第41章 CHAPTER IX. SILVER SPRUCE AND ASPENS(5)

She talked about the dogs, about the caves, the valley, about how hungry she was, till Venters silenced her, asking her to put off further talk till another time. She obeyed, but she sat up in her bed, and her eyes roved to and fro, and always back to him.

Upon the second morning she sat up when he awakened her, and would not permit him to bathe her face and feed her, which actions she performed for herself. She spoke little, however, and Venters was quick to catch in her the first intimations of thoughtfulness and curiosity and appreciation of her situation.

He left camp and took Whitie out to hunt for rabbits. Upon his return he was amazed and somewhat anxiously concerned to see his invalid sitting with her back to a corner of the cave and her bare feet swinging out. Hurriedly he approached, intending to advise her to lie down again, to tell her that perhaps she might overtax her strength. The sun shone upon her, glinting on the little head with its tangle of bright hair and the small, oval face with its pallor, and dark-blue eyes underlined by dark-blue circles. She looked at him and he looked at her. In that exchange of glances he imagined each saw the other in some different guise. It seemed impossible to Venters that this frail girl could be Oldring's Masked Rider. It flashed over him that he had made a mistake which presently she would explain.

"Help me down," she said.

"But--are you well enough?" he protested. "Wait--a little longer."

"I'm weak--dizzy. But I want to get down."

He lifted her--what a light burden now!--and stood her upright beside him, and supported her as she essayed to walk with halting steps. She was like a stripling of a boy; the bright, small head scarcely reached his shoulder. But now, as she clung to his arm, the rider's costume she wore did not contradict, as it had done at first, his feeling of her femininity. She might be the famous Masked Rider of the uplands, she might resemble a boy; but her outline, her little hands and feet, her hair, her big eyes and tremulous lips, and especially a something that Venters felt as a subtle essence rather than what he saw, proclaimed her sex.

She soon tired. He arranged a comfortable seat for her under the spruce that overspread the camp-fire.

"Now tell me--everything," she said.

He recounted all that had happened from the time of his discovery of the rustlers in the canyon up to the present moment.

"You shot me--and now you've saved my life?"

"Yes. After almost killing you I've pulled you through."

"Are you glad?"

"I should say so!"

Her eyes were unusually expressive, and they regarded him steadily; she was unconscious of that mirroring of her emotions and they shone with gratefulness and interest and wonder and sadness.

"Tell me--about yourself?" she asked.

He made this a briefer story, telling of his coming to Utah, his various occupations till he became a rider, and then how the Mormons had practically driven him out of Cottonwoods, an outcast.

Then, no longer able to withstand his own burning curiosity, he questioned her in turn.

"Are you Oldring's Masked Rider?"

"Yes," she replied, and dropped her eyes.

"I knew it--I recognized your figure--and mask, for I saw you once. Yet I can't believe it!...But you never were really that rustler, as we riders knew him? A thief--a marauder--a kidnapper of women--a murderer of sleeping riders!"

"No! I never stole--or harmed any one--in all my life. I only rode and rode--"

"But why--why?" he burst out. "Why the name? I understand Oldring made you ride. But the black mask--the mystery--the things laid to your hands--the threats in your infamous name--the night-riding credited to you--the evil deeds deliberately blamed on you and acknowledged by rustlers--even Oldring himself! Why?

Tell me why?"

"I never knew that," she answered low. Her drooping head straightened, and the large eyes, larger now and darker, met Venters's with a clear, steadfast gaze in which he read truth. It verified his own conviction.

"Never knew? That's strange! Are you a Mormon?"

"No."

"Is Oldring a Mormon?"

"No."

"Do you--care for him?"

"Yes. I hate his men--his life--sometimes I almost hate him!"

Venters paused in his rapid-fire questioning, as if to brace him self to ask for a truth that would be abhorrent for him to confirm, but which he seemed driven to hear.

"What are--what were you to Oldring?"

Like some delicate thing suddenly exposed to blasting heat, the girl wilted; her head dropped, and into her white, wasted cheeks crept the red of shame.

Venters would have given anything to recall that question. It seemed so different--his thought when spoken. Yet her shame established in his mind something akin to the respect he had strangely been hungering to feel for her.

"D--n that question!--forget it!" he cried, in a passion of pain for her and anger at himself. "But once and for all--tell me--I know it, yet I want to hear you say so--you couldn't help yourself?"

"Oh no."

"Well, that makes it all right with me," he went on, honestly.

"I--I want you to feel that...you see--we've been thrown together--and--and I want to help you--not hurt you. I thought life had been cruel to me, but when I think of yours I feel mean and little for my complaining. Anyway, I was a lonely outcast.

And now!...I don't see very clearly what it all means. Only we are here--together. We've got to stay here, for long, surely till you are well. But you'll never go back to Oldring. And I'm sure helping you will help me, for I was sick in mind. There's something now for me to do. And if I can win back your strength--then get you away, out of this wild country--help you somehow to a happier life--just think how good that'll be for me!"