the Bible," grinned Connor. "Shoot ahead and
let's get at the real dope."

"Hush!"

Without raising her eyes, she brushed aside the hand of Connor which had
fallen on the side of the ledger. Her own took its place, ready to turn
the page.

"In the beginning there was a man whose name was John. The Lord looked
upon John and saw his sins. He struck John therefor. First He took two
daughters from John, but still the man was blind and did not read the
writing of his Maker. And God struck down the eldest son of John, and
John sorrowed, but did not understand. Thereat, all in a day, the Lord
took from John his wife and his lands and his goods, which were many and
rich.

"Then John looked about him, and lo! he was alone.

"In the streets his friends forgot him and saw not his passing. The
sound of his own footfall was lonely in his house, and he was left alone
with his sins.

"So he knew that it was the hand of God which struck him, and he heard
a voice which said in the night to him: 'O John, ye who have been too
much with the world must leave it and go into the wilderness.'

"Then the heart of John smote him and he prayed God to send him not out
alone, and God relented and told him to go forth and take with him three
simple men.

"So John on the next morning called to his Negro, a slave who was all
that remained in his hands.

"'Abraham,' he said, 'you who were a slave are free.'

"Then he went into the road and walked all the day until his feet bled.
He rested by the side of the road and one came who kneeled before him
and washed his feet, and John saw that it was Abraham. And Abraham said:
'I was born into your service and I can only die out of it.'

"They went on together until they came to three robbers fighting with
one strong man, and John helped this man and drove away the robbers.

"Then the tall man began to laugh. 'They would have robbed me because I
was once rich,' he said, 'but another thief had already plundered me,
and they have gotten only broken heads for their industry.' Then John
was sorry for the fortune that was stolen.

"'Not I,' said the tall man, 'but I am sorry for the brother I lost with
the money.' Then he told them how his own brother had cheated him.
'But,' he said, 'there is only one way to beat the devil, and that is to
laugh at him.'

"Now John saw this was a good man, so he opened his heart to Luke, which
was the name of him who had been robbed. Then Luke fell in with the two
and went on with them.

"They came to a city filled with plague so that the dead were buried by
the dying and the dog howled over his master in the street; the son fled
from the father and the mother left her child. They found one man who
tended the sick out of charity and the labor was too great for even his
broad shoulders. He had a broad, ugly face, but in his eye was a clear
fire.

"'Brother, what is your name?' said John, and the man answered that he
was called Paul, and begged them for the sweet mercy of Christ to aid
him in his labors.

"But John said: 'Rise, Paul, and follow me.'

"And Paul said: 'How can I follow the living when the dying call to me?'

"But John said: 'Nevertheless, leave them, for these are carrion, but
your soul in which is life eternal is worth all these and far more.'

"Then Paul felt the power of John and followed him and took, also, his
gray horses which were unlike others, and of his servants those who
would follow him for love, and in wagons he put much wealth.

"So they all rode on as a mighty caravan until they came, at the side of
the road, to a youth lying in the meadow with his hands behind his head
whistling, and a bird hovering above him repeated the same note. They
spoke to him and he told them that he was an outcast because he would
not labor.

"'The world is too pleasant to work in,' he said, and whistled again,
and the bird above him made answer.

"Then John said: 'Here is a soul worth all of ours. Rise, brother, and
come with us.'

"So Matthew rose and followed him, and he was the third and last man to
join John, who was the beginning.

"Then they came to a valley set about with walls and with a pleasant
river running through it, and here they entered and called it the Garden
of Eden because in it men should be pure of heart once more. And they
built their houses with labor and lived in quiet and the horses
multiplied and the Garden blossomed under their hands."

Here Ruth marked her place with her finger while she wiped her eyes.

"Do you mean to say this babble is getting you?" growled Ben Connor.

"Please!" she whispered. "Don't you see that it's beautiful?"

And she returned to the book.




_CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE_


"Then John sickened and said: 'Bring me into the room of silence.' So
they brought him to the place where they sat each day to converse with
God in the holy stillness and hear His voice.

"Then John said: 'I am about to depart from among you, and before my
going I put this command on you that you find in the world a male infant
too young to know its father or mother, or without father and mother
living. Rear that child to manhood in the valley, for even as I depart
so will you all do, and the Garden of Eden will be left tenantless.'

"So when John was dead Matthew went forth and found a male child and
brought him to the valley and the two said: 'Where was the child found
and what is its name?' And Matthew said: 'It was found in the place to
which God led me and its name hereafter shall be David.'

"So peace was on the valley, and David grew tall and strong. Then Luke
died, and Paul died in a drift of snow and Matthew grew very old and
wrote these words for the eye of David."

The smooth running, finely made letters come to an end, the narrative
was taken up in fresher ink and in a bold, heavy hand of large
characters.

"One day Matthew called for David and said: 'My hands are cold, whereby
I know I am about to die. As I lay last night with death for a bedfellow
thoughts came to me, which are these: We have been brother and father
and son to one another. But do not grieve that I am gone. I inherit a
place of peace, but you shall come to torment unless you find a woman in
the world and bring her here to bear children to you and be your wife.'

"Then David groaned in his heart and he said: 'How shall I know her when
I find her?'

"And Matthew said: 'By her simplicity.'

"And David said: 'There may be many who are simple.'

"And Matthew said: 'I have never known such a woman. But when you see
her your heart will rise up and claim her. Therefore, within five years,
before you are grown too old, go out and find this woman and wed her.'

"And on that day Matthew died, and a great anguish came to David. The
days passed heavily. And for five years he has waited."

There was another interval of blank paper, and then the pen had been
taken up anew, hurriedly, and driven with such force and haste that it
tore the paper-surface.

"The woman is here!"

Her fingers stiffened about the edges of the book. Raising her head, she
looked out through the little window and saw the tree tops down the
hillside brightening against the red of the dawn. But Connor could not
see her face. He only noted the place at which she had stopped, and now
he began to laugh.

"Can you beat that? That poor dub!"

She turned to him, slowly, a face so full of mute anguish that the
gambler stopped his laughter to gape at her. Was she taking this
seriously? Was this the Bluebeard's chamber which was to ruin all his
work?

Not that he perceived what was going on in her mind, but her expression
made him aware, all at once, of the morning-quiet. Far down the valley a
horse neighed and a bird swooping past the window cast in on them one
thrilling phrase of music. And Connor saw the girl change under his very
eye. She was looking straight at him without seeing his face and into
whatever distance her glance went he felt that he could not follow her.
Here at the very threshold of success the old ledger was proving a more
dangerous enemy than David himself. Connor fumbled for words, the Open
Sesame which would let in the common sense of the everyday world upon
the girl. But the very fear of that crisis kept him dumb. He glanced
from the pale hand on the ledger to her face, and it seemed to him that
beauty had fallen upon her out of the book.

"The woman is here! God has sent her!"

At that she cried out faintly, her voice trembling with self-scorn: "God
has sent me--me!"

"The heart of David stood up and beat in his throat when he saw her,"
went on the rough, strong writing. "She passed the gate. Every step she
took was into the soul of David. As I went beside her the trees grew
taller and the sky was more blue.

"She has passed the gate. She is here. She is mine!

"What am I that she should be mine? God has sent her to show me that my
strength is clumsy. I have no words to fit her. When I look into her
eyes I see her soul; my vision leaps from star to star, a great
distance, and I am filled with humility. O Father in Heaven, having led
her to my hand, teach me to give her happiness, to pour her spirit full
of content."

She closed the book reverently and pressed her hands against her face.
He heard her murmuring: "What have I done? God forgive me!"

Connor grew angry. It was no time for trifling.

He touched her arm: "Come on out of this, Ruth. If you're going to get
religion, try it later."

At that she flung away and faced him, and what he saw was a revelation
of angry scorn.

"Don't touch me," she stammered at him. "You cheat! Is that the
barbarian you were telling me about? Is that the cruel, selfish fool you
tried to make me think was David of Eden?"

His own weapons were turning against him, but he retained his
self-control.

"I won't listen to you, Ruth. It's this hush-stuff that's got you. It's
this infernal room. It makes you feel that the fathead has actually got
the dope from God."

"How do you know that God hasn't come to him here? At least, he's had
the courage and the faith to believe it. What faith have we? I know your
heaven, Ben Connor. It's paved with dollar bills. And mine, too. We've
come sneaking in here like cowardly thieves. Oh, I hate myself, I loathe
myself. I've stolen his heart, and what have I to give him in exchange?
I'm not even worthy to love him! Barbarian? He's so far greater and
finer than we are that we aren't worthy to look in his face!"

"By the Lord!" groaned Connor. "Are you double-crossing me?"

"Could I do anything better? Who tempted me like a devil and brought me
here? Who taught me to play the miserable game with David? You, you,
you!"

Perspiration was streaming down the white face of Connor.

"Try to give me a chance and listen one minute, Ruth. But for God's sake
don't fly off the handle and smash everything when we're next door to
winning. Maybe I've done wrong. I don't see how. I've tried to give
this David a chance to be happy the way any other man would want to be
happy. Now you turn on me because he's written some high-flying chatter
in a book!"

"Because I thought he was a selfish sham, and now I see that he's real.
He's humbled himself to me--to me! I'm not worthy to touch his feet! And
you--"

"Maybe I'm rotten. I don't say I'm all I should be, but half of what
I've done has been for you. The minute I saw you at the key in Lukin I
knew I wanted you. I've gone on wanting you ever since. It's the first
time in my life--but I love you, Ruth. Give me one more chance. Put this
thing through and I'll turn over the rest of my life to fixing you up
so's you'll be happy."

She watched him for a moment incredulously; then she broke into
hysterical laughter.

"If you loved me could you have made me do what I've done? Love? You?
But I know what real love is. It's written into that book. I've heard
him talk. I'm full of his voice, of his face.

"It's the only fine thing about me. For the rest, we're shams, both of
us--cheats--crooked--small, sneaking cheats!"

She stopped with a cry of alarm; the door behind her stood open and in
the entrance was David of Eden. In the background was the ugly, grinning
face of Joseph. This was his revenge.

Connor made one desperate effort to smile, but the effort failed
wretchedly. Neither of them could look at David; they could only steal
glances at one another and see their guilt.

"David, my brother--" began the gambler heavily.

But the voice of the master broke in: "Oh, Abraham, Abraham, would to
God that I had listened!"

He stood to one side, and made a sweeping gesture.

"Come out, and bring the woman."

They shrank past him and stood blinking in the light of the newly risen
sun. Joseph was hugging himself with the cold and his mute delight. The
master closed the door and faced them again.

"Even in the Room of Silence!" he said slowly. "Was it not enough to
bring sin into the Garden? But you have carried it even into the holy
place!"

Connor found his tongue. The fallen head of Ruth told him that there was
no help to be looked for from her, and the crisis forced him into a
certain boisterous glibness of speech.

"Sin, Brother David? What sin? To be sure, Ruth was too curious. She
went into the Room of Silence, but as soon as I knew she was there I
went to fetch her, when--"

He had even cast out one arm in a gesture of easy persuasion, and now it
was caught at the wrist in a grip that burned through the flesh to the
bones. Another hand clutched his coat at the throat. He was lifted and
flung back against the wall by a strength like that of a madman, or a
wild animal. One convulsive effort showed him his helplessness, and he
cried out more in horror than fear. Another cry answered him, and Ruth
strove to press in between, tearing futilely at the arms of David.

A moment later Connor was miraculously freed. He found David a long pace
away and Ruth before him, her arms flung out to give him shelter while
she faced the master of the garden.

"He is saved," said David, "and you are free. Your love has ransomed
him. What price has he paid to win you so that you will even risk death
for him?"

"Oh, David," sobbed the girl, "don't you see I only came between you to
keep you from murder? Because he isn't worth it!"

But the master of the Garden was laughing in a way that made Connor look
about for a weapon and shrink because he found none; only the greedy
eyes of Joseph, close by. David had come again close to the girl; he
even took both her hands in one of his and slipped his arm about her. To
Connor his self-control now seemed more terrible than that one outbreak
of murdering passion.

"Still lies?" said David. "Still lies to me? Beautiful Ruth--never more
beautiful than now, even when you lied to me with your eyes and your
smiles and your promises! The man is nothing. He came like a snake to
me, and his life is worth no more than the life of a snake. Let him
live, let him die; it is no matter. But you, Ruth! I am not even
angered. I see you already from a great distance, a beautiful, evil
thing that has been so close to me. For you have been closer to me than
you are now that my arm is around you, touching you for the last time,
holding your warmth and your tender body, keeping both your hands, which
are smaller and softer than the hands of a child. But mighty hands,
nevertheless.

"They have held the heart of David, and they have almost thrown his soul
into eternal hellfire. Yet you have been closer to me than you are now.
You have been in my heart of hearts. And I take you from it sadly--with
regret, for the sin of loving you has been sweet."

She had been sobbing softly all this time, but now she mastered herself
long enough to draw back a little, taking his hands with a desperate
eagerness, as though they gave her a hold upon his mind.

"Give me one minute to speak out what I have to say. Will you give me
one half minute, David?"

His glance rose past her, higher, until it was fixed on the east, and as
he stood there with his head far back Connor guessed for the first time
at the struggle which was going on within him. The girl pressed closer
to him, drawing his hands down as though she would make him stoop to
her.

"Look at me, David!"

"I see your face clearly."

"Still, look at me for the one last time."

"I dare not, Ruth!"

"But will you believe me?"

"I shall try. But I am glad to hear your voice, for the last time."

"I've come to you like a cheat, David, and I've tried to win you in
order to steal the horses away, but I've stayed long enough to see the
truth.

"If everything in the valley were offered me--the horses and the
men--and everything outside of the valley, without you, I'd throw them
away. I don't want them. Oh, if prayers could make you believe, you'd
believe me now; because I'm praying to you, David.

"You love me, David. I can feel you trembling, and I love you more than
I ever dreamed it was possible to love. Let me come back to you. I don't
want the world or anything that's in it. I only want you. David--I only
want you! Will you believe me?"

And Connor saw David of Eden sway with the violence of his struggle.

But he murmured at length, as one in wonder:

"How you are rooted in me, Ruth! How you are wound into my life, so that
it is like tearing out my heart to part from you. But the God of the
Garden and John and Matthew has given me strength." He stepped back from
her.

"You are free to go, but if you return the doom against you is death
like that of any wild beast that steals down the cliffs to kill in my
fields. Begone, and let me see your face no more. Joseph, take them to
the gate."

And he turned his back with a slowness which made his resolution the
more unmistakable.




_CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR_


It was, unquestionably, a tempting of Providence, but Connor was almost
past caring. Far off he heard the neighing of an Eden Gray; Ruth, with
her bowed head and face covered in her hands, was before him, sobbing;
and all that he had come so near to winning and yet had lost rushed upon
the mind of the gambler. He hardly cared now whether he lived or died.
He called to the master of the Garden, and David whirled on him with a
livid face. Connor walked into the reach of the lion.

"I've made my play," he said through his teeth, "and I don't holler
because I've lost the big stakes. Now I'm going to give you something to
show that I'm not a piker--some free advice, Dave!"

"O man of many lies," said David. "Peace! For when I hear you there is a
great will come on me to take you by the throat and hear your life go
out with a rattle."

"A minute ago," said Connor coolly enough, "I was scared, and I admit
it, but I'm past that stage. I've lost too much to care, and now you're
going to hear me out to the last damned word!"

"God of Paul and Matthew," said David, his voice broken with rage, "let
temptation be far from me!"

"You can take it standing or sitting," said Connor, "and be damned to
you!"

The blind fury sent David a long step nearer, but he checked himself
even as one hand rose toward Connor.

"It is the will of God that you live to be punished hereafter."

"No matter about the future. I'm chattering in the present. I'm going to
come clean, not because I'm afraid of you, but because I'm going to
clear up the girl. Abraham had the cold dope, well enough. I came to
crook you out of a horse, Dave, my boy, and I did it. But after I'd got
away with the goods I tried to play hog, and I came back for the rest of
the horses."

He paused; but David showed no emotion.

"You take the punishment very well," admitted Connor. "There's a touch
of sporting blood in you, but the trouble is that the good in you has
never had a fair chance to come to the top. I came back, and I brought
Ruth with me.

"I'll tell you about her. She's meant to be an honest-to-God woman--the
kind that keeps men clean--she's meant for the big-time stuff. And where
did I find her? In a jay town punching a telegraph key. It was all
wrong.

"She was made to spend a hundred thousand a year. Everything that money
buys means a lot to her. I saw that right away. I like her. I did more
than like her. I loved her. That makes you flinch under the whip, does
it? I don't say I'm worthy of her, but I'm as near to her as you are.

"I admit I played a rotten part. I went to this girl, all starved the
way she was for the velvet touch. I laid my proposition before her. She
was to come up here and bamboozle you. She was to knock your eye out and
get you clear of the valley with the horses. Then I was going to run
those horses on the tracks and make a barrel of coin for all of us.

"You'd think she'd take on a scheme like that right away; but she
didn't. She fought to keep from going crooked until I showed her it was
as much to your advantage as it was to ours. Then she decided to come,
and she came. I worked my stall and she worked hers, and she got into
the valley.

"But this voice of yours in the Room of Silence--why didn't it put you
wise to my game? Well, David, I'll tell you why. The voice is the bunk.
It's your own thoughts. It's your own hunches. The god you've been
worshiping up here is yourself, and in the end you're going to pay hell
for doing it.

"Well, here's the girl in the Garden, and everything going smooth. We
have you, and she's about to take you out and show you how to be happy
in the world. But then she has to go into your secret room. That's the
woman of it. You blame her? Why, you infernal blockhead, you've been
making love to her like God Almighty speaking out of a cloud of fire!
How could she hear your line of chatter without wanting to find out the
secrets that made you the nut you are?

"Well, we went in, and we found out. We found out what? Enough to make
the girl see that you're 'noble,' as she calls it. Enough to make me see
that you're a simp. You've been chasing bubbles all your life. You're
all wrong from the first.

"Those first four birds who started the Garden, who were they? There was
John, a rich fellow who'd hit the high spots, had his life messed up,
and was ready to quit. He'd lived enough. Then there was Luke, a gent
who'd been double-crossed and was sore at the world on general
principles.

"Paul would have been a full-sized saint in the old days. He was never
meant to live the way other men have to live. And finally there's a guy
who lies in the grass and whistles to a bird--Matthew. A poet--and all
poets are nuts.

"Well, all those fellows were tired of the world--fed up with it. Boil
them down, and they come to this: they thought more about the welfare
of their souls than they did about the world. Was that square? It
wasn't! They left the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, the
friends, everything that had brought them into the world and raised 'em.
They go off to take care of themselves.

"That wasn't bad enough for 'em--they had to go out and pluck you and
bring you up with the same rotten hunches. Davie, my boy, d'you think a
man is made to live by himself?

"You haven't got fed up with the world; you're no retired high liver;
you haven't had a chance to get double-crossed more than once; you're
not a crazy poet; and you're a hell of a long ways from being a martyr.

"I'll tell you what you are. You're a certain number of pounds of husky
muscle and bone going to waste up here in the mountains. You've been
alone so much that you've got to thinking that your own hunches come
from God, and that'd spoil any man.

"Live alone? Bah! You've had more happiness since Ruth came into this
valley than you've ever had before or you'll ever have again.

"Right now you're breaking your heart to take her in your arms and tell
her to stop crying, but your pride won't let you.

"You tried to make yourself a mystery with your room of silence and all
that bunk. But no woman can stand a mystery. They all got to read their
husband's letters. You try to bluff her with a lot of fancy words and
partly scare her. It's fear that sent the four men up here in the first
place--fear of the world.

"And they've lived by fear. They scared a lot of poor unfortunate men
into coming with them for the sake of their souls, they said. And they
kept them here the same way. And they've kept you here by telling you
that you'd be damned if you went over the mountains.

"And you still keep them here the same way. Do you think they stay
because they love you? Give them a chance and see if they won't pack up
and beat it for their old homes.

"Now, show me that you're a man and not a fatheaded bluff. Be a man and
admit that what you call the Voice is just your pride. Be a man and take
that girl in your arms and tell her you love her. I've made a mess of
things; I've ruined her life, and I want to see you give her a chance to
be happy.

"Because she's not the kind to love more than one man if she lives to be
a thousand. Now, David Eden, step out and give yourself a chance!"

It had been a gallant last stand on the part of Connor. But he was
beaten before he finished, and he knew it.

"Are you done?" said David.

"I'm through, fast enough. It's up to you!"

"Joseph, take the man and his woman out of the Garden of Eden."

The last thing that Connor ever saw of David Eden was his back as he
closed the door of the Room of Silence upon himself. The gambler went to
Ruth. She was dry-eyed by this time, and there was a peculiar blankness
in her expression that went to his heart.

Secretly he had hoped that his harangue to David would also be a
harangue to the girl and make her see through the master of the Garden;
but that hope disappeared at once.

He stayed a little behind her when they were conducted out of the patio
by the grinning Joseph. He helped her gently to her horse, the old gray
gelding, and when he was in place on his own horse, with the mule pack
behind him, they started for the gate.

She had not spoken since they started. At the gate she moved as if to
turn and look back, but controlled the impulse and bowed her head once
more. Joseph came beside the gambler and stretched out his great palm.
In the center of it was the little ivory ape's head which had brought
Connor his entrance into the valley and had won the hatred of the big
Negro, and had, eventually, ruined all his plans.

"It was given freely," grinned Joseph, "and it is freely returned."

"Very well."

Connor took it and hurled it out of sight along the boulders beyond the
gate. The last thing that he saw of the Garden of Eden and its men was
that broad grin of Joseph, and then he hurried his horse to overtake
Ruth, whose gelding had been plodding steadily along the ravine.

He attempted for the first time to speak to her.

"Only a quitter tries to make up for the harm he's done by apologizing.
But I've got to tell you the one thing in my life I most regret. It
isn't tricking David of Eden, but it's doing what I've done to you. Will
you believe me when I say that I'd give a lot to undo what I've done?"

She only raised her hand to check him and ventured a faint smile of
reassurance. It was the smile that hurt Connor to the quick.

They left the ravine. They toiled slowly up the difficult trail, and
even when they had reached such an altitude that the floor of the valley
of the Garden was unrolling behind them the girl never once moved to
look back.

"So," thought Connor, "she'll go through the rest of her life with her
head down, watching the ground in front of her. And this is my work."

He was not a sentimentalist, but a lump was forming in his throat when,
at the very crest of the mountain, the girl turned suddenly in her
saddle and stopped the gray.

"Only makes it worse to stay here," muttered Connor. "Come on, Ruth."

But she seemed not to hear him, and there was something in her smile
that kept him from speaking again.




_CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE_


The Room of Silence had become to David Eden a chamber of horror. The
four chairs around him, which had hitherto seemed filled with the ghosts
of the four first masters of the Garden, were now empty to his
imagination. In this place where he had so often found unfailing
consolation, unfailing counsel, he was now burdened by the squat, heavy
walls, and the low ceiling. It was like a prison to him.

For all his certainty was gone. "You've made yourself your God," the
gambler had said. "Fear made the Garden of Eden, fear keeps the men in
it. Do you think the others stay for love of you?"

Benjamin had proved a sinner, no doubt, but there had been a ring of
conviction in his words that remained in the mind of David. How could he
tell that the man was not right? Certainly, now that he had once doubted
the wisdom of that silent Voice, the mystery was gone. The room was
empty; the holiness had departed from the Garden of Eden with the
departing of Ruth.

He found himself avoiding the thought of her, for whenever her image
rose before him it was torture.

He dared not even inquire into the depression which weighed down his
spirits, for he knew that the loss of the girl was the secret of it
all.

One thing at least was certain: the strong, calming voice which he had
so often heard in the Room of Silence, no longer dwelt there, and with
that in mind he rose and went into the patio.

In a corner, screened by a climbing vine, hung a large bell which had
only been rung four times in the history of the Garden of Eden, and each
time it was for the death of the master. David tore the green away and
struck the bell. The brazen voice crowded the patio and pealed far away,
and presently the men came. They came in wild-eyed haste, and when they
saw David alive before them they stared at him as if at a ghost.

"As it was in the beginning," said David when the circle had been formed
and hushed, "death follows sin. Sin has come into the Garden of Eden and
the voice of God has died out of it. Therefore the thing for which you
have lived here so long is gone. If for love of David, you wish to stay,
remain; but if your hearts go back to your old homes, return to them.
The wagons and the oxen are yours. All the furnishing of the houses are
yours. There is also a large store of money in my chest which Elijah
shall divide justly among you. And on your journey Elijah shall lead
you, if you go forth, for he is a just man and fit to lead others. Do
not answer now, but return to your house and speak to one another.
Afterward, send one man. If you stay in the Garden he shall tell me. If
you depart I shall bid you farewell through him. Begone!"

They went out soft-footed, as though the master of the Garden had turned
into an animal liable to spring on them from behind.

He began to pace up and down the patio, after a time, rather
impatiently. No doubt the foolish old men were holding forth at great
length. They were appointing the spokesman, and they were framing the
speech which he would make to David telling of their devotion to him,
whether the spirit was gone or remained. They would remain; and
Benjamin's prophecy had been that of a spiteful fool. Yet even if they
stayed, how empty the valley would be--how hollow of all pleasure!

It was at this point in his thoughts that he heard a sound of singing
down the hillside from the house of the servants--first a single, thin,
trembling voice to which others were added until the song was heartened
and grew full and strong. It was a song which David had never heard
before. It rang and swung with a peculiarly happy rhythm, growing
shriller as the old men seemed to gather their enthusiasm. The words,
sung in a thick dialect, were stranger to David than the tune, but as
nearly as he could make out the song ran as follows:

     "Oh, Jo, come back from the cold and the stars
     For the cows they has come to the pasture bars,
     And the little game chicken's beginning to crow:
     Come back to us, Jo; come back to us, Jo!

     "He was walkin' in the gyarden in the cool o' the day
     When He seen my baby Jo in the clover blossoms play.

     "He was walkin' in the gyarden an' the dew was on His feet
     When He seen my baby Jo so little an' sweet.

     "They was flowers in the gyarden, roses, an' such,
     But the roses an' the pansies, they didn't count for much.

     "An' He left the clover blossoms fo' the bees the next day An'
     the roses an' the pansies, but He took Jo away.

     "Oh, Jo, come back from the cold and the stars
     For the cows they has come to the pasture bars,
     And the little game chicken has started to crow:
     Come back to us, Jo; come back to us Jo!"

He knew their voices and he knew their songs, but never had David heard
his servants sing as they sang this song. Their hymns were strong and
pleasant to the ear, but in this old tune there was a melody and a lilt
that brought a lump in his throat. And there was a heart to their
singing, so that he almost saw them swaying their shoulders to the
melody.

It was the writing on the wall for David.

Out of that song he built a picture of their old lives, the hot
sunshine, the dust, and all the things which Matthew had told him of the
slaves and their ways before the time of the making of the Garden.

He waited, then, either for their messenger or for another song; but he
neither saw the one nor heard the other for a considerable time. An
angry pride sustained him in the meantime, in the face of a life alone
in the Garden. Far off, he heard the neigh of the grays in the meadow
near the gate, and then the clarion clear answer of Glani near the
house. He was grateful for that sound. All men, it seemed, were traitors
to him. Let them go. He would remain contented with the Eden Grays. They
would come and go with him like human companions. Better the noble head
of Glani near him than the treacherous cunning of Benjamin! He accepted
his fate, then, not with calm resignation, but with fierce anger against
Connor, who had brought this ruin on him, and against the men who were
preparing to desert him.

He could hear plainly the creaking of the great wains as the oxen were
yoked to them and they were dragged into position to receive the burdens
of the property they were to take with them into the outer world. And,
in the meantime, he paced through the patio in one of those silent
passions which eat at the heart of a man.

He was not aware of the entrance of Elijah. When he saw him, Elijah had
fallen on his knees near the entrance to the patio, and every line of
his time-dried body expressed the terror of the bearer of bad tidings.
David looked at him for a moment in silent rage.

"Do you think, Elijah," he said at last, "that I shall be so grieved to
know that you and the others will leave me and the Garden of Eden? No,
no! For I shall be happier alone. Therefore, speak and be done!"

"Timeh--" began the old man faintly.

"You have done that last duty, then, Elijah? Timeh is no longer alive?"

"The day is still new, David. Twice I went to Timeh, but each time when
I was about to lead her away, the neighing of Juri troubled me and my
heart failed."

"But the third time you remembered my order?"

"But the third time--there was no third time. When the bell sounded we
gathered. Even the watchers by the the gates--Jacob and Isaac--came and
the gate was left unguarded--Timeh was in the pasture near the gate with
Juri--and--"

"They are gone! They have passed through the gate! Call Zacharias and
Joseph. Let them mount and follow and bring Juri back with the foal!"

"Oh, David, my master--"

"What is it now, Elijah, old stammerer? Of all my servants none has cost
me so much pain; to none shall I say farewell with so little regret.
What is it now? Why do you not rise and call them as I bid you? Do you
think you are free before you pass the gates?"

"David, there are no horses to follow Juri!"

"What!"

"The God of John and Paul give me strength to tell and give you strength
to hear me in patience! When you had spoken, and the servants went back
to speak of the strange things you had said, some of them spoke of the
old days before they heard the call and followed to the Garden, and then
a song was raised beginning with Zacharias--"

"Zacharias!" echoed David, softly and fiercely. "Him whom I have favored
above the others!"

"But while the others sang, I heard a neighing near the gate and I
remembered your order and your judgment of Timeh, and I went sorrowfully
to fulfill your will. But near the gate I saw the meadow empty of the
horses, and while I stood wondering, I heard a chorus of neighing beyond
the gate. There was a great answer just behind me, and I turned and saw
Glani racing at full speed. I called to him, but he did not hear and
went on, straight through the pillars of the gate, and disappeared in
the ravine beyond. Then I ran to the gate and looked out, but the horses
were gone from sight--they have left the Garden--they are free--"

"And happy!" said David in a terrible voice. "They, too, have only been
held by fear and never by love. Let them go. Let all go which is kept
here by fear. Why should I care? I am enough by myself. When all is gone
and I am alone the Voice shall return and be my companion. It is well.
Let every living thing depart. David is enough unto himself. Go, Elijah!
And yet pause before you go!"

He went into his room and came out bearing the heavy chest of money,
which he carried to the gate.

"Go to your brothers and bid them come for the money. It will make them
rich enough in the world beyond the mountains, but to me there is need
of no money. Silence and peace is my wish. Go, and let me hear their
voices no more, let me not see one face. Ingrates, fools, and traitors!
Let them find their old places; I have no regret. Begone!"

And Elijah, as one under the shadow of a raised whip, skulked from the
patio and was gone.




_CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX_


The last quiet began for David. He had heard the sounds of departure. He
had heard the rumble of the oxwains begin and go slowly toward the gate
with never the sound of a human voice, and he pictured, with a grim
satisfaction, the downcast faces and the frightened, guilty glances, as
his servants fled, conscious that they were betraying their master. It
filled him with a sort of sulky content which was more painful than
sorrow. But before the sound of the wagons died out the wind blew back
from the gate of the Garden a thin, joyous chorus of singing voices.
They were leaving him with songs!

He was incredulous for a time. He felt, first, a great regret that he
had let them go. Then, in an overwhelming wave of righteousness, he
determined to dismiss them from his mind. They were gone; but worse
still, the horses were gone, and the valley around him was empty! He
remembered the dying prophecy of Abraham, now, as the stern Elijah had
repeated it. He had let the world into the Garden, and the tide of the
world's life, receding, would take all the life of the Garden away
beyond the mountains among other men.

The feeling that Connor had been right beset him: that the four first
masters had been wrong, and that they had raised David in error. Yet his
pride still upheld him.

That day he went resolutely about the routine. He was not hungry, but
when the time came he went into the big kitchen and prepared food. It
was a place of much noise. The great copper kettles chimed and murmured
whenever he touched them, and they spoke to him of the servants who were
gone. Half of his bitterness had already left him and he could remember
those days in his childhood when Abraham had told him tales, and
Zacharias had taught him how to ride at the price of many a tumble from
the lofty back of the gentle old mare. Yet he set the food on the table
in the patio and ate it with steady resolution. Then he returned to the
big kitchen and cleansed the dishes.

It was the late afternoon, now, the time when the sunlight becomes
yellow and loses its heat, and the heavy blue shadow sloped across the
patio. A quiet time. Now and again he found that he was tense with
waiting for sounds in the wind of the servants returning for the night
from the fields, and the shrill whinny of the colts coming back from the
pastures to the paddocks. But he remembered what had happened and made
himself relax.

There was a great dread before him. Finally he realized that it was the
coming of the night, and he went into the Room of Silence for the last
time to find consolation. The book of Matthew had always been a means of
bringing the consolation and counsel of the Voice, but when he opened
the book he could only think of the girl, as she must have leaned above
it. How had she read? With a smile of mockery or with tears? He closed
the book; but still she was with him. It seemed that when he turned in
the chair he must find her waiting behind him and he found himself
growing tense with expectation, his heart beating rapidly.

Out of the Room of Silence he fled as if a curse lived in it, and
without following any conscious direction, he went to the room of Ruth.

The fragrance had left the wild flowers, and the great golden blossoms
at the window hung thin and limp, the bell lips hanging close together,
the color faded to a dim yellow. The green things must be taken away
before they molded. He raised his hand to tear down the transplanted
vine, but his fingers fell away from it. To remove it was to destroy the
last trace of her. She had seen these flowers; on account of them she
had smiled at him with tears of happiness in her eyes. The skin of the
mountain lion on the floor was still rumpled where her foot had fallen,
and he could see the indistinct outline where the heel of her shoe had
pressed.

He avoided that place when he stepped back, and turning, he saw her bed.
The dappled deerskin lay crumpled back where her hand had tossed it as
she rose that morning, and in the blankets was the distinct outline of
her body. He knew where her body had pressed, and there was the hollow
made by her head in the pillow.

Something snapped in the heart of David. The sustaining pride which had
kept his head high all day slipped from him like the strength of the
runner when he crosses the mark. David fell upon his knees and buried
his face where her head had lain, and his arms curved as though around
her body. Connor had been right. He had made himself his god, and this
was the punishment. The mildness of a new humility came to him in the
agony of his grief. He found that he could pray, not the proud prayers
of the old days when David talked as an equal to the voice, but that
most ancient prayer of sinners:

"O Lord, I believe. Help Thou mine unbelief!"

And the moment the whisper had passed his lips there was a blessed
relief from pain. There was a sound at the window, and turning to it, he
saw the head and the arched neck of Glani against the red of the
sunset--Glani looking at him with pricked ears. He went to the stallion,
incredulous, with steps as short as a child which is afraid, and at his
coming Glani whinnied softly. At that the last of David's pride fell
from him. He cast his arms around the neck of the stallion and wept with
deep sobs that tore his throat, and under the grip of his arms he felt
the stallion trembling. He was calmer, at length, and he climbed through
the window and stood beside Glani under the brilliant sunset sky.

"And the others, O Glani," he said. "Have they returned likewise? Timeh
shall live. I, who have judged others so often, have been myself judged
and found wanting. Timeh shall live. What am I that I should speak of
the life or the death of so much as the last bird in the trees? But have
they all returned, all my horses?"

He whistled that call which every gray knew as a rallying sound, a call
that would bring them at a dead gallop with answering neighs. But when
the thin sound of the whistle died out there was no reply. Only Glani
had moved away and was looking back to David as if he bid the master
follow.

"Is it so, Glani?" said the master. "They have not come back, but you
have returned to lead me to them? The woman, the man, the servants, and
the horses. But we shall leave the valley, walking together. Let the
horses go, and the man and the woman and the servants; but we shall go
forth together and find the world beyond the mountains."

And with his hand tangled in the mane of the stallion, he walked down
the road, away from the hill, the house, the lake. He would not look
back, for the house on the hill seemed to him a tomb, the monument of
the four dead men who had made this little kingdom.

By the time he reached the gate the Garden of Eden was awash with the
shadows of the evening, but the higher mountain-tops before him were
still rosy with the sunset. He paused at the gate and looked out on
them, and when he turned to Glani again, he saw a figure crouched
against the base of the rock wall. It was Ruth, weeping, her head fallen
into her hands with weariness. Above her stood Glani, his head turned to
the master in almost human inquiry. The deep cry of David wakened her.
The gentle hands of David raised her to her feet.

"You have not come to drive me away again?"

"To drive you from the Garden? Look back. It is black. It is full of
death, and the world and our life is before us. I have been a king in
the Garden. It is better to be a man among men. All the Garden was mine.
Now my hands are empty. I bring you nothing, Ruth. Is it enough? Ah, my
dear, you are weeping!"

"With happiness. My heart is breaking with happiness, David."

He tipped up her face and held it between his hands. Whatever he saw in
the darkness that was gathering it was enough to make him sigh. Then he
raised her to the back of Glani, and the stallion, which had never borne
a weight except that of David, stood like a stone. So David went up the
valley holding the hand of Ruth and looking up to her with laughter in
his eyes, and she, with one hand pressed against her breast, laughed
back to him, and the great stallion went with his head turned to watch
them.

"How wonderful are the ways of God!" said David. "Through a thief he has
taught me wisdom; through a horse he has taught me faith; and you, oh,
my love, are the key with which he has unlocked my heart!"

And they began to climb the mountain.



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